I’ve said it before, but people are very easy to influence, particularly with the stories we tell ourselves, via Hollywood. These stories include crime dramas, police procedurals, detective stories, and courtroom dramas.
Solving the crime typically drives the plot, and the bad guys perish, or are appropriately punished roughly 90% of the time. Is there any murder plot so complex Perry Mason can’t solve it? I don’t think so!
In real life, the police and courts solve far fewer crimes—13 percent in California in 2022 (says the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice here).
Meanwhile, Hollywood’s stories have an effect. Between 1982 and 2017 the US population increased 42 percent, while spending on policing increased 187 percent. The influence also appears in US prison spending.
With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 25 percent of its prisoners–five times the world’s per-capita average incarceration rate, seven times Canada’s or France’s rates, per-capita. Is Canadian or French crime worse than US crime? No, it’s a little lower.
What’s different in Canadian and French societies that lets them incarcerate at one-seventh the US rate? For one thing, the US has more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France have none.
Could bankruptcy drive people to consider desperate solutions like crime? Could treating people better rather than driving them to bankruptcy for health problems have an influence on crime rates? Never mind Canada and France, there are several studies (here [pdf], and here, etc.) that demonstrate treating poor people better lowers crime rates.
Yet the US continues to believe desperation cures crime, not treating people well. The impulse to punish more has local support, too.
Rather than house the homeless, open local health clinics, or experiment with basic income guarantees for the poor, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors has voted to spend nearly a billion dollars enlarging the County jail.
In fairness to the County, the current jail is full, but 60 – 80 percent of the prisoners are convicted of nothing but being unable to afford bail. They’re doubly poor too, because they’ll lose whatever job they might have had if they await trial in jail.
The County avoids any discussion of supervised release, or no-cash bail. Opponents of this kinder approach might cite a neighboring (Yolo) County that had a less-than-optimum experience (more crimes, and more recidivism) when they released inmates during COVID times.
Yet Washington D.C. and the state of Illinois have adopted no-cash bail for select offenses. In fact one headline from Illinois–“Nearly 8 months into Illinois’ new era without cash bail, experts say recidivism and jail populations are trending lower”–suggests there are ways to successfully do this.
There are also ways to sabotage kinder programs.
Oregon attempted to decriminalize drugs, then repealed that measure as a failure. They tried to get police to offer the alternative–rehab–with tickets. The addicts were not impressed, to say the least, and the police didn’t handle addicts’ defiance well.
Meanwhile, incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical treatment for addiction (rehab), and has a lower success rate.
One study: “if 40 percent of offenders receive rehab vs. incarceration, it saves the system $13 billion. Choosing drug treatment leads to fewer crimes, lower addiction rates, and saves society money.”. Other countries–Portugal and Switzerland among others–have successfully decriminalized drugs.
I’d suggest our addiction to incarceration is as bad an addiction as any drug. To start to address this, perhaps what’s needed, besides a change of heart, is something like tobacco’s warning labels for crime shows. Here are a few:
Warning: This show might lead you to believe police solve all crimes. They don’t even solve half.
Warning: Believing abuse cures criminal behavior is worse than believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus.
Warning: Believing punishment cures criminal behavior is expensive and ineffective.
“DO PRISONS PREVENT CRIME?”
Short answer is YES,
Think of all the crimes that don’t get committed because people don’t want to end up in prisons.
Do prisons and jails deter criminals?
Only sometimes.
You have to look at the varied reasons people break the law. When people commit so called crimes of passion they often don’t think about the possible consequences of their actions. They are seeking retribution and vengeance for being wronged. Think of a husband that finds out his wife has been engaged in an adulterous extra-maritial affair with their neighbor or his best friend out in the open.
Many criminals don’t think they will get caught. A look at all of the data only reinforces this belief. Anecdotal evidence does not constitute a trend or broad narrative.
To top things off when you congregate scores of criminals in prisons or jails they tend to learn how to commit additional crimes and methods to evade detection.
That’s only part of the analysis.
The fear of ending up in prison has to be the biggest deterrence to anyone thinking of committing a crime.
Hands down…
Maybe. That assumes rational decision making among people suffering from trauma, poverty, abuse, mental illness and substance use disorder. It’s still only one part of the analysis, you’re intentionally ignoring the back end – which whether time in prison actually is effective at changing behavior and the failure of the system to prepare those who are released which is 95 percent of those incarcerated, for their future. There is also the fact that a large percentage of people in prison are incarcerated well past the point at which they are a danger to society. In short, there are multilayers to this that you have not considered in your comments.
What’s the title of the article?
“Do Prisons Prevent Crime”
The obvious answer is a big fat YES.
That’s why we want people to fear going there and don’t want our prisons to be country clubs.
The question is whether in aggregate they prevent crime overall and I don’t think you’ve made the case that they do.
As you haven’t made the case that they don’t.
You made the argument that prisons prevent crime because of deterrence and because of suppression but failed to cite evidence to support that conclusion, I’ve only argued that you have failed to consider other factors that in aggregate could undermine your case.
Supply evidence?
Some things are so obvious that no proof needs to be given.
And how could you prove that anyway, you would have to be able to read minds.
Really? That’s interesting.
What is the recidivism rate in the US for people who are released from prison? About between 60 to 70 percent. Given that 95 percent of incarcerated people are released, that’s rather ineffective.
But of course it turns out that there are thing we can do while people are incarcerated to drastically lower the recidivism rate.
For example, do you know that the recidivism rate is near zero for people who get college degrees while in prison?
And yet, instead of attempting to leverage these things, we make it very difficult for people released from prison to get jobs, housing and benefits. What does that lead to? More prison.
In European countires, they have explored alternative incarceration schemes where people can leave the prison to get jobs, get education, and live in things that look more like college dorms than cages. And yes, their recidivism rate and crime rates are far lower than in the US.
There are all sorts of things we can do differently here if you’re willing to explore them.
Keith, you’re under the impression that fear is the sole human motivation. It’s a powerful one, I’ll grant you, but hardly the only one. The lower crime rates that accompany lower incarceration rates in France and Canada are evidence to the contrary. There’s not nearly as much incarceration, yet crime is lower than the seven-times-higher incarceration US. How is that possible?
The studies that find crime diminishes when people are treated better also contradict your conclusion. One example not mentioned in the article: the Swiss legalized opiates, including heroin, distributing the drug at reasonable prices from (legal) clinics. Crime declined 85% around the clinics. So both fear (being busted for opiates) and crime diminished.
There are too many examples like this to take your hasty conclusion seriously.
“Supply evidence?
Some things are so obvious that no proof needs to be given.”
The new post-fact/post-evidence right wing, people.
He seems to not recognize that things are a bit more complex than “LOCK EM UP!!!!!!!!!!!” 😆🤣😂😆🤣😂
As has been demonstrated copiously, though, conservatives don’t do really well with complexity and nuance. They are overwhelmingly “this or that” “black or white” more simplistic “thinkers.”
“And yet, instead of attempting to leverage these things, we make it very difficult for people released from prison to get jobs, housing and benefits. What does that lead to? More prison.”
100%, but of course he and people like him don’t want to hear this. They want to be “tough on crime” and not offer any real rehabilitation or re-integration back into society.
They are more interested in *punishment* (another biggie with the conservative brain type, and it’s borne out in our current conservative/right wing group. “Beware of all those in whom the urge to punish is strong,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned. This drive is usually off the charts in people who align themselves with right wing/authoritarian movements.
Instead, we should be doing more to lower the recidivism rate, and there have been ample studies on how we can do that. Once someone has paid their so-called “debt to society” it shouldn’t haunt them for the rest of their lives (but it does in this country).
My little brother has gone through this for years. He hasn’t even re-offended in over 12 years, but he still gets shut out of job opportunities, rental housing, etc. b/c of the mentality Mr. O here has. We shouldn’t wonder why people re-offend under such conditions.
Good points. I was thinking about this earlier, we have been working with incarcerated people, teaching them journalism. We’ve done it long enough that roughly 20 people who we have worked with have been released on parole, and none of them have committed a new crime since they’ve been out.
Yes, there are many programs that seem to have had success in this arena. There was a recent documentary on some prisons having a dog program, where prisoners were 100% in charge of caring for a dog. Many of them fell in love with those dogs and they indicated it completely changed their lives b/c they were never asked to care for anyone or anything, and–maybe most important of all–had never *received* the love from someone else that the dog was giving them. 🙁
The “tough on crime” people would like to ignore the very real issue of how there are people who weren’t raised like many of us were (with love, support, encouragement, or even just having the basic needs met), and yet expect the same kind of behavior that the rest of us exhibit.
I think we need more programs like this. They really work. I hear Shakespeare and musicals programs in some prisons are also doing a similar job at lowering recidivism rates.
And I had a former convict show up in one of my upper division Chaucer classes I taught (there were community college programs that led to him getting out and going to UCD). He was probably 20 or so years older than most of my students and was one of the hardest working students I ever met. He attributed that to having been encouraged to take the community college programs in prison that made him want to do better.