Our prisons, L. Edward Day writes, need to become a place for rehabilitation, not a place for punishment.
Rational planning isn’t all that tough. You decide what the outcome should be and make a plan to work towards it.
And that is why we don’t have a rational criminal justice system.
Ever since the rehabilitative ideal was largely abandoned a few decades ago, we have lost sight of the endgame. Public debate focuses on what we do on the inside, within the walls of our prisons, and the loudest voices shout for punishment. It should hurt. We want hard time, and hard time should be hard.
The part of the process we don’t talk about is what comes out the other side, when prisoners are released. For the United States, that is a big problem. We keep a greater proportion of our population in prison than any nation on earth. Nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world sits in an American prison. And since we don’t execute very many, and only a small proportion die of other reasons while they are in there, we have the problem we tend to forget. They come out. Lots of them. About 1600 prisoners a day are released in the United States, 365 days a year, and some of them are moving in next door to your mother. Who do you want them to be?
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Predicting the results of our current system doesn’t require a genius mentality. We just don’t take the time to do it. So indulge me for a moment in a brief thought experiment. Take a look at our criminal justice system with fresh eyes, as if you didn’t have the cultural baggage of decades’ worth of shouts for their heads. Just walk through the process.
Let’s start with someone who we know is likely to engage in criminal behavior. We know that because we’ve already caught the jerk red-handed. Now let’s take this crook and toss him into a brutal environment for several years. When we’re done with that, let’s drop him into the highest crime area of a large city with no resources, no job, and no prospects. Tell me, what are the chances that this crook will commit crime again? If you said anything less than 100 percent, your thought experiment has gone awry. Everything you just did has been repeatedly shown in research to increase the likelihood that someone will commit a crime. Our politicians tell us they can’t figure out why the recidivism rate in the United States is so high. Are you kidding me? A kindergartener could figure that out.
This is, though, exactly the correctional process we find in most of our states. It’s a $55 billion a year victim creation system. That’s not a good use of tax dollars.
Our actual recidivism rate isn’t quite 100 percent. Although it’s been a while since anyone has tried to do a large scale study, it’s estimated that roughly two-thirds of released prisoners will be rearrested on a new criminal charge within two years. Yeah, that’s right, that guy who moved in next door to Mom will probably do it again. We spent all that money, all that time, and all we ended up with is more crime victims. It’s time for us to get serious and face the facts. A 67 percent recidivism rate is a sign of failure.
But there’s hope here too. A two-thirds failure rate isn’t bad when you predicted 100 percent. The fact that one-third aren’t returning to crime may be the most hopeful statistic in criminal justice.
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There is no one reason why some don’t recidivate. There may be some who are actually frightened out of crime by the experience of prison. A larger number have likely have aged out of crime while serving their sentences. Crime is primarily a young man’s game. Statistics show that most will stop as they age whether we catch them or not. But I believe the biggest reason is the group of courageous wardens, other prison administrators, and private organizations throughout the nation who recognize that the standard practice is madness. They know we can do better and they try to change things by focusing their efforts exactly where we don’t: the outcome.
At the same time as we were formally abandoning rehabilitation in favor of punishment, research was showing that nearly any kind of rehabilitation program worked better. You’ll still find those in prison, though the administrators tend to run them quietly, scraping together programs out of sparse budgets, convinced that they’re helping. The range of successful programs will have to wait for another essay, but trust me, they’re out there. Perhaps even more effective are post-prison remedies, reentry programs that cost little but give ex-cons a foothold on a conventional life and at least the option of choosing another path.
The academic literature is full of rigorous, scientific evaluations of such programs showing that they work; however, you will rarely hear about them in popular media. Public officials involved in them rarely speak out, understanding the political consequences. The public debate continues to focus on how hard we should punish, not how we should reform.
It’s time we changed the debate. It’s time we stopped listening to those who call for more punishment—in a time of tight budgets, you just don’t dump more money into a system with a failure rate like prisons. The age of the rhetoric of hatred needs to end. If we want a rational system, we need to change our focus from how much we want these guys to pay for what they’ve done to what we want them to be when their sentences are over. It’s time to look at what they need to try a different lifestyle. And we don’t do it for their sake—heck, they’re the jerks that committed the crime in the first place. We do it to reduce the recidivism rate. We do it so that we don’t spend our tax dollars on the creation of new victims. We do it for Mom.
—Photo derekskey/Flickr
The reason that the rational alternatives are not more explored is simply that this is not imprisonment is not rational — it is 100% emotional. In my personal experience I liken it to the debate on “extracting valuable intelligence through torture.” I was a senior USAF intelligence analyst for most of the 1960’s. As such I saw literally thousands of classified intelligence reports (IRs) that used various forms of torture as theior source methodology. They were all classified Top Secret “to protect sources and methods.” And not a single one yielded useful, actionable intelligence. They just reiterated information supplied by… Read more »