Matt Yglesias

Prisons and Mental Institutions Revisited

I pointed to the provocative chart below a few days ago and was intrigued by the thesis that the prison boom has basically been the flipside of the 60s-era decline in institutionalization of the mentally ill:

Mark Kleiman does it buy it and argues, convincingly in my view, that “the demographics aren’t right.”

As Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll point out in Do Prisons Make Us Safer? (just published), mental-hospital patients tended to be white, female, and elderly, while prisoners are disproportionately black, male, and young.

Certainly, the jails have borne some of the brunt of de-institutionalization; the Los Angeles County jail has been described as the largest mental hospital in the nation. But Raphael and Stoll compute that fewer than 130,000 of the nation’s 2.3 million prison and jail inmates are the products of de-institutionalization; that’s about 10% of the growth in the system.

Yes, it’s important to provide better mental-health services to criminal-justice clients, and doing so will tend to reduce prison and jail headcounts. But de-institutionalization is not among the major sources of mass incarceration. That policy had costs, some of them due to the failure to replace asylum care with good community-based care. Those costs fell on the criminal justice system, on the neighborhoods disturbed by disturbing behavior, and on those released, many of whom wound up on the streets or in homeless shelters.

But surely the civil libertarians got the bigger question right: locking people up for acting crazy is a pretty rotten thing to do, and I’m glad we mostly don’t do it anymore. There’s a revisionist tendency to add de-institutionalization to high-rise public housing on the liberal-good-intentions-gone-awry list. It should be resisted. And the notion that the current level of incarceration is somehow historically normal needs to have stake driven through its heart.

That sounds good to me.

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.

Too Much Prison

Ben Trachtenberg has a smart item in the ABA Journal about the horrible waste of resources represented by our current mass incarceration policies. Throwing people in jail is a vital element of crime control policy, but it’s very expensive in terms of direct expenditures and has tons of indirect costs as well. We need to be relying on it in a much more targeted way, and putting more resources into alternative forms of punishment and more and better policing.

Prison Currency

As everyone knows, in prison you use cigarettes as a medium of exchange. Except in 2004, federal prisons banned smoking. Ergo, they banned cigarettes. Ergo, you need a new medium of exchange. Thus, via Alex Tabarrok, the rise of the mackerel:

Mr. Muntz says he sold more than $1 million of mackerel for federal prison commissaries last year. It accounted for about half his commissary sales, he says, outstripping the canned tuna, crab, chicken and oysters he offers.

Unlike those more expensive delicacies, former prisoners say, the mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few — other than weight-lifters craving protein — want to eat it.

I can think of some good reasons for the rule preventing prisoners from holding cash (”Money they get from prison jobs . . . or family members goes into commissary accounts that let them buy things such as food and toiletries”) but the mackerel situation seems a bit absurd. It seems to me that the prison system ought to create an in-house currency like Disney Dollars or chips at a casino for prisoners to use as a medium of exchange.