End Mass Incarceration Now
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Between easy fear-mongering ("Do you want criminals on the street?", "Representative Smith let that murder out, he could have prevented this", "Senator Bill is soft on crime!") and the huge number of jobs who depend on this nonsense (prisons, police, lawyers, bail bonds, half-way houses) I fear this will never be undone.
Some find this disgusting and antithetical to democracy, but I’m actually quite ok with it. The politicians only set the broad guidelines and figure out how to pay for it.
Of course there are controversies and of course it is occasionally very possible to score political points with “hang them higher” rhetorics, but not all that often.
All’s not perfect, too, obviously, but at least it’s a bit better.
This isn't accidental.
...a two-year, 444-page study prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others.
For instance, the sentence for petty larceny can be 6 months to a year. The penalty for 1st degree murder can be 30 years to life. I don't know anyone who would think Murder is merely 30 to 60 times worse than stealing underwear from Walmart.
I'm not one of those who thinks we should adopt Nordic style sentences. I.e. Anders Breivik should never see the light of day again in my opinion.
But sentences should be appropriate to the seriousness of what was done. Since the worst possible penalty is death/life in prison, which is ~30 to 60 years in most cases, lesser crimes such as theft or fraud should merit much smaller penalties. I.e. a day in jail, community service or payment of restitution.
Has it reduced those crimes? I have no idea.
One demographic I could see it working well on is younger offenders - whereas some forms of punishment could be considered "cool", being publicly forced to do something and wearing an outfit not of your choosing while doing it, I can't see how that would be considered cool. Also, it could avoid them meeting the wrong people while in the joint which might lead them further down the wrong path.
At the very least it would be cheaper than almost any other form of punishment, plus you'd get some garbage picked up.
There are monsters in this world, they are human. Society is best served with them not being amongst it freely.
We need a prison system that is designed to teach prisoners how to effectively reintegrate with society and provides the mental help that they need instead of one that just perpetuates the cycle.
Sure, there are cases where people will never be able to integrate and that can be dealt with. But there is so much cognitive surplus being wasted here.
We need all hands on deck for the coming decades. We need to grow up.
Getting soldiers back into civilian life can be challenging, but no one questions that it's something we must try to do. People who are convicted of murder did what they did for many different reasons, and making a blanket statement that they're all monsters and should be denied even the chance to rejoin society is wrong. Sure, some of them are lost causes, but not all of them, and therefore we have to give all of them a chance at redemption.
Be a solider? Kill? Follow orders? Wake up so early?
And what happens when they want? A life sentence?
I doubt that most people who commit violent crimes were violent people from birth. Most of them were probably forced into a lifestyle in which it is the norm. This is not to say that these people aren't accountable for their actions, but we should definitely understand that most of these people grew up in circumstances where violence was unavoidable and that instead of punishing them indiscriminately, we should try to actually 'correct' them in correctional facilities by healing them and trying to help them become functioning, productive members of society.
http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00...
Also, like the article pointed out, I'm not sure many people really appreciate how harsh prison is. Even with cable TV and AC, it's still prison.
There are some cases where it's simply impossible to say with some measure of certainty that somebody is rehabilitated, but even the most lenient countries (Norway and the rest of Scandinavia) have measures to protect the rest of the population in those cases. Repeatedly determining that Anders Behring Breivik continues to be a threat to society is Norway's form of capital punishment.
Here's a thought experiment: Would you treat a man who took revenge on his wife's murderer by killing them the same as the murderer, a psychopath who decided to kill the wife because they were bored?
Obviously, neither One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or American Psycho is desirable, but if you ask me to choose, you can guess which one I'd pick.
(Btw. even if you disagree, the U.S. has a tremendous amount of hate-crime legislation, which does punish people for what's on their mind.)
Do you think that 68% of prisoners are mostly evil people who cannot function in society? 68% of men in prison don't have a high school diploma. Or are these mostly people who were born and raised in shitty circumstances with little hope for avoiding prison, hence why they didn't even finish high school?
Do you think 1/3 of black men are simply beyond rehabilitation? Because 1 in 3 black men will end up in prison at some point in their lives.
Let's just ignore the fact that the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison and jail has increased 1,100% since 1980. Let's ignore the fact that black people use drugs at the same rates as whites and even sell drugs at lower rates yet at state and federal level they're incarcerated far more than whites http://www.csdp.org/publicservice/kids.htm . Let's ignore the fact that 4.1% of death row sentences are erroneous, and that 95+% of all convictions happen through plea bargains, meaning that the rate of false imprisonment is probably quite high, even higher than 4.1%.
I'm guessing that a very, very small percentage of the prison population is beyond rehabilitation. In those cases, prison makes sense. But our prison population has exploded since 1980, and I doubt that most of the people that have been swept up in that growth are like Anders Breivik.
Anything else is basically just society taking revenge.
As for deterrence, I'm not sure that you want to build a system on that as we have; people ought to follow the law and not murder because it is the right thing to do, not because they're afraid not to.
If you have a system motivated by fear, it means that any external fear (psychological defect, job-related, desperation-related, or just plain being too drunk to remember that injuring others carries a stiff penalty) has the opportunity to override your system.
Murder isn't right, but we should be trying to figure out why it occurred and how to prevent it in the future and rehabilitate the person (or dispose of them forthright)--torture and punishment doesn't benefit anyone.
The problem is there are certain individuals constitutionally incapable of doing "the right thing". They have no respect for the lives of others, and can only be deterred by fear of punishment.
We call them psychopaths.
Anyway, violent psychopaths belong in mental institutions (for life, if it is determined that they remain a threat to society.) I don't think many people disagree with that.
This has almost nothing to do with, for example, sentencing on crack being tougher than on cocaine, and rape being worse than murder. Also, most people convicted of crimes aren't psychopaths, although they often have (fixable) mental problems.
In some cases the fear of being caught and punished is sufficient to stop some crimes.
It's quite firmly established at this point that solitary confinement is torture, but apparently the Norwegian prison system has the discretion of deciding to do this without any input from the judicial system. In my opinion, this is a horrible blemish on an otherwise good Norwegian legal syste, but it's understandably a sore subject. There has been very little debate around this point. Hard to bring this up when most of the kids he murdered were the acquaintances or children of the biggest political party at the time.
The moral of logarithmic growth is clear: "If you are gonna do the crime, make it worth the time!"
The reason for this is simple: Sentence length isn't just retribution for the crime. It can be for rehabilitation as well (at least, in other countries). Prison sentences also try to have a deterrent effect. Thieves aren't caught nearly as often as murderers. If the punishment for theft was repayment and a fine, we'd see a lot more theft. It's a similar story with drunk driving. Most of the time, people get away with driving drunk. Nobody gets hurt, nobody gets pulled over. But we want to discourage this behavior since it does kill people. So we make harsh punishments for even a first-time offense.
It's interesting that you bring up the example of Anders Breivik. How would your opinion of him change if, hypothetically, it were later shown that he had a brain tumor? For me, the justification for retribution evaporates. Sure, lock him up forever; he's still dangerous. But if we can trace someone's actions back to causes outside of their control, doesn't that obviate the need for punishment? Then, all we can do is try to rehabilitate them and/or keep them from harming others.
I think this argument applies to the vast majority of people in prison. We don't choose our genes. We don't choose our parents. We don't choose the household or culture we grow up in. We don't choose how much lithium is in our tap water.[1] The vast majority of our personalities and behaviors are shaped by forces completely outside our control, often without our knowledge. We're nowhere close to fully understanding the interactions between genes and environment necessary to diagnose each person's violent behavior, but that's no excuse for exacting retribution. Right now our society is effectively punishing people for having brain tumors. I think focusing on rehabilitation would be much more effective and fair, even for some of the most horrific crimes.
1. Yes, this actually matters: http://www.gwern.net/docs/nootropics/1990-schrauzer.pdf
One obscene result of this paradigm is that you sacrifice the actual lives of individuals for merely potential benefits for society. The literary example is Jean Val Jean, who of course ends up spending a lifetime in prison for stealing a loaf of bread.
This actually happens in American justice. Those harshly punished for minor offenses are not only not rehabilitated, they are turned into hardened criminals by association with the low-lifes who truly deserve to be in prison.
> It's interesting that you bring up the example of Anders Breivik. How would your opinion of him change if, hypothetically, it were later shown that he had a brain tumor? For me, the justification for retribution evaporates.
To extend your hypothetical, say we can conclusively prove that the universe is deterministic and there is no such thing as free will. Then is no one responsible for anything they do?
I contend, in the absence of contradicting evidence, we must live as if we have free will, because (ironically) we have no other choice. So if Breivik's lawyers/doctors demonstrate a brain tumor affecting his behavior, we treat him differently than we do the garden-variety psychopathic mass-murderer he appears to (and purports to) be.
Sentences should be high enough to deter crime, and no higher. If one month of prison time doesn't reduce your petty theft rate significantly, then double it. Measure the new offense rate then double the penalty again. Eventually you'll reach that knee in the curve where any additional punishment you can mete out has little significant effect, and that's your magic number.
The idea of "lesser crimes" should not be used to influence punishment. You cannot linearly compare shoplifting against auto theft or battery - so it's not possible to assign commensurate sentences. Compile the offense rates and then go for the knees, dispassionately.
My point was that sentence guidelines should generally be data-driven, the dependent variable being the crime rate for a specific offense. I did not mention edge cases, judicial discretion, capital offenses, recidivism, rehabilitation, and other gnarly stuff.
Does in your example crimes with lower rate of catching criminals will end with a very high sentences and few caught will get an unreasonable jail times? "You have pirated a song, an infinity in jail is Your sentence"
"Data-driven" is a reasonable approach, but what data should be allowed to drive? Choosing what kind of data to use and making relevant conclusions from it is the hard part.
Anyways, the data is in. Putting more people in prison for longer doesn't work. The problem though is that in the short term reversing this policy without any other policy changes may not work either. People aren't as simple as that.
In Saudi Arabia they will cut your arm off if you're caught stealing. That's a pretty severe punishment. Do you think there's no theft? In Iran you may get executed.
What is most likely going to happen is that this knee will continuously move away from you as you try to pursue it. More punishment isn't going to reduce crime. People's response to punishment will change with that curve and you will get all sorts of unintended consequences. The US system is a living proof of this.
What you need to do is address the social causes of crime. Punishment should be the last resort, minimal and should be as humane as possible. Fines/damages/community service should be strongly preferred to prison terms.
Why can't I? For theft, it's easy to determine the value of the stolen goods.
You seem not to care for the lives of the individual human beings committing the crimes. It's not ethical or moral to sacrifice the one for the benefit of the many.
of course, it's one thing to talk about legalizing marijuana - but i'm not sure what i'm supposed to think about early release for a guy who was importing heroin into chicago, so that kids who can't afford reformulated oxycontin have a way to get high. it's all part of the same "non-violent drug offense" coin.
this is a pretty reflexive NYT column. once we get away from "non-violent drug offenders" i think the argument loses force. If you spend about 20 minutes reading about the details of the types of gnarly violent crimes the non-drug-related "mass incarcerated" commit, this sort of vague editorializing rings really hollow. people are capable of really heinous stuff.
Free the room up for sex offenders that molest kids. Why we let them out given all the studies about repeat offenses, I will never know[1].
I often think "Law and Order" politicians are out of step with what their "Law and Order" voters really want.
1) Also, any prosecutor that tries to get some 18 year old on a list for going out with his 16 year old girlfriend needs to be disbarred. Consensual is a family matter not a court matter.
http://www.freerangekids.com/why-are-we-putting-kids-as-youn...
Lots of money importing heroin, due to the huge black market created by the criminalization of supply and possession. You know for a fact the guy that got locked up for it got immediately replaced by the next schmuck whose opportunities in this supply chain dramatically eclipse anything he'd be able to attain in his economically devastated, capital-starved community.
We created the ghettos, we created the economic incentives that cause good people to make bad choices. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/13/how-we-buil...
The answer could be "yes" - I don't know enough to say with much confidence - but my point is that you seem to be talking about users while parent seemed to be talking about supplier and those are two very different questions with potentially very different answers.
I disagree.
97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions are the result of plea bargains. At least 4% of death sentences are erroneous. In 2007 there were 2.4 million prisoners in the United States.
I'm guessing death row convictions receive much more attention than normal convictions, especially convictions from plea bargains. In this case, we can conservatively guess that the rate of false conviction is higher for plea bargains.. let's say it's 6%. Extrapolate that to the entire prison population, and that's 144,000 people who are wrongfully locked up. That number is far, far too high no matter how you look at it, and I'm guessing it's even worse than that in reality. The way our system abuses the plea bargaining system is morally reprehensible. This alone should be enough to warrant reform.
> people are capable of really heinous stuff.
People who were raised in shitty circumstances tend to do shitty things. 68% of prisoners don't have a high school diploma. I think that's pretty telling on its own.
The real question is: what is the point of prison? Is it a place wherein troubled individuals can receive treatment and be corrected so that they may be reintegrated at some point and become functioning and productive members of society? Or is simply a place that we punish people indiscriminately?
Recidivism rates tell the story. In California, 60% of the formerly incarcerated end up back in prison. Prison is obviously not a place for treatment or healing or anything that might improve the lives of the people who enter it. It is a place that society simply locks the people up that it doesn't like - for the most part, poor black people.
But there is hope. When I see things like this: http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/05/13/rehab-program-boas... , it gives me hope that people will realize that the way we're handling 'corrections' produces more criminals than it stops. Our system currently doesn't work if the goal is to reduce crime in the long run. I wonder how many criminals we have created because of false convictions. Or because of the war on drugs, since the number of federal prisoners has jumped 790% since 1980 (do you really think people have been committing 790% more crime since then?)
It's never been the first objective of prison. Prison exists to ensure the people who are dangerous or detrimental to society remain excluded from roaming in the streets and causing more trouble.
This whole idea of "prison to reeducate people" is very much a creation of recent history.
This is not the point of prison. Whites and blacks, for example, use drugs and sell drugs at the same rates. Yet blacks are incarcerated at a much higher rate relative to their representation in the general population.
Throughout the entire criminal justice process, from arrest to prosecution / plea bargaining to sentencing, blacks are discriminated against and receive much harsher treatment than whites.
More accurate would be, 'people who we perceive to be more dangerous'.
The number of federal and state non-violent drug offenders have increased by 750% and 1100% respectively since 1980. Do you really think that these people are so dangerous?
On top of this, a good portion of felony convictions are erroneous, and recidivism rates are near 67%, meaning our prisons are actively creating criminals.
Regardless, I was asking the question to try and inspire thought about what prison should be. I should have been more clear.
Before prison, the common practice in antiquity was to exile people. Which has the exact same effect as prison: to remove people from everyday society. That's why the primary goal of prison is to achieve the same thing: removal of individuals who cause harm (whether they are actually doing harm is a different discussion).
If you want to reeducate people, I'm not sure prison is the right place to do so.
Before crying straw man (by the way, that's a great way to stifle the discussion), remember that you first said: "Prison exists to ensure ...". There is quite a difference in meaning between that and what you are talking about here - my response was hardly a strawman if you interpret "Prison exists ..." in a certain way.
Yeah, and this has always been the primary goal of Prison. Prisons were never made to be places to reeducate people. It was always, at the beginning, seen as both a practical "exile" form society and a form of punishment. And I maintain that your reply was indeed a strawman, because it was not at all answering to the point I raised, no matter how you look at it, there was no implication that Prison was fair in any way in my comment.
No matter how you look at it. When I first read your sentence, I unintentionally read what you said differently than what you intended. If ambiguity in language allows for many interpretations of a statement, responding to one instead of the other is not a strawman.
Again, regardless, the purpose of my question was not about what prison was originally intended to be but instead what it's purpose should be.
But your analysis leaves out the idea of deterrence.
Heavy consequences for serious violent crimes like rape, murder, assault, etc. keep those violent crimes from being seen as viable options for resolving disputes by people who have self-interest but little-to-no empathy or ethics.
A free democracy with a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, can't really do much to criminals other than attempt to rehabilitate them, lock them up, or punish them financially [1]. Enduring sentences of rehabilitation and financial punishments are probably things that a rational, self-interested sociopath would be willing to endure as the price of being allowed to maim or murder someone who gets in the way of what they want. OTOH the prospect losing a few decades to prison, would probably convince our hypothetical sociopath to try to find a lawful way to deal with their situation.
[1] The death penalty is an interesting and complex topic, and I think the consensus is slowly moving toward ending the death penalty. My view is that it obviously does nothing for rehabilitation, it's not cost-effective at keeping criminals off the streets (it's less expensive to imprison a defendant for life than to do all the legal maneuvering courts and legislatures have found necessary to properly protect the rights of the accused), and its deterrence value is not that great (because it's so expensive, relatively few cases go through the process, and it takes a long time, so the additional deterrence provided versus a life prison sentence is questionable at best). Since life imprisonment does a better job of satisfying those three main objectives of criminal penalties, it should be preferred.
In other words, the death penalty either has to get a lot faster, cheaper, and much more widely applied, or we need to give it up entirely. I think the first path is a political non-starter and fraught with constitutional issues, making the second path the only real way forward.
Even for violent crimes, I don't think that locking people up should be the only response. Victim-centered approaches, like restorative justice circles for example, could and should be used more where applicable. The victim is mostly left out of the equation in our current justice system. We should also try to view instances of violence not as deliberate evil actions taken by people, but instead culminations of bad circumstances and bad choices. This is not to say there shouldn't be repercussions for the bad choices, but we should also offer support and rehabilitation to try to improve the circumstances.
Of course, there will always be the people who are beyond rehabilitation. Even then, for these kinds of people, 'prison' doesn't sound quite right to me.. 'mental institution' seems more appropriate.
On [1], I don't support the death penalty because there are so many errors made in sentencing. Even if we managed to make the error rate much lower, I personally don't think the cost of innocent lives would be worth the potential extra deterrence the threat of death provides over life imprisonment. Hell, even if the rate were 0%, I still wouldn't support it for moral reasons.
Then you have all of the other people/entities that benefit from a broken system; lawyers, police, judges, bail bonds. The justice system is inherently corrupt. And speaking of private prisons, most of them have occupancy guarantee clauses in their government contracts.
I think the problem is even bigger than the New York Times thinks it is. It'll take more than a NYT article to fix the problem.
It is first worth noting that change is generally hard for everyone: governments, organizations, and individuals, because it's not typically not a simple singular event but a complex process: http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Womens_Hea...
On the policy front, this is one of many approaches being taken, and this specific one is coming from the White House, My Brother's Keeper: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/27/fact-s...
On the grassroots front, there are two organization that come to mind that are running programs showing promise in breaking the cycle of crime at different points: Roca & the Center for Employment.
Here are their theories of change respectively: http://rocainc.org/what-we-do/the-solution/rocas-interventio... http://ceoworks.org/about/what-we-do/ceo-model-3/
Both are taking part in scaling what works with Social Impact Bonds: http://www.ted.com/talks/toby_eccles_invest_in_social_change http://www.socialfinanceus.org/what-we-do/select-current-eng... http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/tackling-mas...
Additional case studies from David Hunter: http://dekhconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/HunterC... http://dekhconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/CenterF...
In short, the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country, and we do it because we aren't brave enough to deal with our problems more directly. That is mass incarceration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_gen...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_th...
The ny times editorial board is either living in a dream world, or is willfully lying and actually wants a return to the levels of property and violent crime from 40 years ago.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
(Good luck, you'll need it.)