While I sat in a dentist's chair a few days ago, having a hygienist stick pointy things into my gums and scrape god-knows-what off of my teeth, I listened to Fox News ("We Report. You Believe.") playing on the TV set my dentist has mounted on the chair. This is supposed to relax me, but I haven't noticed it working. Anyway, the segment was concerned with the fate of a woman who had killed her baby in an especially gruesome way. Fox's e-mail polls on the story indicated its viewers had no use for people like this, and were advocating dispositions ranging from a bullet in the head without the cost of a trial to incarceration in the closest thing we might have to the black hole of Calcutta.
Then, a news story we ran earlier in the week included the costs of keeping people in the correctional system: about $29,000 per year for an inmate, and between $1250 and $2750 for those on probation and parole.
And, on a similar theme, an AP story discusses how states may abandon the death penalty, not because of ethical or moral concerns, but because of cost.
The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics indicates that there were 2,258,983 people in jail or prison in 2006. There was an average 2.8% increase in that number between 2005 and 2006, so you can bet on that number being around 2.3 million people now. At $29K per inmate, that's about $67 billion spent on keeping people behind bars each year. Given the numbers we're seeing the government spend right now, it's easy to become jaded on what that represents. Translated into tangible items, that's
- 2,708,164 four-year degrees at public colleges
- 339,928 single-family homes (December 2008 median price)
- 2,263,513 fully-equipped patrol cars
- 15 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers
You get the idea. It's money best spent elsewhere.
Why do we do it?
What makes putting people behind bars such an attractive activity, worthy of funding at the expense of other things that could alleviate suffering or make a return on investment? Retribution, mostly. We want these people to suffer for what they have done. The typical American taxpayer wants these criminals locked away and treated as meanly as possible. It galls Joe the Plumber to know that prison inmates have access to education, counseling and treatment programs, television, exercise equipment, and other creature comforts. He wants the Graybar Hotel to look more like the Hanoi Hilton.
In criminology, there are five objectives to punishment:
- Retribution–revenge, pure and simple. An eye for an eye.
- Rehabilitation–this assumes the criminal is sick and can be made well. We "treat" the offender with counseling, education, job and life skills training, etc. He learns to become a useful member of society.
- Incapacitation–we don't care if the criminal suffers or not so long as he is prevented from harming anyone else. Prison is the usual solution here, but "chemical castration" has been used for sex offenders, and slave owners used to chop off a foot of chronic runaways.
- Deterrence–punishment to serve as a warning to others. This is the rationale for publishing the names of prostitution "johns" and drunk drives in the newspaper. The fear of public humiliation is supposed to prevent people from engaging in the behavior.
- Restoration–making the victim(s) whole again. This is accomplished by everything from requiring the offender to pay restitution to having them apologize to the victim.
Practicality and efficiency
None of the correctional methods presently employed are especially cost-effective in terms of pure economics. The prisoners we hold the longest are those convicted of "person" crimes such as murder and rape. These crimes have a tremendous emotional impact, and there is the cost associated with the loss of the victims' contributions to the economy. Even so, unless the prisoner is a predator type who has killed or raped repeatedly, they are relatively good recidivist risks. Only about 11% of murderers and 13% of rapists who are released from prison are returned to prison with a new sentence. For "property" crimes of various types of theft and arson, the range is from 20% to 31%, and one could argue that property crimes account for greater economic loss. By that analysis, it makes more sense to hold onto the property offenders and release more person offenders. We release half again as many property prisoners as we do person prisoners.
Imprisonment works well for incapacitation, and less so for retribution. We like the idea that convicts are held where they can't re-victimize us, but the commonly held belief is that prisons are far too nice and pleasant. I've toured a fair number of prisons and jails, both new and modern and old and crumbling. I was anxious to get out of every one. Even when the facilities are adequate and well-maintained, every movement is controlled and prisoners have little opportunity for the self-direction we take for granted. The other consistent downside is that the prisoner is caged with other prisoners, many of whom are mentally ill and/or violent, and all of whom are accomplished victimizers.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of the professional rehabilitation community, rehab is mostly a waste from a cost-benefits analysis. It would make sense to rehab programs if they worked, but they seldom do. There are rare programs that seem to be effective at steering their participants away from crime, but the longer we track those programs, the worse the results appear. A program where 40% of its graduates stay out of trouble is wildly successful when compared to the field. Rehab produces some warm and fuzzies when an inmate receives his GED, completes his twelfth step, finds God, or accepts responsibility for his actions and apologizes to his victims. There's not much evidence that it keeps convicts from resuming a life of crime.
Deterrence works very well for most people, because at some point we start considering the consequences of our actions. Career criminals often lack impulse control and consider the consequences of their actions only when they see they're about to be arrested. When they express remorse, it's not remorse over the offense–it's remorse over getting caught. No matter how many times you punish this kind of individual for that conduct, or how severely you punish him, he's going to act the next time it occurs to him that it would be to his benefit to do so.
Solutions
There are alternatives to incarceration, but they don't work well with predator types, and they're usually too underfunded or overwhelmed to work properly. Community corrections–a more trendy term for "probation and parole"–is the most accessible, but the caseloads are so large and the number of staff so small that any meaningful supervision is laughable.
Try this: a program where there are no more than ten probationers for every probation officer. It would cost $290,000 to keep those ten offenders in prison for a year, and I think we could fully fund a probation officer position for considerably less. The PO works out of his car, in the field, looking after his flock. No offender should go more than three days without speaking to the PO face to face. The PO ensures his charges stay busy–working, going to school, attending rehab, whatever it takes to make them a functioning member of society. As they acquire gainful employment, their pay goes first to the PO, who takes out a portion to pay for their school, rehab, etc., and another portion to pay restitution to the victim(s). When an offender gets tired of the program and goes over the wall, we will find waiting for him on his return a jail that makes prison segregation look cozy: an isolation cell with a mattress and a toilet, and Nutriloaf (think "Purina Human Chow") three times a day. No TV, no visitors, no books, no exercise yard–just him and the walls. He stays in there until his PO thinks he's ready for another go.
We could try even more extreme measures for predators. Violent criminals could be crippled so they were unable to use force against anyone else. Thieves and con artists could be face-tattooed so that anyone dealing with them would immediately know who and what they were. For the serial predators who are untreatable sociopaths and are doing life terms, declare them civilly dead and allow their families to go on with their lives. From there, use them for organ transplants, medical experimentation, or whatever else we would do with people we don't care about.
Before anyone starts crafting a committal order for me or shows up at my house with pitchforks and torches, know that I'm resorting to reductio ad absurdum to make my point. I don't think we should take a chapter from Dr. Josef Mengele's playbook or start thinking up creative ways to maim convicts (I do wish someone would give serious though to my probation plan, however). The point here is that we have to come to grips with the fact that we incarcerate more of our people than any country in the world. It's obscenely expensive to do so, and the only thing it seems to accomplish is to keep them away from us and partially satisfy our societal mandate for a pound of flesh.
We are also one of the few countries that still executes prisoners, and we regard most of the others that do it as harsh and oppressive. The common belief that executing prisoners is cheaper than feeding them is very, very wrong. The cost of executing a prisoner is ten times the cost of incarcerating them for life, on average, and it can't be undone. Although we haven't yet identified a person who was executed after being wrongly convicted, the number of prisoners on death row who have been freed because of new forensic methods indicates that it's bound to have happened.
It's time we get over this craving for vengeance and look for a correctional solution that works better, or at least is less expensive. Payback just costs too much.