The New Yorker has a truly great article chronicling the current state of the prison system and laying out suggestions for improvement. I’ve always been suspicious of our culture’s tendency to gravitate towards prison terms as the default way to punish criminals. The pure number of people we are incarcerating is astounding (read the whole article here):
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that.
Roughly six million are currently in our prisons. Among the many problems with our system:
A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.
Adam Gopnik, author of the article, spends time investigating efforts in the 90′s onward that led to a startling decline in crime in New York City:
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already.
Gopnik commends small steps that change behaviors – opening doors for good opportunities and blocking easy access to crime. One example he used was closing down the drug market in Washington Square. Such actions either eliminate or reduce criminal activity. Crime stops or it goes into less convenient places.
So what are Gopnik’s conclusions? Basically, he believes that we need to change our tactics in our approach to crime while also making wiser decisions about precisely which kinds of activities we deem prison-worthy. Near the conclusion of his piece:
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient.
I find it difficult to weigh the justice in such a situation. Do community service and public disgrace balance against the wrong of some of these crimes? At the same time, surely community service is closer to the ideal of paying recompense for your crime than merely spending time in a cell. A prisoner does not pay back his community – far from it – he requires thousands of tax dollars to support in prison.
There is much we could do to reduce our prison population, and we should get serious about finding solutions. Surely many men and women would rather work to atone for their crimes than sit in a jail cell for months or years.
Such adjustments still would not change the reality of prison for violent crime, but they would massively reduce our taxpayer burden. This is made all the more desirable if prison itself cannot be shown to be a great deterrent to crime.
I’m not sure that I agree with Gopnik’s exact proposals, but we should really reconsider how we deal with petty crime and whether time in a cell is really justice at all in some of these cases.
Click here to read the whole piece. It’s excellent, fascinating reporting and opinion.
Leave A Comment
