Criminal justice is not about revenge, retribution, or righting historic wrongs. It’s about enforcing laws and maintaining public safety. Incarceration is not about making someone pay for their crimes or answer for the sins of their economic class, gender or race. Rather, the purpose of incarceration is to:
Deter criminal behavior
Protect society through temporary incapacitation of criminal offenders
Discourage recidivism
Let’s take these one at a time.
Deterrence:
A few years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice summarized the primary findings of deterrence research, as follows:
The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
Sending an offender to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.
Incarceration
The ACLU says it well:
Incarceration can control crime in many circumstances…. Criminals who are locked up cannot mug law-abiding citizens, and the prospect of going to prison must surely deter some from breaking the law in the first place. All this is true, but only up to a point. In the 1980s expanding prisons probably did help slow the rise of crime by taking thugs off the streets. But mass incarceration has long since become counter-productive - Smart Reform is Possible/American Civil Liberties Union August 2011
Incarceration becomes counter-productive when it no longer functions as a crime deterrent and actually increases the likelihood of re-offending. This appears to have happened in the US, as crime rates no longer have a clear relationship to incarceration rates and recidivism rates remain sky-high.
Recidivism
So, how are US prisoners doing upon release? Turns out, not so good. This from a 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics follow-up study of state prisoners:
Of the 401,288 state prisoners released in 2005, an estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.
Forty-four percent of released prisoners were arrested during the first year following release.
Eighty-two percent of prisoners arrested during the 9-year period were arrested within the first 3 years.
Just five percent of prisoners arrested during the first year after release were not arrested again during the 9-year follow-up period.
What to Do?
Well, that’s a huge question. One that I’ll address in the next post.
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References:
Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling “What Caused the Crime Decline?” Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law 2015
Smart Reform is Possible/American Civil Liberties Union August 2011
Time Served in State Prison, 2016 Danielle Kaeble/ Bureau of Justice Statistics. Bulletin NCJ 252205. November 2018 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf