More Punishment, Less Prison
Reader RR writes “Could Matt (or anyone) give some examples of ‘alternative forms of punishment’ that effectively keep criminals off the street and don’t violate the 8th amendment?” I suppose there’s always exile to Australia. But for keeping people off the street, there’s no serious alternative to prison. Even unconstitutional forms of corporal punishment leave people on the street. But nevertheless, we already make plenty of use of criminal sanctions other than prison—parole and probation. The problem is that while prison is costly and inhumane, parole and probation as currently practiced just don’t accomplish much. But prison is much more expensive. Investing resources in building better models of parole—coerced abstinence, for example—would let us get more bang for our sanctioning buck and free up resources for use in other areas.
54 Responses to “More Punishment, Less Prison”
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January 28th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I think there is a serious and rather obvious alternative to locking people up if you want to keep them off the street. It seems to me that building a huge complex with barbed wire and paying a bunch of big guys with guns to stand around is probably more expensive than slapping an ankle bracelet with electronic monitoring device on someone and paying one small guy to sit behind a panel in a control booth. But I could be wrong.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Mark Kleiman has written a lot on improved probation programs.
See H.O.P.E. for Reform in the American Prospect.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
“I suppose there’s always exile to Australia.”
The eight amendment to the constitution expressly forbids this type of cruelty.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
The eight amendment to the constitution expressly forbids this type of cruelty.
I read the post and I clicked the “Comments” link with the intention of writing precisely that. Alas, I was too slow.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Matt arbitrarily combines morality and financial cost to come up with some abstract idea of what is to costly. I suppose prisons will never be cost effective based on what Matt finds inhumane but for the rest of America, who only really care about the financial cost, please tell us why prisons aren’t worth the cost?
I know a prisoner costs about 30k per year. How much would they cost society under your liberal fantasy program? And aren’t liberals just being disingenuous when they talk about prison cost? We all know that if conservatives had their way prisons would cost a lot less.
If you want to convince Americans on prison reform at least provide a little evidence.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
I have an idea! Let’s legalize marijuana, which will overnight remove MILLIONS of criminals from the street. Their punishment will be the natural consequences of their choice in intoxicants, whether that be loss of job, spouse, or general sloth.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
“Coerced abstinence” as Kleiman describes it is a great idea, but isn’t really properly thought of as an alternative to incarceration or a response to the question posed, since few people are incarcerated for incidents of drug use alone (and since Kleiman’s proposal actually requires users to be incarcerated immediately as a sanction for using the drug).
To the extent that a coerced absitence program reduced the overall size of the drug market, and its attendant social problems, you could see a decline in the crime rate that was reflected in the incarceration rate — but that’s really just a way of saying that if we have less crime, we have fewer prisoners, which I think is a different point than the one Matt was trying to make.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Costs vary per state.
But let’s just accept Gordon’s figure for fun. How many prisoners are in the U.S.? 2.3 million. How much is that per year? $69 billion.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
@gordon gekko
Matt was talking about systemic or societal costs of prison, not the price per prisoner. The US leads the world in the percentage of its own population who are incarcerated, more than China, more than Iran, more than Cuba. Consequently, we spend a much greater percentage of our GDP on prisons than any country in the world.
Why? Are Americans the most lawless and least-moral society on earth? Is the US government the most repressive? I think the answer to those questions is no. Rather, we spend so much of our GDP on prisons because we view incarceration as a suitable punishment for almost any crime (even “victimless” crimes) and public opinion in the US almost always supports longer rather than shorter sentences for anyone convicted of a crime.
Is there some alternative punishment for the many prisoners who are not threats to the public safety?
January 28th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
The problem with “Reader RR’s” challenge is that it begs the question. As Matt says, there aren’t many practical ways of keeping criminals off the streets except prison. But why do non-violent minor criminals need to be “kept off the streets”? There are lots of other sanctions, including ones other than Matt mentions: not only parole and probation, but also (for example) fines and community service. The weird thing about the United States is that we have collectively decided that lots of people who commit minor crimes need to be “kept off the streets” at vast public expense, whereas in every other democratic country people who commit EXACTLY THE SAME CRIMES are punished WITHOUT being kept off the streets, with no apparent ill effects on public order and with huge savings to public finances.
I am not sure why adopting a program which is (a) vastly cheaper and (b) equally effective at preventing crime should be seen as “liberal”. To me it sounds sensibly conservative, especially if one associates conservatism with fiscal responsibility (admittedly, the Bush presidency has rather weakened that association, but the idea is still out there).
January 28th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
“since few people are incarcerated for incidents of drug use alone”
What? Actually, half the people in any jail are there on drug or alcohol use alone. I’ve been in jail quite a lot. And it’s always been drugs or alcohol. I’ve never even committed any other crimes, much less been busted for them. I’m willing to accept that “half” might be equivalent to “few”, but you need to explicitly state that you are offering a new definition for a word.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
In California prisons, only 11% of the incarcerated population was convicted for ANY drug offense, including dealing at all levels. I believe that California’s population is higher than that of most states — in the federal system, 5% or less of the inmates are there on drug possession charges, and because of prosecutorial discretion, these are generally not people who did nothing besides possess drugs. In CA, every first time drug possession convict is already offered out-of-prison treatment.
Jails, of course, are different than prisons.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
“Their punishment will be the natural consequences of their choice in intoxicants, whether that be loss of job, spouse, or general sloth”
Either that, or being a successful businessman like me. Alcohol does fuck with my work ethic, but it’s also a requirement in my business. I need to get doctors drunk and take them to strip clubs. But pot is my own thing. It makes doing CAD work a whole lot more fun. And it doesn’t mess with my accuracy. I have a reputation for being unusually precise and clear in the work I do. I can’t say the pot helps me, but it surely doesn’t hurt. The alcohol surely does.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
First, thanks to Matt for responding to my post and question.
The basic idea underlying Matt’s response seems to be that, since many crimes punished are victimless, keeping them off the street isn’t really paramount as it is with more serious felonies.
In essence, an argument against the drug war* — and a good one to be sure! But it seems to make an entirely different point than what I initially read in Matt’s prior post that incarceration is a poor (economically inefficient, etc.) punishment that needs serious alternatives.
But then maybe I’m misreading him. So to Matt (and anyone else):
Does incarceration remain the best punishment for criminals who actually have victims, or are alternatives necessary for them as well?
* and our society’s approach to victimless crimes in general
January 28th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
We have a problem in the US in that we tend to want to put every one in prison. We need to be rational and determine who we are “afraid” of and who we are “mad” at. And then only incarcerate those that we are afraid of.
Prison should be the place for the people we are afraid of.
New systems and penalties need to be provided for those we are mad at. The idea that we are well served by putting poor single working moms in prison for not having auto insurance is nonsense. As is incarcerating marijuana users.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Prison business is big business, it’s also a revenue transfer from urban centers to rural areas that are home to most prisons.
CA had a chance to release the non-violent prisoners last year but the prison lobby killed that budget proposal last year.
$40,000 grand per year to warehouse a human, $12,000 to educate or train them for a real job in their neighborhood.
Money does not talk, it swears.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Increasing the amount of total punishment given is not a good idea unless the american people are currently underpunished. I don’t think that is true.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
“Jails, of course, are different than prisons.”
Yes they are. I’ve met people who got sent back from state prison to county jail so they could learn to readjust. Those people are crazy and probably shouldn’t get out at all. But they do get out. The one thing I’ve learned is that you will get less punishment if you commit a felony than commit a misdemeanor. And that sucks. I don’t want to rape someone, I just want to smoke pot. But if I raped someone, I’d get a lesser sentence. That’s what makes the Drug War so dangerous. If I just shot the cop busting me, I’d only face a murder charge. If I let him bust me, I face the more serious drug charges. Ever wonder why people shoot cops?
January 28th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
People are indeed incarcerated for drug use alone — or for violating parole by failing a blood test after having been incarcerated for drug or alcohol use. I personally have heard of or know of several such cases. These people are by no means dangerous criminals. In some cases they are the mothers of babies and toddlers.
Nowadays such people, after they are freed, are required to re-emburse the prison for the cost of their incarceration. Many many young people across the country are falling into this abyss of debt and jail, which affects their whole families, who often also become liable, no matter how meager their incomes or how elderly they are, in the event the young former prisoner is unable to pay. It is truly Dickensian, or worse than Dickensian. This is happening to the formerly “middle class.”
January 28th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Yes, because sentences for pot possession are so much higher than those for rape or murder. Huh?
January 28th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Given that Wall Street Executives and Bankers have buttfucked the People of this country to the tune of $TRillions of dollars
– and given that our former President, his subordinates and several members of the American Bar Assocation have wiped their asses on the Bill of Rights –
I would suggest that the problem is NOT HOW we incarcerate people but the fact that we’re obviously incarcerating the WRONG people.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
OrganicGeorge is the first to bring up the prison/industrial complex (at least in this follow-up post/thread). This part of the equation cannot be ignored. Some people are making a LOT of money in the incarceration biz.
If the number of people incarcerated for drug use in this country is above zero, that number is far too high. Drug abuse is a medical problem, not a criminal one. And I’m not at all sure “coerced” treatment for them is any more appropriate than coerced treatment for any other non-communicable disease.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
James Elliot,
Your big numbers don’t scare me. What I would like to see is more of this. Even if it comes from a liberal (i.e. reliable) source.
In Vancouver (land of the safe injection sites) the average drug addict needs $700,000 a year of stolen goods to feed his drug habit. Most of that comes from car theft.
Surely you would agree that prisons (or some other form of incarceration) would be a cost effective solution? If you can find some even cheaper/more humane option, fine, but at least demonstrate its effectiveness.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
I’m sure anyone from California has a story or two about someone getting sentenced under the three strikes law for pretty ridiculous things. I remember my brother (a lawyer) telling me about a guy who stole a bicycle out of a garage (the garage door was open), but since it was an attached garage, legally, he broke into the house making the theft a felony. It was his third strike, so that bicycle theft got him sent away for a long long time. (I don’t recall what the first two offenses were in that case). Maybe the law has been fixed since then, but its yet another example of silly reasons we send people to prison for a long long time.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Wake County Sheriff’s Office operates the jails in the capital county of North Carolina. In 2004, according to the WCSO’s website, some 28,000 people were admitted into the jail system. Obviously a good number of admissions were the same people multiple times during the year.
But all of those people were pre-trial detainees. Some stay a day, many stay for months. The average cost is something like $33,000.
The State bail law basically establishes a hierarchy: people should be presumptively ROR’d, then released on a promise of another party (a parent, relative), then released as part of pre-trial monitoring program, then, if there’s a risk of flight or danger, detained on as low a bail necessary to ensure appearance at court.
What happens? Presumptive detention on a bail that most people cannot make. Then you sit in jail for 3-4 on low level felonies (I’m talking, here, low level drug possession cases) until you get a hearing and take a plea that allows you release into some kind of program that does not work… two more of those, and you’re a HABITUAL FELON, and you’re doing real time.
Any-hoo, you can see how such a system is incredibly inefficient and expensive. Multiply that by 100 counties in NC, and 50 states, and you start talking real money to detain the unconvicted.
The vast vast majority of people show up for court dates, although we don’t know exactly about the people who are detained. But I suspect, from experience, that they’re no different and would show up too.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Gordont: In Vancouver (land of the safe injection sites) the average drug addict needs $700,000 a year of stolen goods to feed his drug habit. Most of that comes from car theft.
Surely you would agree that prisons (or some other form of incarceration) would be a cost effective solution? If you can find some even cheaper/more humane option, fine, but at least demonstrate its effectiveness.
What drug could possibly cost anywhere near $70,000 to produce an annual dose? Want to eliminate car theft by junkies? Lower the price of their drugs.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
“Yes, because sentences for pot possession are so much higher than those for rape or murder. Huh?”
A murderer typically spends about ten years in jail here in Colorado. If you get busted with a few pounds of pot, you’ll spend twenty years in jail. So if you’re getting busted for more than a pound, shoot the cop and ditch the weed. That will actually reduce your jail time.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Oh Jer, so naive. Don’t you know anything about Canada. The RCMP already does this to a large extent by not excessively targeting the supply of drugs. The reason why the druggies need to steal so much is because they only receive a small fraction of the amount they steal.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
“What drug could possibly cost anywhere near $70,000 to produce an annual dose?”
Cocaine. And that goes for your $70,000 or the original $700,000. My brother spent $500K a year when he was a real junkie. But he spent it on cheap drugs like heroin and methamphetamine. Cocaine cost a lot more because the high lasts so much shorter.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Drugs are expensive because they’re illegal.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
fostert: “Cocaine. And that goes for your $70,000 or the original $700,000. My brother spent $500K a year when he was a real junkie.”
But that’s the sale price, not the production cost. I can’t imagine that cocaine, were it as mass produced as any other generic OTC drug, would cost more to produce than Tylenol. Same with heroin, pot, & meth. The street price is driven up by distribution costs, not production costs.
gordon: ” The RCMP already does this to a large extent by not excessively targeting the supply of drugs. The reason why the druggies need to steal so much is because they only receive a small fraction of the amount they steal.”
No, the reason druggies need to steal so much is that they have a $70,000 habit. If their habit cost 10x less, they’d need to steal 10x fewer cars. (Assuming no threshold at which they could support their habit under “normal” means.)
January 28th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
If an average junkie has to steel 100 cars per year to “feed his habit”, this kind of limits the population of junkies to a small fraction of 1% of the population. Public transit seems a solution.
Also, since cars are rarely microscopic, one can eliminate car theft using relatively simple means, like chips that allow to track them. Or monitoring the content of junkyards, especially, the emergence of new junkyards which can be the evidence of chop-shop activity. Or monitoring the trade in used car parts. Now, if the cars can be smuggled across a border of a lawless state, then car theft becomes an industry, dominated by large organizations. It may be also associated with insurance fraud — you can arranged for your car to be stolen. Eurasia offers such possibilities.
We had a person helping us in the garden who told us the sad tale how he made the living in “the old country”. He was actually a gardener in Kazakhstan. Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, he had to find some other occupation, and for a while, he was riding cars stolen in Germany to Kazakhstan. “Then mafia came and bussiness caput”. He managed to successfully claim religious prosecution and came to North America.
North America clearly does not have problems of Eurasia, where you can load your 18-wheeler in Afghanistan and more or less drive continuously West, paying several thousand dollars on each border crossing. Unless the competition will gun you down with automatic weapons. Everything seems bigger over there.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
“I can’t imagine that cocaine, were it as mass produced as any other generic OTC drug, would cost more to produce than Tylenol.”
Really? Well cocaine has a major ingredient that’s fairly expensive and of limited supply. Now you might think that making it legal would expand the production capacity, but not really. The high price of cocaine has already maximized production. What’s really interesting here is the question of whether Tylenol or cocaine is produced on a larger scale. Both are certainly huge products, but I’m guessing cocaine is the bigger one. This is certainly true on a gram for gram basis. But dose for dose? I think it’s pretty close. But I’ll still go with cocaine. Only because the effects don’t last long with cocaine. You always need another bump. The extra bump creates quite a demand.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I think we should also look at why it’s so expensive to jail people. I understand why it costs a zillion dollars a year to put someone in Florence or state-level Big Houses, but if there’s broad agreement that most criminals represent negligible threats of violence, why don’t we have a lowest tier of jails with internal freedom of movement, only token security on the perimeter, and the threat of genuine hard time elsewhere as the effective sanction? If we’re talking about people so relatively innocuous that we’re debating whether to use parole, community service, or the actual reclassification of their conduct out of the criminal realm altogether, surely there’s a less-restrictive and MUCH less expensive way to incarcerate them for modest periods/
January 28th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
1. Home Confinement
2. Hospitalization
3. Commitment to a halfway house
4. Something on the three dimensional continuum of 1, 2, and 3.
or
5. Supervised Community Service (during the hours of supervision the offender is not re-offending)
6. Unsupervised Community Service (ok, this is less reliable)
January 29th, 2009 at 12:54 am
I wish I could find the citation for this, but I remember some research that I read for a class that the most effective way to deter crimes is by catching criminal frequently. The actual level of punishment didn’t have much effect. Meaning that fines for a lot of things worked as well as probation or jail time in reducing criminal behavior.
The key is making sure that you can catch offenders frequently enough to actually have an effect. This would require more police, which would be a better way to spend money than sending a person to prison.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Getting off of the subject of drugs (well, mostly), I think a sensible punishment for killing a bicyclist while committing *any* traffic violation should not be jail, but lifelong revocation of one’s driving privileges. But rather than just leave it there, the violator also receives, free of charge, a decent commuter bike (with accompanying helmet, lights, lock, and even a rack on the back tire) and must attend a workshop on safely riding a bike.
January 29th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Well, what portion of the US felony population are non-US citizens (and not necessarily illegal aliens, but legal immigrants and other visa-holders too)? The power to deport those convicted of “aggravated felonies” is so broad that sometimes long-tieme green card holders convicted of misdemeanors are permanently barred from the country– that’s over the top. But if the list of aggravated felonies crimes is tightened up and applied consistently, then ICE could and should bounce them.
To take things to the next level, the DOJ Office of Special Counsel kept itself busy for years deporting suspected Nazi war criminals who were naturalized US citizens. False answers on your naturalization application is grounds for the courts to strip you of citizenship. Since real life Nazis (as opposed to Hollywood depictions thereof) are rather thin on the ground in the 21 Century, well there are a lot of organized crime members who are naturalized citizens and the application has a LOT of questions. If they’re convicted of an aggravated felony, go through their app like those health insurance clerks in Sicko and if they have a wrong answer… bounce them.
No I wouldn’t go there, in fact I didn’t think it was cool to strip US citizenship from war criminals. Extradite them to face charges sure. Give them a trial and if convicted, sentence them to prison or even the gallows. Heck, if nothing else, its a 10 year prison sentence for lying on a government form– convict them of that. If you have the evidence, what difference does it make what passport they hold now? And if you don’t have the evidence to convict, its a shabby business to yank someone’s citizenship.
January 29th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Oops, its the DOJ Office of Special Investigations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._DOJ_Office_of_Special_Investigations
January 29th, 2009 at 9:29 am
In the city where I work, we hear criminals asking for jail (county jail, not state prison) rather than probation. Because our probation officers are good and are able to harass the hell out of criminals, I guess they’d rather be left alone in jail.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Re Kyle in 37: “Getting off of the subject of drugs (well, mostly), I think a sensible punishment for killing a bicyclist while committing *any* traffic violation should not be jail, but lifelong revocation of one’s driving privileges.”
———————
Whereas I think a $25 fine –for littering– would be sufficient punishment in this case.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Does it not occur to this reader that perhaps the best thing to do would be to invest in education. States it seems spends more money on prisons than children’s education. More social services and better education system would decrease prison populations. In addition, over half of prisoners are in jail for non violent drug offenses. If they were put in treatment programs instead of prison it would help to reduce recidivism.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Oops, the following comment was posted the Too Much Prison blog, when I meant it to be here on More Punishment, Less Prison. My apologies.
# randy pepin Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Time should not be the driving force in determining the effectiveness of incarceration on one who has committed a crime or crimes. The issue is , what is being done with the time? America loves what is mistakenly referred to as Retributive Justice. Retribution is designed to crush, period, and is not justice. George Carlin would put that phrase in with other non sequitur’s like jumbo shrimp. Restorative Justice is not an either/or alternative, it is a comprehensive package of punishment and remolding.
Education, job skill training, and mental health therapy is essential for inmates, as they will all come out. We need for them to be Better People when they do. Restorative Justice would take incarceration time to address mental health issues first. A program like Moral Reconation Therapy is just the ticket. It is a cognitive behavioral therapy program designed for those in lock up to be reeducated “… socially,morally, and behaviorally, to instill appropriate goals, motivations, and values.”(ccimrt@aol.com) The next step is education and job training.
Employment, when in the process of reentry, is that which enables an ex-offender to obtain housing, and transportation, and to pay fines. In the process they [hopefully] become law abiding citizens, paying taxes, thus reducing recidivism and creating a real drop in crime rates. Without additional education and job training, beyond what they had before being locked up, the possibility of employment for an ex-offender is just about nil. They go back to crime as a means of ’self employment’.
Within the Restorative Justice process, there are mediation components. Inmates who choose to be a participant in such a process, can engage in one of two ways. A person who has been victimized in a particular way, like say armed robbery, can speak to a group of inmates who have committed similar crimes and tell the inmates how that crime affected them, the victim. This is done in a mental health group therapy type setting, and is strictly controlled. It is probably the first time an inmate has come face to face with the harm they have done to others.
The other setting is when a victim or victims’ family member confronts the actual perp. Such a setting takes rigorous preparation for both parties; the perp must be silent unless allowed to speak by the victim, and everything is directed by a professionally trained mediator.
Lastly, the community is involved when an ex-offender is released, not just probation and parole. And so, R.R., there is your alternative.
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