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How Do We Feel about Incarceration?
I’m uneasy about incarceration and believe it raises some serious ethical concerns. As I understand it, we imprison a larger percentage of our population than any other country in the world, and probably any other society in history. I think of them as “the other 1%” because it’s close to 1% of our total population. It seems we should seriously consider why it is so necessary that we lock up such an enormous number of people.
For starters, I know some prosecutors and they seem like fair-minded, conscientious people. They do their jobs. My concerns mostly aren’t on that level, though it does seem that mandatory sentencing and three-strike laws have put some not-very-dangerous people away for some serious time. I have no strong feelings on whether prison is too harsh of a punishment or not harsh enough; it probably depends. One unhappy feature is the fact that forcible removal from your life will always be a much more severe blow to people who already have a life. People who have a lot to lose (jobs, families, homes) will feel it pretty cruelly. People whose lives were already utterly empty and miserable may even welcome the prospect of at least getting three squares a day. In general, incarceration will be a much harsher punishment for generally-good people than for generally-bad ones. That’s definitely non-ideal.
That’s also a factor on the level of deterrence. The threat of incarceration will do a lot more to deter already-functional people from committing crimes, but of course, they were much less likely to do so in any case.
Despite that, on the public safety front, I think incarceration been reasonably effective, and this is really why we continue to use it so heavily. There are always horror stories about bad people who are given a slap on the wrist and sent forth to rape and murder again. But the dramatic upswing in incarceration rates (which mostly happened in the ’80s and ’90s) did correspond to a significant reduction in crime. It turns out that locking up disturbed, vicious and dysfunctional people is an effective way to stop them from hurting others, and our society has a lot of messed-up people. That being the case, it seems unlikely that our inmate population will be significantly reduced in the near future, unless we decide we’re too broke to afford public safety.
I care about public safety, but my ethical concerns spring from a few considerations. First of all, I think we’re using incarceration as something of a bandage to cover up the other deficiencies of our society. For a number of reasons (the welfare state, broken family structures, high unemployment among the less-educated, etc.) we have a high proportion of broken and dysfunctional citizens in our society. Rather than face up to those problem children, we lock up them up so that nice people like me don’t have to deal with them.
And it’s quite true that I don’t want to deal with them, certainly not as a threat to my family’s safety. I’m not naive about how bad those people can be, nor am I suggesting that criminals don’t deserve to be punished. They do. In fact, they need to be punished, for their own good as well as society’s. But it’s also the case that our wider social failures are creating a much larger class of “likely inmates” than we really should have. Any sociologist could look at a printout of basic statistics on every newborn in the maternity ward (or, more accurately, on that child’s parents and home situation) and give you decent odds as to whether or not that kid will end up in jail. Figuring out how to lower those odds is a lot tougher than just building more prisons, so we’ve been lazy by relying on the latter.
Of course, the final problem with prisons is that they do a poor job on the rehabilitation front. We call them “correctional facilities” but our recidivism rates would suggest that they don’t do as much correction as we might hope.
It’s not so much that we don’t try at all. We offer psychiatric treatments, educational programs and vocational training. That’s all good, but in a lot of ways, incarceration is poorly suited to rehabilitating people. One of its most significant effects is to erode people’s ties with their natural communities (such as families and friends) and diminish their capacity to function as responsible individuals in a free society. In a limited number of cases, that “break” with the old life might be a good thing, if the circumstances were sufficiently awful. But prison obviously isn’t doing a great job habituating people to be thriving citizens after they come out (which, let’s remember, the overwhelming majority eventually do). The “inmate class” is itself an American demographic now, from which some people can never fully escape, no matter what the parole board might rule.
It is also probably true that within prison itself, the goal of rehabilitation takes a pretty distant second to the goal of “managing” inmate populations. It’s hard to blame anybody for this; quite obviously, ensuring safety within prisons (both for guards and other inmates) is a challenge. It’s chilling to read, for example, how liberally we use solitary confinement to keep possibly-dangerous people from posing a threat to anyone. I’m pretty open to the suggestion that extended solitary confinement is significantly crueler than capital punishment. A non-trivial number of Americans have spent years locked in isolated cells with almost no human contact. That bothers me. What we’re basically saying is that we’re uncomfortable with the state killing dangerous people, so instead we’ll just ensure that their lives are as empty and devoid of meaning as a human existence could possibly be.
On some level it’s probably fair to say that we rely on incarceration because 1) we want bad people off the streets, and 2) we’re too squeamish for any other “serious” punishment. The first reason is compelling, but speaks to larger social problems that should concern us deeply; the second reason just isn’t very good at all. And without suggesting that we should abolish prisons entirely (which would be going too far) I at least think we should ask ourselves: if locking millions of people up seems to us like an unavoidable necessity (which it hasn’t been for any other human society ever), what does that say about our civilization?
Published in General
In order for corporal punishment to be effective, it must be administered publicly because the component of shame plays such a massive role in its deterrent effect–not only to the one receiving the punishment, but to others.
The administration of such punishment, furthermore, requires the employ of some rather unsavory characters.
One must have to stomach to tolerate such things. Indiscriminate compassion is incompatible with corporal punishment, as is the facile certitude that all men learn in the same fashion–or that, say, words alone are sufficient for governance.
I agree with this. I think in the long run our society will be judged not only by what we tolerate, but what we don’t tolerate. There are certain crimes that are so heinous that they must not be tolerated. That is why I have no problem with a death penalty as long as it is judicially safe-guarded.
The most important factor is the protection of the vulnerable. By that I don’t mean the criminals but the victims of crime. We expend a lot more angst for the criminals than we do for the victims. And the victims are by and large much more likely to be poor and vulnerable. These are the people we, as a society, must protect.
No politician ever lost an election by promising to be tougher on crime.
IF the judiciary had done its job in the first place, then the other two branches would not have had to correct (or over-correct, if you will) in the second place.
Everytime the public gets the idea that a major area of their civic life has eroded they turn to the politicians to fix it. Hate standardized testing in schools? Had the education establishment done its job in the first place, then the pols would not of seen the opportunity to seize on the issue.
They’re largely the same people. Very substantial overlap anyway. Most criminals have been victims at an earlier point, and a huge percentage of victims have been criminals. Young black men are murdering each other at an appalling rate in this country right now.
The main reason to lock someone up is to get them off the streets, so others can have normal functional lives. The absolute best thing that society can do for the poor is to make their neighborhoods safe so they can go to school, work, and through their daily lives without being victimized by criminals. This has to happen before you can deal with the other “deficiencies of our society” that you mentioned. Did you ever think that maybe the best way to reduce the number of people in prison in the long term is to increase the number of people in prison in the short term? A neighborhood full of criminals will result in more kids becoming criminals. Conversely, getting the criminals off the streets will result in more kids becoming honest productive adults.
My opinion on this stems from my experience as a correctional officer at a maximum security unit for the criminally insane. First, let me say thank God for prisons. There are some very bad people out there who need to be locked away for the safety of everyone. Having said that, many of the people I met did not need to be in prison. Many were not guilty of the crimes for which they were convict, although they were not innocent of other things. Many were there because they’d be turned out of mental institutions in a misguided effort to mainstream people who simply could not cope with normal society. These people were on a never ending cycle of release, legal problems, then incarceration simply because they couldn’t cope in a normal world. As for treatment, what treatment they received was ludicrous. Treatment providers with no idea patient reality would come in once a week and gobble at the prisoners, who had no earthly idea what the “doctors” were talking about.
In my opinion, many people need to be in prison. Many who are in prison shouldn’t be there at all. Farming prisons out to corporations is obscene. If the state determines someone needs to be incarcerated they should be doing the job themselves.
Corporal punishment is a great idea for folks like drunk drivers. Capital punishment is a great idea for repeat drunk drivers. I’m a great believer in capital punishment, it reduces recidivism to zero. The American legal system is insane. Some places one joint can get you more prison time than murder. Most prisons should be located in the center of town so the prisoners and guards are under the constant scrutiny of the local population, so that people are not warehoused and forgotten and the guards don’t get away with murder. I could talk all day about this and still not make any sense, every example I saw was a different discussion and no hard and fast rule applied to every situation. But the difference between academic discussion of prison and the reality of prison are incredibly different things.
What we’ve got, in our prisons, is a failure to communicate.
Thanks for commenting here.
“But the difference between academic discussion of prison and the reality of prison are incredibly different things.”
I’m sure you’re right, but how would one get more perspective on the situation? Without either getting a job as a guard or actually going to prison? Academic discussion has its limits to be sure, but it’s usually a necessary component of any kind of reform.
Visit a prison. Go with a chaplain and help with service once or twice. It will give you some insight you wouldn’t ordinarily have. That is one reason I’m in favor of prisons being in towns, so people won’t forget.
I saw that movie for the first time recently.
What struck me the most about it was that the prison farm didn’t seem that bad at all, as it was depicted. Newman’s character has a hard time because he refuses to get with the program. For the other inmates, there were no beatings, no gangs, no prison rape, etc.
Read Theodore Dalrymple who served as a prison psychologist for years; I would especially recommend Our Culture, What’s Left Of It.
Or one could join me “on the ice” at my nephew’s hockey games in LA as I always sit next to the parents of the team captain; the father is a veteran prison guard at LAC. Whoa baby … now that’s been an education and I’m certain you’d agree Robert E.
Oh, my.
I have two thoughts on this topic. One of them needs to be written about on its own, and I will attempt to do so at some time. The other thought is, quite simply, that you might feel a little differently if you really get an insider’s view of the criminal world. Maybe I’m just a bit cynical, and maybe my views on the first topic (not yet written) tend to dictate my conclusions from the second… so I guess I’ll leave it at that.
Interestingly, I had a criminal law professor who wrote an article about retributive justice, working from a biblical perspective (no, that was NOT the focus of the class, for goodness sake). It was fascinating, and the more I experience it, the more I know he was right.
whoo boy, I second that.
I have to agree with Amy that mental health issues in prison are a huge problem, but disagree that the problem is kids who were exposed to drug use during their mom’s pregnancy. The problem with these kids is that they grow up in chaotic, households where illegal activities take place, often with only the drug using mother as a parent. The results tend to be similar whether the woman used during pregnancy or not. That holds for stimulant meds (crack/meth) for drug use of system depressants (heroin/alcohol/barbituates) there is a different set of effects that can results in a very different set of problems (e.g., cognitive) but not necesssarily jail time.
Every male inmate, or almost all of them, discounting perhaps some gang members and old folks, gets raped. This is no way to rehabilitate anyone. I don’t know how to stop this, but it should be stopped. Maybe smaller prisons?
And why is it we don’t demand some form of restitution for the victims of their crimes? Maybe if we put these guys to work, and paid their earnings to the victims or their families?
Note I didn’t claim in utero drug abuse to be the sole problem, but to ignore it is not only naïve, but harmful, as it is critical that American society assess the damage created by the financial subsidization of physical and biological pathologies. Let’s address this issue and then move forward to religious moralizing. First things first.
So I did a little reading on the interwebs. In 2011 when computing the rate of crime, the US comes in #22 at or about 66% of the High Income OECD countries. (shown here)
The UK (110/1000) has almost triple the crime as the US (42/1000). The rest of the countries we like to compare ourselves to are no better (Iceland 5X, Sweden 3X, NZ is the same as UK, Canada almost 2X).
There is an interesting relationship when looking at crime stats. The more corrupt the country, the lower the official crime stats – largely due to a poor interaction (or trust) between police and population.
Does anyone really think Russia and Zimbabwe have lower actual (as opposed to reported) rates of crime than the US?
I actually prefer our lower crime rate. Maybe the rest of the world values criminals more than victims?
(edited for better argument construction)
My apologies; my original comment re-posted!