JULY/AUGUST 2008
Reentry
Reversing mass imprisonment
Bruce Western
The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.
For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.
There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.
Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.
***
The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.
The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration—a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.
Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.
Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the ’90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.
So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.
More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs—the broken homes, unemployment, and crime—that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?
***
We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here. The origins of today’s mass incarceration can be traced to basic political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime—the traditional target of the penal system—was an important part of these urban social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from 1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the penal system was used to manage many of the byproducts of persistent poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness, chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fuelled incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and parole violators.
As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.
The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of homicide victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest through conviction and sentencing. As a result the prison walls we built with such industry in the 1980s and ’90s did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.
Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and ’70s. They ignored the illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.
The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them, certain city blocks received millions of dollars in “correctional investment”—spending on the removal of local residents by incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor; the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.
***
Getting tough on crime created a sustained public policy mistake of immense proportions. If the prison boom was indeed produced by a historic collision between the jobless ghetto and a punitive politics of civil rights backlash, retreating from mass incarceration will involve equally fundamental shifts in politics and economics. What would a new politics of criminal justice look like, and what policies would it promote?
There are small signs of change in the public conversation about crime, punishment, and poverty, though bold ideas have not yet penetrated the mainstream. By supporting education and treatment programs for prisoners, leaders from both parties have offered one answer to Senator Webb’s question about the future of punishment in America. In April this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which funds literacy programs, drug treatment, and other services for prisoners and ex-prisoners. While prison reform advocates supported Second Chance, a bipartisan majority was ensured by Christian conservatives like Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who spoke up for a law that promoted a message of redemption and faith-based prison programs.
Second Chance can be viewed as one achievement in a broader movement for improved prisoner reentry policy. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been a leading voice in naming the social problem of prisoner reentry and proposing policy solutions. In his 2005 book But They All Come Back Travis writes: “The reality of mass incarceration translates into the reality of reentry . . . [T]he harmful effects of high rates of incarceration and reentry call for . . . policies that promote reintegration, not retribution.” Here the reentry movement challenges mass incarceration by reasserting the importance of rehabilitation, but deliberately stops short of recommending a reduction in prison populations.
If the employment problems of young minority men in poor urban neighborhoods are a prime precondition for mass incarceration, prisoner reentry programs that promote employment may offer a way out of the street-prison cycle in which so many are caught. A wide variety of programs aim to help people move from prison to the labor market. GED classes, vocational training, prison work-programs, and job readiness instruction all seek to improve prisoners’ preparation for working life. In part, the wide variety of programs reflects the sheer range of behavioral and cognitive deficits of the prison population.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for these programs is that many men and women coming out of prison—most in their thirties or older—have never held a steady job. The newly released behave awkwardly around coworkers and have never cultivated daily work habits; these shortcomings may be no less debilitating than illiteracy or a shortage of vocational skills. Social scientists refer to the necessary traits of reliability, motivation, and sociability as “non-cognitive skills.” While education programs in prison can help develop the cognitive skills of math and verbal ability, the non-cognitive skills that promote success in free society are hard to develop while incarcerated. To learn these skills, people coming out of prison must repeatedly rehearse the habits of regular work. But precisely because they have so little work experience and carry the added penalty of a criminal record, formerly incarcerated men and women have little access to the steady jobs that can make them more productive. For ex-prisoners, extreme economic insecurity is a trap that prevents them accumulating the kind of work experience that enables a return to mainstream social life.
Building everyday work habits means working every day; instead of relying only on a wary labor market, some programs try to break the cycle of economic insecurity by offering jobs immediately after release from prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in New York provides transitional jobs in combination with job placement services to move prisoners into the open labor market. CEO takes people straight out of prison, and puts them in a week-long training program before assigning them to a seven-hour day, four-day week in small supervised crews doing groundskeeping and other manual work at the New York minimum wage of $7.15 an hour. On the fifth day of each week, the CEO participants take vocational and job readiness classes that prepare them for job searching and interviews. CEO’s transitional jobs generally last a month or two and program graduates receive transport and supermarket vouchers if they remain employed.
CEO, in a move rare among reentry programs, has sought to study the effectiveness of its program through experimentation. The experiment randomly assigned parolees either to transitional jobs or to a control group composed of former inmates who received job-search assistance from the support staff, but not transitional work. Parolees who took on transitional jobs within three months of release from prison saw their arrest rates reduced by about 20 percent compared to the control group. However, parolees who entered the transitional jobs more than 3 months after prison release experience no reductions in recidivism. It seems that timely intervention, immediately after prison, provides the greatest benefits.
CEO’s method shows promising results, but is narrowly directed toward alleviating unemployment. A small but intensive program run by the Brooklyn District Attorney suggests how a more comprehensive program might operate. Charles “Joe” Hynes is unusual among prosecutors. He actively incorporates alternatives to incarceration into the work of his office. Beginning in 1990 Hynes promoted a diversion program that sent nonviolent drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead of prison. By the later part of the decade, the D.A. was convening regular meetings of community groups throughout Brooklyn to connect parolees and probationers to drug treatment, housing, and jobs.
The meetings were run by Hynes’s energetic First Assistant District
Attorney, Patricia Gatling. Gatling did not see the D.A.’s role as
simply seeking the toughest justice for Brooklyn’s criminal defendants.
In her view, the D.A. is a community lawyer, charged with strengthening
neighborhoods and improving public safety in a broad sense. The community
meetings in Brooklyn’s poor neighborhoods were Gatling’s effort
to replenish the area’s flagging social capital—the web of networks
and supports that greases the wheels of social life. After a few years,
Hynes hired a full-time social worker and developed his own prisoner reentry
program. At first it operated only in a few precincts with high parole caseloads,
but later it spread across the whole borough.
Called ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together), the program provides parolees with drug treatment, transitional employment, and housing. Most ComALERT participants, have prior convictions for drugs or violence, and all have been ordered into drug treatment. Some homeless parolees enter the Ready Willing and Able (RWA) program that provides a full year of employment and supportive housing in return for a promise of complete drug and alcohol abstinence and a biweekly regime of drug testing. RWA participants work in street cleaning and other unskilled jobs for $7.50 an hour, share small apartments, and receive drug counseling and educational programming. A recent evaluation found that two years after release from prison, ComALERT clients were 18 percent less likely to be rearrested than a comparison group with a similar history of crime and drug use. ComALERT participants also earned about $1000 more each quarter and were about 20 percent more likely to be employed.
A large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America's new carceral class.
These positive outcomes suggest three policy lessons. First, transitional jobs are large-dose interventions that can reduce recidivism at least for a while by providing close supervision and paying wages. Regular work habits cannot be built cheap, though these programs are still less expensive than incarceration. Second, the programs that work best are comprehensive, bundling together a variety of services including drug treatment and housing. Because released prisoners often cope with a range of problems, additional supports must be in place for transitional jobs to help. Third, timely intervention is imperative; successful schemes provide a job immediately out of prison.
While the results from transitional jobs and supplementary programs are encouraging, we must be realistic about what these projects can achieve. Most initiatives operate at the local level. Sometimes their efforts span a city, but more often several neighborhoods. The high quality results that stem from local efforts will not scale to counties and states. Even in the best-case scenario, if recidivism is reduced by 10 or 20 percent, ex-prisoners would still be re-arrested at rates of around 40 percent or more.
Still, a large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America’s new carceral class. Instead of focusing assessment of reentry programs narrowly on the decrease in recidivism achieved, we should account for the benefits of families reunited, the paychecks that help support the children of ex-prisoners, and the value of literacy for its effects on quality of life in addition to its role in averting crime. The cost-benefit calculus looks quite different when we include these social goods. For nonviolent drug and public-order offenders, intensive, large-dose treatment in the community (which is relatively cheap) begins to look like a good alternative to custody in prison (which is expensive). Here we count as benefits not just reductions in crime, which may be modest, but all the ways in which social life is made more normal by drawing our erstwhile outsiders back into society, instead of building more walls to keep them out.
***
What would a different kind of penal system look like: one that viewed the unemployment of ex-prisoners as a key problem to solve and the deficit of noncognitive skills a central obstacle to steady work? Projecting our exemplary local programs on to the national stage, all parolees leaving prison in need of a job would move into closely supervised community-service work paying minimum wage. Like Brooklyn’s RWA program, these jobs might be offered for up to a year and coupled to job placement with the goal of parolee self-sufficiency. Those with drug problems would enroll in a rigorous program of treatment and testing. Those living on the streets would move into supportive housing.
How many would participate in this national reentry program, and at what cost? Employment statistics for prisoners suggest a national transitional jobs program would enroll about 180,000 out of the 700,000 prisoners released each year. Around 200,000 would fill new places in drug treatment programs. Another 100,000 would require housing. A national program of transitional jobs, drug treatment, and supportive housing would represent a significant expansion of the social services available to ex-prisoners. The total cost of this effort would be about $7 billion each year, roughly one-tenth of total current spending on corrections. In the present climate such a program seems entirely fanciful—how could we pay for it?
One source of funds is the vast treasury expended on large-scale incarceration itself. By cutting the size of prison populations and redirecting some of the spending on custody to community programs, we could dramatically expand services to prisoners after they have been released. Unlocking America, a recent proposal from the Washington, D.C.-based JFA Institute, recommends four ways to reduce the size of prison populations.
First, Unlocking America recommends decriminalizing drug offenses and other “victimless” crimes. The authors argue that arresting drug dealers has no crime reducing effect because new dealers will fill the vacancies opened by incarceration. Since the mid-1990s, prominent conservatives, too, have supported the view that incarceration for drug dealing fails to curb the drug trade. In 1995 John DiIulio and Anne Piehl—the former would become an appointee in the second Bush administration—wrote that their “best estimate of the incapacitation effect (number of drug sales prevented by incarcerating a drug dealer) is zero,” and they therefore “value drug crimes (sales and possession) at zero social cost.” Though the War on Drugs failed to reduce drug use or the prices of drugs, it boosted incarceration and racial disparity. Drug convictions account for about a third of the increase in state prison populations and about three-quarters of the increase in the federal prison population through the 1980s and ’90s.
Second, time served in prison can be reduced. In the mid-1970s prisoners were incarcerated for relatively short periods, given their offenses. Since then, life sentences have become common for violent offenders and those with prior felony convictions. Three-strikes provisions add long stretches of prison time for repeat convicts. Truth-in-sentencing requires felony offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. These measures serve to lengthen prison time account for about half of the growth in state prison populations over the last twenty years.
Third, the length of probation and parole-supervision periods could also be reduced. People on probation and parole are likely to return to prison, but usually as a result of a technical violation, not a new crime. Unlocking America finds little evidence that lengthy parole and probation terms reduce crime. Probationers and parolees are most likely to fail in the first twelve months. After that first year, the authors write, “supervision is more of a nuisance than a means for assisting people after prison or preventing them from committing another crime.”
Finally, the authors argue that re-imprisonment should be eliminated for technical violations of parole and probation. Parolees and probationers are released to the community subject to a large number of conditions that typically include employment, drug testing, and regular meetings with case officers. When they violate these conditions, supervising officers can send them back to prison. Many parolees and probationers are sent back to prison for failing a drug test or missing an appointment—their reappearence behind bars may have nothing to do with crime. Incarceration for technical violations of parole or probation was a significant driver of state imprisonment rates through the 1990s. In some states, like California, most of those on parole are re-incarcerated for technical violations, adding a year or more to their time in prison.
Of all the proposals to reduce prison populations, restricting re-incarceration for technical parole violators seems most politically feasible. Some states are already trying to reduce parole revocation, sometimes by imposing more intensive community supervision or a few days in lock-up instead of months and years in prison. Kansas now conducts a risk assessment for parolees. Some are assigned to a low-risk group that receives only loose supervision. Case managers place high-risk parolees in special programs, and enforce a variety of punishments short of return to prison. Since adopting these measures in 2003, Kansas has halved the number of parole violators. Half a dozen other states, like Arizona, Illinois, New York, and Texas, have also adopted a system of graduated sanctions to reduce parole revocation. At the national level, eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would reduce prison admissions by about 30 percent each year. By itself this measure could save much of the funds needed for a national prisoner reentry program.
Eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would also support a reintegrative model of corrections. Given that over half of state prisoners struggle with problems of drug addiction, we should anticipate that many will fail and become involved again in drugs or miss work or parole appointments. These failures should be viewed as a component of reentry. Relapse is part of a learning process in which new non-cognitive skills of reliability and persistence develop. If failure is a likely stop on the path to steady work, parole supervision must also allow people to fail and remain in their communities.
***
So far I have argued that we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.
There are more advocates now for reentry programs than decarceration, but a real policy debate over the future of mass incarceration has barely begun. Though Congress dipped a toe in the pool of reintegrative criminal justice by passing the Second Chance Act, a national large-dose reentry program is a much larger effort. Faced with mounting correctional budgets, governors in Kansas and elsewhere have experimented with parole reform. Some states are also considering sentencing reforms. Commissions in New York and California are now reviewing three-strikes and mandatory minimums. Despite these signs of change, the reform process remains in its infancy. Few correctional facilities have closed, and incarceration rates continue to rise.
While an expanded reentry policy and a revision of the penal codes may stop the growth of prisons, the future of mass incarceration depends very much on its past. A less punitive criminal justice system cannot by itself solve the deep social problems of poor urban neighborhoods. These problems—disorder and addiction largely flowing from chronic idleness—set in motion the politics and policy choices that delivered mass incarceration. As America’s meager welfare state failed to prevent school dropout and persistent unemployment among unskilled inner-city residents, prisons and jails expanded to fill the vacuum of social control formerly occupied by the education system and the labor market. The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving the social problems of idleness, addiction, and mental illness, while also controlling their natural jurisdiction over serious crime. But they were given just a few tools: the powers of arrest and imprisonment. Mass incarceration contains an unruly population beset with trouble; wholesale confinement makes the population more manageable but leaves their troubles undiminished.
To expect a rehabilitative criminal justice alone to reverse mass incarceration is, in an odd way, to repeat the mistakes of the tough-on-crime movement. We would again be turning to line officers to manage the byproducts of deep social inequalities. While we might spend billions on a jobs program for former prisoners, we would still send them out to look for work in labor markets where half of the young men are jobless. We would still be asking them to stay sober amid a thriving street trade in illegal drugs. This is what prisoners mean when they say they are set up to fail. This is not just a recidivist’s special pleading: it reflects the deficiencies of a theory in which society’s losers have only themselves to blame.
The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving social problems, but their only tools were the powers of arrest and imprisonment.
Reversing mass incarceration will ultimately require that social problems be solved with social policies. The two most urgent priorities are the prevention of school dropout and the creation of a viable and legitimate economy in poor inner-city neighborhoods. Not even the most rehabilitative criminal justice policy can solve these problems. We normally think of education and employment as sources of economic opportunity. In the era of mass incarceration, we also see that they are positive sources of social control, providing order in people’s daily lives.
School failure and joblessness, of course, lie deep at the core of American urban inequality. Even if our policy knowledge is equal to these problems, the political will is weak, especially since carceral stigma now clouds the neighborhoods of the urban poor. It seems unlikely under these conditions that communities of concentrated poverty will somehow launch new programs of urban renewal or that middle class voters will discover sympathies for the poor. Are new efforts at social investment impossible?
The upcoming election season holds more promise for an expanded social policy than we have seen in years. The coming debate over national health insurance holds enormous significance for communities most affected by mass incarceration. If a plan emerges that covers treatment for substance abuse, mental health problems, and chronic disease, and if the plan is truly universal, carrying no exclusions for those in prison or with felony convictions, it can significantly improve the lives of those entangled in the penal system. By aiming to cover everyone, national health insurance creates a common cause between the urban poor wracked by mass incarceration and the suburban middle class. We have recently seen this kind of cross-class support in defense of Social Security—a universalistic and venerated institution operating with great anti-poverty effect. Supporters repelled the threat of privatization not because Social Security slashes poverty among the elderly, but because it guarantees the material dignity of all citizens in retirement.
Policies narrowly tailored only to the needs of released prisoners can at best attract the support of altruists and the poor themselves. The ineffectiveness of these constituencies is reflected in the quality of these targeted policies as they currently stand. But by actively constructing the common citizenship of the poor and the middle class, a universal social policy provides a powerful force for social integration.
***
Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.
Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.
Clearly we are not there yet. The norms of good citizenship, however, develop in tandem with the institutions of civic life. Political will can grow in small increments led by the promotion of institutions that provide on the basis of Marshall’s “basic human equality.” Such a renewal of an authentically American social citizenship would sweep away the jobless ghetto and the mass incarceration that it has spawned.
Also in this Special Issue: What we owe to incarcerated fathers, and Learning from the prison boom
Comments
Can you follow that?
Also, this faith-based return policy leads to higher reincarceration rates versus no helping religionists. Look that up, you'll see that I'm right.
Here's the thing though. Participating in criminal activity is not, as Joy put it, wrong--at least not always, not in the cases of many of these people in the slammer. There is nothing immoral, i.e. wrong, about using or selling drugs. We've chosen to make that crime. But, of course, poor people don't sell drugs because they have a more enlightened outlook than our government. They do it because it's the only option left. This is not a question of personal responsibility. To escape the ghetto requires a struggle that white people never ask each other to endure.
Formerly Incarcerated Black Man...
If you take the budget of the Minneapolis School District and divide it by the number of students, you come up with a result close to $18,000 per student. Yet half the kids drop out. Maybe the problem is not quality schools but quality community values.
If you take a bus in that city, you cannot help but notice people who have traveled from Laos, Somalia, Mexico and Central America to work. All experience some degree of cultural difficulty and perhaps discrimination - but the incarceration rates among these groups are comparatively low.
Could it be both the solution and problem with crime in the inner-cities reside entirely within that domain?
This changes only when a particular community is seen as respectable. I was raised respectable poor, and they are in fact the strongest critics of the feckless poor. Later in life I was a parole officer, both on the streets and for a number of years within a very large prison. I could never sympathise with prisoners who came up with lines like "Well, you have to steal, don't you?" because I knew from my own experience that this is not true.
But on the other hand, for every self-justifying fool I found a dozen who were not feckless, but merely witless or hapless. Their schooling had gone badly for all sorts of reasons - they were dim, or they were constantly required to stay home and look after brothers and sisters, and/or they had levels of anxiety that would get them $100/hour therapy if they had been lucky enough to be born into a different family.
(Get one point clear - looking scary, acting scary, is not mainly intended to intimidate victims. It is mainly for self-protection in the small worlds in which these people - usually men - have been obliged to grow up. It is, for a small kid, a way of trying to prevent a larger kid from taking the money your mother sent you out with to buy groceries.)
We all tend to adjust ourselves to the world around us - there is a major debate at the moment about whether fat people grow fatter because they see even fatter people around them. You could equally say that people buy BMWs on credit because they see other people around them buying BMWs on credit. To me, that is pretty much the same mechanism that happens in many neighbourhoods when it comes to crime. But you don't get a life sentence for buying your third BMW.
The rule of thumb in every prison I have ever worked in or visited, the words repeated so often that you know just when somebody on the staff is going to say them, used to be "One quarter of the people in here definitely deserve to be in here - the other three-quarters don't."
With the frankly insane growth in prison populations in the UK and the US, though not in other Western countries, I would take a bet that prison staff would now say no more than "20% belong in here, 80% don't".
There certainly are callous and nasty people around, and I make no excuse for them, on the basis of race or poverty or anything else. But without getting into any sort of sociological twisting and turning, it is a simple fact that not everybody gets an even break in life, nor in a courtroom.
Just to prove that I am capable of being petty, not just high-minded, compare what happens in court on something as simple as a DUI. It is the same offense, but compare what happens to Professor Plum to what happens to Miss Scarlett, or Mrs White from the kitchen.
Just consider that old chestnut "The defendant expressed sincere remorse" - a classic way of cutting a sentence. What if expressing sincere remorse was the very worst thing you could do in terms of facing either your jail time or your own mean neighbours? In those terms, sneering and defiance is in fact a rational posture; faking remorse is a good idea for many, faking defiance may be an even better idea for some. I have sometimes felt that a good defense lawyer should be able to pass a note to the judge saying "He is in fact utterly mortified, and feels that he has let his mother and sisters down very badly, but he will get roasted over hot coals if he lets that show." But that does not happen, and a three-month sentence turns into three years.
$18,000 isn't always $18,000 well spent. Even so, I'm sure the dominant values of inner-city communities do come into play, but part of the problem is that those values are generated to some degree in response to destructive government policies. The culture of the street gobbles kids up at a young age, but there would be no such culture without the war on drugs and rampant imprisonment. We've got a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy here. We've developed laws and enforcement strategies (something I don't see mentioned in any of these Boston Review prison articles) that treat young black men as criminals and thereby foisted a culture of criminality upon them that fosters the continuing output of criminals.
And your comparison to other minority groups doesn't make sense. Low incarceration rate compared to whom? Hispanics have a much higher incarceration rate than whites. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at mid-year 2007 there were 773 white male sentenced prisoners 100,000 white males and 1,747 Hispanic male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 hispanic males (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm). That's not has high as the rate among black males, but look at the situations in, say, Mexico or Colombia, which have extremely high incidence of drug-related violent crime. In the U.S., drug dealing organizations are most prominent in black communities and police focus their efforts there because this is how legislators from the federal level right on down to the municipality want it. Where Hispanics are present in larger numbers than Minneapolis and have had the delightful opportunity to live in their own sprawling ghettoes, the police crack their heads too.
the mark, well almost. This article talks about
prison and does a great job but not about why
most of these people are in prison. How can
crime be going down when our prison system
keeps growing? Seven point two million in our
criminal justice system who are either in prison,
jail, probation, parole or half way houses. Almost
two thirds are young (18-35) black, latino males.
Our, female and juvinile criminal justice system are
another story all together. The female system takes
away nurturers from areas that need them the most.
Our juvinile system provides the unending feeder pool
for the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
When one talks about prison today and not about
the "war on drugs" this does a grave injustice to
the article at hand. Most of the people today
are there for drug related charges. Forty percent
of prison population are there for what are called non
violent drug charges such as using or selling.
When one looks at drug related charges those
percentages go up almost another thirty percent.
One may ask the question, what is drug related? Consider
this; one goes to purchase givin illeagal drug and gets into
a disagreement and violence ensues and someone is killed
or hurt. More than likely this person is charged with a felony
but not a drug felony. Prostitutes are selling their bodies because they are
working for a pimp or themselves and have a drug habit. The
person gets busted but instead of it being a drug felony, they
are pinniched because they are people of the evening. There have
been many stories where vice cops are at loggerheads as to
whom will get the pinch because there are quotas which have
to be met by every department within givin police department.
Until scholars, researchers walk the walk instead of just talking
the talk they are looking and acting like the dog that is chasing
its tail. They have to ask the question; If crime is down, then
why does our criminal justice system keep growing all the while
understanding that a dog never catches its tail and we will never
get to the bottom of the biggest policy failure of the 20th and now
21st century, called America's "war on drugs"
Yes, Hispanics who are "white" have a higher crime rate than European heritage whites, yet the rate of crime among recent immigrants is significantly lower than among Hispanics who have been here for a while. Violence seems to be driven more by absorbing inner-city culture than by being poor or a member of a minority.
All this talk about drugs misses an important point. Prior to the 1970's, drug usage in the inner-cities was lower than it is in the suburbs today, so was the rate of out-of-wedlock births.
This simple fact makes a lie of argument that suggests the devolution of inner-city culture came from outside.
As for enforcement of drug laws, Jaimie has it backwards, federal, state, county and city government step up drug enforcement in the inner cities because of pressure from those communities to do something about drug violence.
Most victims of drug violence are black.
So what is the solution?
It appears Bill Cosby and Barak Obama are on to something. In the mid-1960's, the dominiant message in the inner-city was of self-improvement, then came The Great Society.
Empowerment needs to be returned to The People.
"Because we are joined by a common humanity, the murder of one kills us all."
Is this not every bit as true as his version?
"Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all."
And if it is, how does allowing murderers to walk freely among us enhance our 'common humanity'?
Or perhaps Mr. Western is aware that a disproportionate number of murder victims are poor or otherwise disadvantaged, and he is more comfortable with death than incarceration.
Mr. Western would be well advised to read the prison journalism of the British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple.
As for absorbing inner-city culture, I completely agree. But the point I was trying to make is that government policy has contributed to what that culture has become. I realize this is hard to accept because no congressman or bureaucrat has ever walked into the ghetto with a megaphone and called upon the masses to write songs about killing cops, turn "stop snitching" into a moral imperative (not that cops like snitching either), or shoot other drugs dealers, but if you scratch beneath the surface, the connections are obvious. The behavior of inner-city black youth is a rational response to conditions that are exacerbated by government policy. Ever since Nixon the line has been nothing but personal responsibility, meanwhile poor blacks have to start from nothing and recognize the futility of trying to bootstrap themselves in a society that fears them.
And fear is the principle reason that inner city residents are often the most eloquent opponents of drug use. Government propaganda has been working for decades to convince people that certain drugs, those arbitrarily determined to be illegal, are inherently bad. This gives people the misimpression that the violence plaguing inner cities is a result of drugs rather than drug prohibition. It's not the junkies who are shooting each other. The only drug I know of that commonly makes people violent is alcohol; so-called "drug violence" is prohibition violence.
But those junkies do commit other crimes, usually theft. If drugs were decriminalized and open competition were allowed, prices would fall dramatically thereby reducing the incentive to steal in order to get high.
I don't follow what Greg is saying about earlier levels of drug use. If anything that just demonstrates how great a failure the war on drugs has been.
One might also point out that, while there is pressure for enforcement in inner city communities, many refuse to cooperate with the police for fear of retribution from criminals. Some also refuse because they resent the way that their rights are systematically violated by surveillance and drug-free zones where, suddenly, the constitution no longer applies: a cop can throw you up against a wall and search you just for standing in a drug-free zone. You don't see that happening where the white people live, even though white people use plenty of drugs too. Talk about a racially motivated double standard.
Empowerment is a euphemism for telling people "you're on your own" while our entire society militates against blackness. See comment #7 for a poignant indication of how that works on a micro level. Empowerment is what got us where we are today: 2.3 million in prison. Actually, it's worse than that. The ghetto is merely an extension of the prison. Those 2.3 million are just official.
Western shows us that part of the solution is helping ex-prisoners reintegrate into society. That will reduce the amount of recidivism and decrease the escalation of violence that occurs when violent people go to prison, surround themselves with more violent people and fall into the cycle Richard described in his thoughtful comment above.
That will help take care of ex-prisoners. The greater part of the solution is ending the war on drugs, which is the cause of so much violence and unnecessary incarceration. It's actually damn simple.
Illegal drug use is pretty even across the board. This is not to say that whites have a great propencity to use drugs, its just that there are more whites that use illegal drugs. For every black that uses cannabis there ten whites, for those that smoke crack there are seven whites. Those numbers play out with all illegal drugs except methamphetamines. Ninety percent upward have whites using this drug.
This problem is particularly acute in African American urban settings. White America and government spending can have little or no effect. The problem has to be solved in the urban area, by the people involved. When the local communities and the local people begin taking responsibility, then conditions will improve. I see no evidence that this is happening.
In my experience, blaming poor family life in black communities is principally a way that white people pretend that racism doesn't exist and they bear no responsibility for urban plight. That's not to say that urban blacks wouldn't benefit from stronger family structures nor is it an attempt to absolve individual black men of their culpability in this arena. But there are reasons why black families fall apart, and, fundamentally, they are not the fault of the black community.
2. All Americans should have a least a high school education.
3. It is illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to have a handgun. Obey the federal law.
4. Narcotic drugs are illegal under federal law. Obey the federal law.
5. Return to your home a 9 p.m. and wake up early to go to work.
6. Don't drink alcohol, though legal.
No government program can compare to the results of the above six rules concerning personal responsibility. If people can't live by the above rules and control their impulses and commit crimes, they should only be incarcerated if they refuse to work. We have a failing infrastructure (bridges, roads, ad infinitum) that can harness this negative energy. White collar criminals should be right there beside them.
Really?
So why wasn't it a rational response in the 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's or 60's?
Why did drug addiction, violence and failed parenthood suddenly make sense where it never made sense before?
You seem to imply that first came Nixon's War on Drugs, then came drug use. I think you have it backwards.
Where did this odd idea that drug addiction is a "victimless crime" come from? People who have spent time in Family Court and witnessed the abandonment and abuse suffered by children of addicts rarely hold such a view.
The "drug war" does not rape children - but addicts with lousy impulse control frequently do.
As for "drug criminals" filling our prison, let's look at the rest of their criminal record.
It is easier to prosecute violent people for simple possession than convict them for rape, robbery or assault. Because of this, drug charges are often the result of pleaing down from a more serious offense.
"Empowerment is a euphemism for telling people "you're on your own" while our entire society militates against blackness." - Jaimie
What society is that?
The society I live in has a majority of blacks living in the middle class and stands on the verge of electing a black president.
It is time to abandon the parisitic message of people like Jesse Jackson and move into the 21st century.
The discussion about why and what to do is much more complex. No single answer or silver bullet has yet been identified. There are many approaches to these questions and it is the opinion of some scientist that creating sustainable solutions should be a participatory development. From my view, all comments to this article, thus far, are made by different stakeholders. They all need to be heard and respected, even those we disagree with. The different views hopefully will help the author and other readers to widen their scope and consider a bigger picture of these issues.
A humongous problem indeed, it affects a myriad of stakeholders many of whom can give healthy input and offer valid examples of success. Not diminishing the value of any stakeholder, it surprises me how little value is given to those previously incarcerated people who have successfully managed to achieve a sustained reintegration…and…have chosen to give back by dedicating their lives to helping others to be successful. Many of these individuals are leaders of programs and initiatives, proven to be successful and are widely used as best practice models. Successful previously incarcerated people give added value to justice policy discussions and reentry strategies. Their voices should be heard and advice considered more seriously.
“We share the belief that the individuals who a program or initiative is designed to assist should participate and play an active role throughout its planning, implementation and evaluation.”[DC PIPs 2005]
Indeed there are witless and hapless people everywhere who end up in jail, but in the inner-city there are so many more of them.
The big question is why.
It seems to me the answer is found in the question "what do you want?"
In communities where people want a career, a family, a house, a dog, a stable life. They usually find those things, even if they are witless and hapless.
It is where these things are not the goal, that other darker things are pursued.
I am not accusing you of touting that sort of stuff, not at all, but it struck me with great sadness that of the five things you list, the only one that a hapless/witless can genuinely hope to have in a lifetime is a dog.
What struck me very forcefully in dealing with all sorts of minor/medium criminals was the astonishing level of chronic illness or sudden undeserved calamity in their immediate families. And I don't mean just the obvious stuff about Type 2 diabetes, or cirrhosis - these were not lifestyle diseases. There is a strain of sickle cell anaemia, for instance, which strikes some families from Cyprus; or the breadwinner, father or mother, has a stroke which nobody could have predicted; or all the family's attention has to switch to a child who has an injury or some very demanding illness.
This is hard enough for a family that is stable. It is a commonplace that caring for a seriously ill or injured or disabled child can split a prosperous couple - it is devastating in families that are neither stable nor prosperous. We are lucky over here in that medical care is free, but not all the costs are financial. To their shame, there are fathers who walk away, because the tensions are "too much".
This is where I find Theodore Dalrymple irritating - he is a poseur, hiding behind a pseudonym, parading a family and personal history which does contain genuine tragedy, and a lot of personal good work, but he is far too simplistic in expecting everybody to be as clever as he is.
I shall try to sum it up in a single story. I once had to deal with a young man who had just been sent to prison for acting as a lookout in an armed robbery (nobody got hurt). He got ten years. He was plainly more than a little bit simple, and his father had tried his best to look after him, finding him jobs. But his father died very suddenly, of a heart attack, and this simpleton, being a beefy sort of bloke, was very quickly picked up by people whom his father would have warned him against. So he was a lookout, once, and he got ten years. No previous convictions or arrests.
What sticks with me is that he said "I never think about my Dad when I am awake, but I do always have dreams about him - does that count?"
Nobody in the prison thought that guy deserved ten. Not the staff, not the cons.
That is an extreme example, but believe me, if you look not at what many of the cons have done, but what has gone on around them, other explanations do come in. Not liberal excuses, useful explanations; not that cheesy "There but for the grace of god ..." and you can completely forget the idea of "honour among thieves" - just how people in very tough situations which keep on piling up all through their childhood may not make the right choices.
Whch is why I go back to feasibility. I was lucky because although we had no money, and my mother was a widow, I could use my academic ability. If that failed, I could fall back on an ability to use a lathe; if that failed, I was sufficiently well-spoken to get a job in a department store ... and on and on. But what if you have no academic ability, what if you do not know how to work a lathe, what if you are not well-spoken?
Idiots speak as if crime is the first choice of bad people. It is probably the fourth choice of middling to dim people who had no chance of the first three.
I am very flattered that you read my opinion, and I find this debate interesting - I can be a policy wonk, but this goes deeper for me.
I have also encountered many people who don't have these things.
Observing the two groups, it is clear that what distinguishes one from the other is the desire to live the life of the former.
Straw man, I know. But it's the logical conclusion.
For two years I have been doing volunteer work in a medium security prison - it has been a real eye opener. This experience has caused me to reflect on the "guys" in my life who ended up in prison (nine that I know of) - a childhood friend for petty crimes, a former superintendent of schools for bank kitting, an owner of a construction business for keeping a double set of books, a CEO of a technology business for fraud, the son of a friend for vehicular homicide, etc. If I had been from a different segment of society the story would be much different - e.g., the crimes would be mostly related to the "drug business" if I had been raised in an inner city ghetto. Take a ride through the ghetto nearest your home and check out the conditions that a large number of American blacks call home - put yourself or better yet your children in that context and envision what might have been. And remember they probably don't live there because they chose it over the neighborhood you and your family live in.
I have a friend who served in the legislature in the state where I live - our prison population is 2.5 times that of a neighboring state with very similar demographics. He told me that nearly every member of our state legislature in private is against tough on crime laws but in public they cannot take that stand because they are afraid of a "Willie Horton" backlash. So it costs us nearly twice as much for corrections as it does the neighboring state which by the way has a lower crime rate also - mostly because we have uniformed voters, people like many of commentors above who have little knowledge of the problem but all the answers.
Get informed before you shoot your mouth off about things like responsibility and values. Who knows, you might become a compassionate conservative with a real interest in solving the root problems.
I find it disturbing that various TV networks show "reality" and crime shows where the "Toughest Jail on Earth" and the "Meanest Prisons" -- all in the USA -- are held up to New Zealanders as entertaining role models to which we should aspire.
If society spend the taxes on educating young people and offering them the hope of a decent life and some values other than pursuit of the almighty dollar we would be spending the money more wisely.
Building more jails and locking up more and more people is not the answer.
There are others, but you will get the gist of the broad sweep of Murray's writings from the above.
Here is a quote from "The Advantages of Social Apartheid":
"If we are unwilling to prevent an underclass by giving responsibility for behaviour back to individuals, families and communities, Custodial Democracy is the only option left".
PC liberals can rant all they like about the beliefs of conservatives, but the mess that liberals continue to make of society would be cause for mirth if it were not cause for sorrow.
I'd like to know how this was done - as it is not in line with the findings of other research.
It further states ..."The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001...."
Agains there is no explanation of how the author came to these conclusions
"The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces..."
and again, other research has shown (and practical experience proven) that increasing the size of police forces without changing other factors makes no significant difference.
..."the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s"
The crack epidemic may have been pacified - but it has also been supplanted by methamphetamine which is probably even worse, so I doubt that is significant.
The author then cites "the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation."
So we are left with something unaccounted for that has somehow reduced crime. Occams razor is applicable here - always look for the simplest explanation and certainly increased imprisonment fits the facts
On the substance of your concern: I am not an expert on this subject, but my understanding is that estimates of the effect of increasing imprisonment on decreasing crime rates do vary a good deal. But economists and sociologists who have studied it think that increased imprisonment may account for as much as 25% of the decrease in crime (Western's own estimate is much lower than 25%). But even that high estimate leaves 75% to be explained by other factors.
so you are right to think that there is a gap in the argument, but western's book, like most of the literature (as far as I understand it), would say that you are overstating the effects of imprisonment on declining crime rates.
Josh
Part of the role of punishment is that of motivating the population to consider the consequences before undertaking criminal behaviour.
Thus one might see a reduction in recidivism but more of the population might be motivated to join the criminal fraternity in the first place.
Secondly, I agree if one is to rely on the state (not State) to spend our taxes to re-educate, employ and otherwise manage these criminals then it has to be locally managed and closely monitored. Here in the UK the taxpayer has, rightly, become cynical about government-run "solutions" that eventually prove to be non-productive and a huge waste of taxpayers funds.
Third, the time has surely come to stop giving people excuses for their poor behaviour. Not all poor people, black people or poor black people become criminals. The blaming of society, things, government, "disadvantage" et al only serves to lengthen the time before people get round to looking at themselves, everything else is denial by another name.
Yes, black people may have more hurdles to jump than whites. Poor people will have less to lose than rich. But we do not help their resolve if we give them excuses to fall back on.
I think this is an extremely interesting sentiment, one that can only exist in a world dominated by economic thinking. The notion is that by providing an excuse to criminals we incentivize behavior. This is the kind of mindset economists use to approach human behavior. We are, they contend, not but machines reacting predictably to incentives (though sometimes those predictable reactions are not rational, as the current literature stresses).
I don't buy economic reductivism, but even if it's right, it's a moot point. Academics ensconced in universities debate these points; magazines for the highly educated, like Boston Review, print articles about the debate; and people privileged enough to know how to use a computer write comments about the debate. But none of it has any impact on criminal behavior. The corner boy slinging dope knows nothing about what we're talking about.
Criminals don't see sociological theory as a license to commit crimes. The poor, illiterate, black men we're talking about wouldn't know sociology from an aardvark's elbow. So this notion that considering ways to undue the damage wrought on their communities by bad laws and bad enforcement is somehow contributing to their criminality is utter nonsense. He doesn't wake up in the morning and say, "Bruce Western thinks there are systemic inequalities and bad laws that lead me to commit crimes, therefore I will plug someone today." He doesn't even think that white people feel guilty so he'll get away with it. He is following the logic dictated by his situation and that logic does not account for politics.
We're talking about different worlds here. The only time they meet is when the privileged man's law draws the poor man into the courtroom. So you can go on about personal responsibility, but that kid thinks he's doing precisely that each day he steps onto the corner. Either we accept the situation as it currently exists we try creative methods to overcome it.
I'm not saying I know the answer for sure, but as long as we're thinking sociologically, economically--scientifically--let's try an experiment. Suspend the war on drugs for one year in one city. Just see what happens. Evaluate the harms, evaluate the benefits. We've always taken the drug war on faith. Let's test it and see what it really does. Is that so immodest a proposal?
View from abroad from a Registered Society's member within Association for probation and Offenders Assistance.
Posted by: "lhull" Lhull@xxx
Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:47 am (PDT)
I am not kidding with that title. In the Katy Independent School District, a 12-year-old student, Shelby Sendelbach, was given a very harsh punishment for writing the words "I Love Alex" in permanent baby blue marker on her school gym's wall. The district classified her act as a Level 4 infraction. What is a level 4 infraction? Well, in the eyes of the district, it ranks up there with terroristic threats. Meaning, she could have called in a bomb threat or brought a gun to school and received the same punishment. That punishment was a mandatory four-month
assignment to an alternative school. Think about that for a moment. An innocent (yes, destructive, but not threatening) act of vandalism was seen as a terroristic threat. Did she write, "I will kill all teachers?"
Not at all. She declared her preteen love for a boy named Alex. Pause and think this over. Terrorism. Writing on a wall. Bomb threat. Writing on a wall.
"New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years."
Actually th New York Department of corrections site
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doc/html/stats/doc_stats.shtml
shows the following;
Average Daily Inmate Population
FY 2007 - 13,987
FY 2006 - 13,497
FY 2005 - 13,576
FY 2004 - 13,751
FY 2003 - 14,533
FY 2002 - 13,934
FY 2001 - 14,490
A drop of some 500 odd over 6 years, which doesn't look that significant to me.
So, the issue boils down largely to class and the ongoing conscious maldistribution of resources and wealth.The power structure creates and sustains the maldistribution. Race becomes a proxy for class discrepancies accentuated among certain populations. This is social inequality 101. The bigotry against various "of-color" populations tends to accelerate the likelihood of their being poor and oppressed, as the statistics show. Similarly, poor and white never has been a treat from the days of the founding fathers and before. The class issue creates a commonality. Until it is addressed, the sustainability of evidence-based re-entry programs and early social policy intervention programs (see further, Beyond Common Sense by the Chapin Hill authors)will be limited. It is sad, but let us not deceive ourselves as to the underlying "causes" or "factors" and why they are sustained instead of being modified so that meaningful alternatives may be created and sustained.
Willy D. 7/24/08
I encourage you to study the history of recent African immigrants, such as Somalians, who experience high levels of employment, low crime rates and low illegal drug use.
You suggest the underclass lives the way it does because of lack of choice, yet anyone who spent time in any major American city is well aware of the 19 million immigrants who are not white, who have traveled thousands of miles to prosper in a land where they do not speak the language.
Odd, how they do not seem to be constrained by racism and oppression.....
The Forgiveness Project
Petersilia (2003), also of the same opinion, indicated prisoner reentry includes all efforts to prepare the incarcerated to transition safely into the community and live a law-abiding lifestyle.
Others have suggested prison reentry is a philosophy that begins at sentencing and involves community partnership, legal collaboration, and family involvement (R. Wilkinson, Dir. of OH Dept. of Rehab. and Corrections). However, none of the above are useful for developing an operationalized definition of reentry that can be subjected to programmatic empirical evaluation. How do we study something that means "everything?"
The research of Seiter and Kadela (2003) into the "active ingredients" or "what works" in reentry programs was somewhat ground-breaking in that they developed an operationalized definition useful for the purpose of empirical evaluation. They defined reentry programs as organizations that have outcome evaluations and focus specifically on reentry into the public, or those that begin treatment within a correctional environment with methods to ensure continuity of care post-release.
Outcome evaluations…go figure! Yes, while this is beautiful to see in a definition of a reentry program from a scientific standpoint, it unfortunately eliminates the vast majority of reentry community efforts. Most folks at the Goodwill have not taken a graduate level statistics course.
In fact, using this definition, the authors were only able to identify 28 empirical studies that fit their definition and only 19 had controls. Furthermore, of the 19, 10 were drug rehabs. Yes, when you do the math, this albeit narrow definition suggests there have only been approximately 9 published studies between 1975 and 2001 on “reentry programs.”
The way we define reentry programs are important in science and in practice. Too often reentry partners may unknowingly be comparing apples and oranges when they discuss and study reentry programming. The ultimate solution would be the adoption of conventional definitions, although this practice may limit future progress. At a minimum, writings on reentry program research, policy, and practice must include how they defined "reentry program" because it is unrealistic to assume readers can infer what you mean at this point.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jemour A. Maddux, Psy.D. (President) Board of Empirically Supported Transition Practices, Nonprofit Corporation www.njreentry.com Email: jmaddux@njreentry.com Phone: 1-888 362-4591
Neuroscience and neurophilosophy will show us, eventually, that an individual does only what he or she is capable of doing at any given moment, no more, no less, and that Free Will is an illusion. A very convincing and seductive illusion, perhaps occasionally useful in a positive way, but certainly as a basis for a humane, ethical and successful society, a terrible miscalculation.
AND
2. Has an experiment ever been done wherein a few companies set up shop within prisons so as to train men for meaningful work?
Of course, I'm talking about more sophisticated jobs here, not manual labor. Placing myself in a prisoner's shoes, I am not so sure I would look forward to minimum wage work...
I live in Minneapolis, MN
I came to US as political refugee on human rights violations in former USSR
I am russian jew, and I got a lot of discrimination in USSR
My parents are Holocaust survivors.
But I got the worst thing in USA, never possible in communist country.
I was set up with my computer, convicted as a s..x offender for computer p..rn.
I would like to send you some links to publications about my criminal
case. I was forced to confess to the
possession of internet digital pictures of p..rn in deleted clusters
of my computer hard drive. My browser was hijacked while I was
browsing the web. I was redirected to illegal sites against my will.
Some illegal pictures were found on my hard drive, recovering in
unallocated clusters, without dates of file creation/download.
I do not know how courts can widely press these charges on people to
convict them, while the whole Internet is a mess.
I was fired from many jobs, and I am out of job for 5 years.
Also police watch me all the time naming me a predator,
I am not a predator, I came here in hope to escape human rights violations,
but I got copletely terrible violations by government. All of this
looks like Nazi Germany
Most recent publication in ZDnet
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=824
You can find all links to publications about my case here
http://estrinyefim.newsvine.com/_news/2007/06/23/798199-internet-porn-hysteria
Laloo Prasad Yadav talks to his son
Laloo: I want you to marry a girl of my choice
Son: "I want to choose my own bride".
Laloo: "But the girl is Ambani's daughter."
Son: "Well, in that case...... Yes"
Next day Laloo approaches Mukesh Ambani
Laloo: "I have a husband for your daughter."
Ambani: "But my daughter is too young to marry."
Laloo: "But this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank."
Ambani: "Ah, in that case.....Yes"
Finally Laloo goes to see the president of the World Bank.
Laloo:"I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president."
President:"But I already have more vice-presidents than I need."
Laloo: "But this young man is Ambani's son-in-law."
President: "Ah, in that case.......Yes."
This is how business is done!!!
------------------------
Dx
-----------------------
Kansas Drug Treatment Centers-Kansas Drug Treatment Centers