And although some people are dangerous and need to be in prison, in other cases, locking people up is a waste of taxpayer dollars that may do more harm than good. Rather than getting tough on crime, justice agencies need to get smart on crime. For instance, rather than indiscriminately cramming everyone into prison, justice agencies should use scientifically supported methods to identify which defendants truly pose a danger to others.
We are researchers who work with American and Canadian justice agencies to help them develop effective methods to identify and manage people who may be violent towards others.
We explain why jailing everyone is not the answer to preventing violence, and how many researchers have developed risk assessment tools to help justice agencies make better decisions about who to imprison and what services to provide.
The U. However, many politicians have recently concluded that warehousing people in prison is costly and unsustainable. As such, politicians have been trying to bring down prison rates. An example of this is the new First Step Act in the U. American politicians are shifting their thinking for many reasons. Here are a few:. Prisons are expensive to operate. In the U. Research shows that putting people behind bars does not reduce reoffending , and some studies show it can make matters worse.
From working in prisons, we have seen this firsthand; prisons can be schools for crime. Although some of the people we jail are dangerous, many are not. Many have mental illnesses and addictions. Some are teenagers who have made bad decisions. Also, decisions about who we put behind bars are prone to biases and disparities.
For example, in Canada, even though incarceration rates have fallen, the proportion of prisoners who are Indigenous is growing — 60 per cent of imprisoned teenage girls are Indigenous. How do law makers decide who is dangerous and truly needs to be locked up? However, even the incapacitation interpretation is cast in doubt by the aging of the U.
Between and , the percentage of prisoners in state and federal prisons over age 45 nearly tripled, from Thus, the apparent decline in the incapacitative effectiveness of incarceration with. Further complicating the decreasing returns interpretation is the changing composition of the prison population with respect to the types of offenses for which prisoners have been convicted.
For more than four decades, the percentage of prisoners incarcerated for non-Part I Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI index crimes 13 has increased substantially Blumstein and Beck, , Thus, the reduction in crime prevention effectiveness may be due to the types of prisoners incarcerated rather than the high rate of incarceration itself. All of these studies, whether instrumental variables-based or not, also suffer from an important conceptual flaw that limits their usefulness in understanding deterrence and devising crime control policy.
Prison population is not a policy variable per se; rather, it is an outcome of sanction policies dictating who goes to prison and for how long—the certainty and severity of punishment. In all incentive-based theories of criminal behavior in the tradition of Bentham and Beccaria, the deterrence response to sanction threats is posed in terms of the certainty and severity of punishment, not the incarceration rate. Therefore, to predict how changes in certainty and severity might affect the crime rate requires knowledge of the relationship of the crime rate to certainty and severity as separate entities.
This knowledge is not provided by the literature that analyzes the relationship of the crime rate to the incarceration rate. These studies also were conducted at an overly global level. Nagin discusses two dimensions of sanction policies that affect incarceration rates. The 5-fold growth in incarceration rates over the past four decades is attributable to a combination of policies belonging to all cells of this matrix.
As described in Chapter 3 , parole powers have been greatly curtailed and sentence lengths increased, both in general and for particular crimes e.
Consequently, any impact of the increase in prison population. There are good reasons for predicting differences in the crime reduction effects of different types of sanctions e. Obvious sources of heterogeneity in offender response include such factors as prior contact with the criminal justice system, demographic characteristics, and the mechanism by which sanction threats are communicated to their intended audience. In studying the lagged effects of incarceration on crime, researchers generally have focused on the criminal involvement of people who have been incarcerated.
Two competing hypotheses appear plausible. On the one hand, people who have served time in prison may be less likely to be involved in crime because the experience of incarceration has deterred them or because they have been involved in rehabilitative programs. A recent review of the literature on imprisonment and reoffending by Nagin and colleagues concludes that there is little evidence of a specific deterrent or rehabilitative effect of incarceration, and that all evidence on the effect of imprisonment on reoffending points to either no effect or a criminogenic effect.
Studies of the effect of aging on recidivism examine how rates of recidivism change with age, whereas studies of the effect of imprisonment on recidivism examine how imprisonment affects recidivism compared with a noncustodial sanction such as probation. Thus, the conclusion that rates of recidivism tend to decline with age does not contradict the conclusion that imprisonment, compared with a noncustodial sanction, may be associated with higher rates of recidivism.
Whatever the effects of incarceration on those who have served time, research on recidivism offers a clear picture of crime among the formerly incarcerated.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has published two multistate studies estimating recidivism among state prisoners. Both take an annual cohort of prison releases and use state and federal criminal record databases to estimate rates of rearrest, reconviction, and resentencing to prison. Beck and Shipley examine criminal records for a cohort of released prisoners in 11 states, while Langan and Levin analyze a cohort in the 11 original states plus 4 others.
Although the incarceration rate had roughly doubled between and , the results of the two studies are strikingly similar: the 3-year rearrest rate for state prisoners was around two-thirds in both cohorts Although none of these studies examines desistance among the formerly incarcerated, their findings are suggestive and point to the need for research on long-term patterns of desistance among those who have served prison time.
Using a variety of cohorts in the United States and the United Kingdom, this research finds that the offending rate of the formerly arrested or those with prior criminal convictions converges toward the age-specific offending rate of the general population, conditional on having been crime free for the previous 7 to 10 years.
The redemption studies also show that the rate of convergence of the formerly incarcerated tends to be slower if ex-offenders are younger or if they have a long criminal history. Rehabilitative programming has been the main method for reducing crime among the incarcerated. Such programming dates back to Progressive-era reforms in criminal justice that also produced a separate juvenile justice system for children involved in crime, indeterminate sentencing laws with discretionary parole release, and agencies for parole and probation supervision.
For much of the twentieth century, rehabilitation occupied a central place in the official philosophy—if not the practice—of U. This philosophy was significantly challenged in the s when a variety of reviews found that many rehabilitative programs yielded few reductions in crime Martinson, ; National Research Council, a.
By the late s, consensus had begun to swing back in favor of rehabilitative programs. Gaes and colleagues report, with little controversy, that well-designed programs can achieve significant reductions in recidivism, and that community-based programs and programs for juveniles tend to be more successful than programs applied in custody and with adult clients.
Gaes and colleagues also point to the special value. Since the review of Gaes and colleagues, there have been several important evaluations of transitional employment and community supervision programs Hawken and Kleiman, ; Redcross et al. Results for transitional employment among parole populations have been mixed. Over a 3-year follow-up period, prison and jail incarceration was significantly reduced by a 6-week period of transitional employment, but arrests and convictions were unaffected.
Parole and probation reforms involving both sanctions that are swift and certain but mild and sanctions that are graduated have been shown to reduce violations and revocations. Because evaluation of such programs is ongoing, information about other postprogram effects is not yet available.
Indeed, this view motivated a variety of policies intended to minimize social interaction among the incarcerated in the early nineteenth-century penitentiary. Much of the research reported in Chapters 6 through 9 on the individual-level effects of incarceration suggests plausible pathways by which prison time may adversely affect criminal desistance. Research suggests the importance of steady employment and stable family relationships for desisting from crime Sampson and Laub, ; Laub and Sampson, To the extent that incarceration diminishes job stability and disrupts family relationships, it may also be associated with continuing involvement in crime.
As previously indicated, Nagin and colleagues found that a substantial number of studies report evidence of a criminogenic effect of imprisonment, although they also conclude that most of these studies were based on weak research designs. As discussed in Chapter 2 , a large portion of the growth in state and federal imprisonment is due to the increased number of arrests for drug offenses and the increased number of prison commitments per drug arrest. Law enforcement efforts targeting drug offenses expanded greatly after the s, with the arrest rate for drugs increasing from about per , adults in to more than per , in Snyder, Sentencing for drug offenses also became more punitive, as mandatory prison time for these offenses was widely adopted by the states through the s and incorporated in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in Expanded enforcement and the growing use of custodial sentences for drug.
From to , the state incarceration rate for drug offenses grew from 15 per , to more than per ,, a faster rate of increase than for any other offense category. State prison admissions for drug offenses grew most rapidly in the s, increasing from about 10, in to about , by and peaking at , in Beck and Blumstein, , Figures 12 and As discussed in Chapter 4 , successive iterations of the war on drugs, announced by the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations, focused drug control policy on both the supply side and the demand side of the illegal drug market.
The intensified law enforcement efforts not only were aimed chiefly at reducing the supply of drugs, but also were intended to reduce the demand for drugs. On the supply side, the specific expectation of policy makers has been that, by taking dealers off the streets and raising the risks associated with selling drugs, these enforcement strategies and more severe punishments would reduce the supply of illegal drugs and raise prices, thereby reducing drug consumption.
On the demand side, penalties for possession became harsher as well, and criminal justice agencies became actively involved in reducing demand through the arrest and prosecution of drug users. As a result of this twin focus on supply and demand, incarceration rates for drug possession increased in roughly similar proportion to incarceration rates for drug trafficking Caulkins and Chandler, Much of the research on drug control policy—and specifically, on the effectiveness of law enforcement and criminal justice strategies in carrying out those policies—is summarized in two reports of the National Research Council , However, the combined effect of both supply-and demand-side enforcement on price is uncertain Kleiman, ; Kleiman et al.
Thus, the well-documented reduction in the price of most drugs since the early s Reuter, may, in principle, be partly a reflection of success in demand suppression.
The data show large declines in the prices of cocaine and heroin since the early s, and prices have largely been fluctuating around a historically low level over the past two decades. The National Research Council , p. We offer the following observations regarding gaps in knowledge of the crime prevention effects of incarceration and research to address those gaps. The deterrent effect of lengthy sentences is modest at best. Research on the relationship between sentence length and the magnitude of the deterrent effect is therefore a high priority.
Related research is needed to establish whether other components of the certainty of punishment beyond the certainty of apprehension, such as the probability of imprisonment given conviction, are effective deterrents.
A National Research Council report on the deterrent effect of the death penalty National Research Council, a describes large gaps in state-level data on the types of noncapital sanctions legally available for the punishment of murder and on their actual utilization.
Comparable gaps exist for other serious crimes that are not subject to capital punishment. As a consequence, it is not possible to compare postconviction sentencing practices across the 50 states. Development of a comprehensive database. Similar price declines are found for heroin and crack cocaine. Many studies have attempted to estimate the combined incapacitation and deterrence effects of incarceration on crime using panel data at the state level from the s to the s and s.
Most studies estimate the crime-reducing effect of incarceration to be small and some report that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of incarceration. Where adjustments are made for the direct dependence of incarceration rates on crime rates, the crime-reducing effects of incarceration are found to be larger.
Thus, the degree of dependence of the incarceration rate on the crime rate is crucial to the interpretation of these studies. However, research in this area is not unanimous and the historical and legal analysis is hard to quantify. If the trend in the incarceration rate depended strongly on the trend in crime, then a larger effect of incarceration on crime would be more credible.
On balance, panel data studies support the conclusion that the growth in incarceration rates reduced crime, but the magnitude of the crime reduction remains highly uncertain and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large. Whatever the estimated average effect of the incarceration rate on the crime rate, the available studies on imprisonment and crime have limited utility for policy.
The incarceration rate is the outcome of policies affecting who goes to prison and for how long and of policies affecting parole revocation. Not all policies can be expected to be equally effective in preventing crime. Thus, it is inaccurate to speak of the crime prevention effect of incarceration in the singular. Policies that effectively target the incarceration of highly dangerous and frequent offenders can have large crime prevention benefits, whereas other policies will have a small prevention effect or, even worse, increase crime in the long run if they have the effect of increasing postrelease criminality.
Evidence is limited on the crime prevention effects of most of the policies that contributed to the post increase in incarceration rates. Nevertheless, the evidence base demonstrates that lengthy prison sentences are ineffective as a crime control measure.
Specifically, the incremental deterrent effect of increases in lengthy prison sentences is modest at best. Also, because recidivism rates decline markedly with age and prisoners necessarily age as they serve their prison sentence, lengthy prison sentences are an inefficient approach to preventing crime by incapacitation unless they.
For these reasons, statutes mandating lengthy prison sentences cannot be justified on the basis of their effectiveness in preventing crime. Finally, although the body of credible evidence on the effect of the experience of imprisonment on recidivism is small, that evidence consistently points either to no effect or to an increase rather than a decrease in recidivism. Thus, there is no credible evidence of a specific deterrent effect of the experience of incarceration.
Our review of the evidence in this chapter reaffirms the theories of deterrence first articulated by the Enlightenment philosophers Beccaria and Bentham. In their view, the overarching purpose of punishment is to deter crime. For state-imposed sanctions to deter crime, they theorized, requires three ingredients—severity, certainty, and celerity of punishment. But they also posited that severity alone would not deter crime.
Our review of the evidence has confirmed both the enduring power of their theories and the modern relevance of their cautionary observation about overreliance on the severity of punishment as a crime prevention policy. After decades of stability from the s to the early s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States more than quadrupled during the last four decades. The U. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons.
Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects.
This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States recommends changes in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy to reduce the nation's reliance on incarceration.
The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. The study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website. Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one.
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Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released. Get This Book. Visit NAP. Looking for other ways to read this? No thanks. Rawls says that until the veil is lifted we know nothing about how well each of us is fitted by natural endowment, health, education, or social position, or even gender, to achieve the best outcomes. We are disposed by a risk-averse nature to guard against the worst possible outcomes, he argues, so that our own rational self-interest drives us to choose principles of justice which would favour the worst off.
According to the Difference Principle, the gains garnered by naturally gifted or socially privileged individuals do not belong exclusively to them, but should be treated to as a common fund, and available for redistribution. The Principle is in effect an agreement to treat the spread of the natural talents and acquired abilities among all individuals as collective assets.
The notion of desert does not apply here. And if the fortunate do not deserve the advantages from having a good character, why should the unfortunate deserve the disadvantages from having a bad one? Rawls actually grants that they do not deserve them. It is their misfortune because they do not deserve punishment for offences which they were led to commit by a badness of character for which they themselves are not to blame.
It is their bad luck to have punishment fall upon them, since none of us deserve our initial starting place in society, nor how we were raised. Unfortunately, however, offenders have nevertheless to be punished in order to preserve liberty in a just society.
The parties to the theoretical Original Position where the principles for society are chosen would surely agree that laws must be enforced.
The reasoning is entirely symmetrical. Because character traits depend in large part upon family and social circumstances in early life, favourable or otherwise, for which we can claim no credit or deserve no blame, it is therefore unjust to let retribution fall exclusively upon persons of bad character. Rather, the arbitrariness of talents and character undermines desert in respect of both the distribution of wealth and of criminal punishment.
It would be just to share the misfortune of offenders. Imprisonment tinkers with the symptoms of crime, aggravates the causes of crime, and thus perpetuates crime.
It would be very foolish to suppose that poverty and ignorance could be wiped out in the lifespan of even several governments. That result would require a set of policies, consistently maintained over many decades, and purposely designed as a Grand Project to eradicate the conditions in which people feel driven into criminal careers as their only survival strategy. For such a project to be fulfilled it would need to be backed up by a binding compact between the major political parties.
One possible analogy is with a great flood prevention project in Holland known as the Delta Works. In January , all of south-west Holland, from Rotterdam to Flushing, was covered by a North Sea flood that killed around two thousand people in one night.
The South Holland coast region is home to four million people, most of whom live below normal sea level. In response to the flood, the Dutch government decided to build a storm surge barrier that would reduce the length of coastline exposed to the sea by kilometres miles. This work was sustained until the work was declared officially finished nearly sixty years later in The Dutch people were politically committed to see the project through, no matter how long it took, or which government was in power, or what it cost.
If imprisonment were the answer to crime we would be closing prisons not opening more.
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