Against prisons (Eileen Baldry)
July 3rd 2007 12:24
Basically, this was a conversation about prisons (with copious input from the audience, which included a number of correctional officers).
Check out the previous post for some general stats on crime in Australia and NSW.
***
* So the idea was that the prison system should be reformed in various ways (and note that Baldry wasn't arguing that prisons should be abandoned completely).
* She began by observing that the prison population is rising (across Australia, 50% over the last decade; across NSW, 27%), while crime per capita seems to be falling. More people are being imprisoned and for longer. Baldry didn't draw an explicit conclusion from these stats, but perhaps the implication was that the increase in imprisonment is unnecessary -- disproportionate to the prevalence of crime.
* (Could the opposite conclusion have been drawn? -- that crime rates are mostly falling because of the rise in imprisonment?)
* The main argument for prison reform was an undercutting of the traditional four justifications for punishment: deterrence, rehabilitation, prevention, retribution.
* (Personally I find these hard to conceptually separate. If crime rates go down, is that a prevention effect or is it a deterrence effect? And if people commit no future crimes, is that deterrence or is that rehabilitation? Etc. But anyway...)
* Deterrence: Well, does imprisonment in fact deter? There’s a high rate of recidivism. If you look at the number of people who are back in prison within two years of being released, it's 40% in NSW. If you look at the number of current inmates who've ever been incarcerated before, it's 70% in NSW (some measures take it up to 80%). Across Australia it's 65%.
-- (1) a police policy ("differential policing") of targeting ex-prisoners (along with Aboriginals and youths. I didn't quite follow the argument here, but the claim might be: (i) perhaps you've been to some extent deterred -- for instance, you commit fewer crimes or less serious crimes -- but you're more likely to be caught and re-imprisoned because police are keeping a closer watch and hold you to a higher standard of behaviour; (ii) extra policing can sometimes cause the new offence. For instance, if police harrass you, and you respond, they might be able to charge you with the "trifecta" -- offensive behaviour, resist arrest, and assault police);
-- (2) the offence that's grown most over the last 10 years is the offence "against good order", which includes breach of court orders or parole (and you might not want to consider this a new offence per se);
-- (3) people are sometimes picked up on old warrants after release (in 2006, people who were in prison "on remand", awaiting trial -- perhaps because they couldn't afford bail, or lacked secure accomodation -- amounted to more than 22% of the prison population. The majority of prisoners on remand are not given prison sentences).
* But even taking such factors into account, one should conclude, said Baldry, that there's little real deterrent effect. And, in fact, the idea of deterrence comes out of an unrealistic view about rational choice -- that prior to committing a crime you sit down and think about being caught, and weigh up the pros and cons, or remember how awful prison was when you were there before. Such a view ignores crimes of the moment, and a host of other causal factors -- drugs, poverty, mental illness, general life chaos.
* (Note that Baldry here talks about prison deterring offenders from committing new crimes. But what a prison system is also supposed to do is deter people from committing any crimes in the first place. And presumably this effect has some efficacy, though I imagine it's difficult to get any data measuring it -- for how could you measure crimes that people would have committed, but didn’t?
A friend of mine, AM, mentions cases where police have gone on strike, and law and order break down, but I don't know if one can draw general conclusions from these...)
* As another example of failure to deter, some guy from the Bureau of Crime Statistics mentioned that, in a lot of cases, if you double a fine penalty (for a traffic offence, perhaps), this has no real effect.
* Prevention: Ie, actually keeping people off the street and thereby stopping them from committing crimes. Does this work?
Well, Baldry claims that yes it does; and she believes that there are some people who ought to be locked up for life. But if you’re talking about reducing the rates of crime across a community, then imprisonment hasn’t been shown to have real effect. There are exceptions -- for instance, crime rates go down if you lock up a big drug dealer -- but, in general, to achieve a significant reduction (how significant?), you’d need to lock up a large chunk of the population for a lengthy period.
* (I didn't quite follow this argument. But presumably the claim is something like: if you alter the law and change the penalty from community service to imprisonment, this doesn't really make any difference, unless you do a Mussolini and lock up half of Sicily.
Why? Well, one factor might be that prisons can cause crime. For instance:
-- you might have been marginalised before, but you're going to be plenty marginalised afterwards -- you're further isolated from family and community, further alienated from society; you'll leave prison traumatised and angry;
-- prisons can increase disadvantage (for instance, in terms of employment prospects);
-- they exacerbate mental illness (a prison is the opposite of a theraupeutic environment -- you become more depressed and paranoid, and there's a high rate of suicide and self-harm among inmates and ex-inmates, especially women);
-- they can have various damaging effects on the community. Eg, imprisonment will probably result in the break up of the family; and the children of prisoners are six times more likely to wind up in prison themselves.)
-- (1) to begin a reasonable program, you need to be incarcerated for longer than a year -- to make progress, for instance, in drug rehab or in therapy. But the majority of prisoners are there for less than a year (60% for less than six months, 72% for around 12 months). Tonight, there might be 9500 prisoners in NSW gaols, and those who flow through the system over a year might be twice that number. No government collects information on how many;
-- (2) you're moved around a lot in prison -- from this facility to that court to another facility, etc. Most people move at least two or three times, even on short sentences. So it's difficult to sustain a rehab program;
-- (3) and it's an unnatural environment. In the standard men's prison, the age group is 18-35, there are no children or women, and there are no trains, buses, shops, ATMs, etc -- it's the antithesis of community life. You might be doing well on a rehab program on the inside, but then suddenly you're removed from that structured existence and are thrust into a chaotic world you didn't have to deal with for a year, and any skills you acquired will naturally fall apart -- unless, added Baldry, you have a matching program on the outside.
* (Some thoughts:
-- Rehab is here treated as matter of skills -- ie, it's not just deterrence from future crime.
-- There are other reasons why prison is counter-productive to rehab: eg, mental health problems get worse in prison, drug addiction is acquired or worsens...
-- And there are reasons why rehab inside is less effective than rehab outside -- it's easier to treat addicts when they aren't cut off from family and community.)
* (It's not clear to me, though, on what basis Baldry declares that the sheer removal from society is the retribution. If you're committed to an eye-for-an-eye mentality, then why should simple removal cause the offender enough suffering?)
* Baldry adds (and I didn't follow this argument either): prisons are just a symbol to make people feel safe. They don't lock up the majority of criminals, and they don't lock up the worst offenders -- but only the people who are dumb enough to get caught. There is an injustice in saying that prisons punish, seeing that the people who do receive prison terms deserve it less than the people who don't.
***
Alternatives.
A correctional officer piped up with this metaphor: if your bathtub is overflowing, the common sense thing is to either turn the tap off or let some of the water out. Whereas in NSW, we add another wing to the bathtub.
In essence, there's no one replacement for prison -- you do need a place to hold certain people. But there's a whole number of things you can do to reduce the prison population and the incidence of crime, and simply building more prisons isn't one of them.
I found it striking that the argument was not for the most part a "humanitarian" one. Rather, it was economic (spending money in more cost effective ways), or social (about what measures are the most effective for reducing crime).
1. Nip it in the bud. Address the systemic problems. Put resources into social services, mental health, housing, employment, and programs to improve school attendance.
The results are "home and hosed" on early intervention. If you ensure assistance for struggling families -- eg home visits, nursing care, child support, early education -- the research is consistent that you save a lot of money in the long run, and especially when you address obvious targets. The gaols are full of people with borderline IQ disabilities -- the 70-80 range is key -- the average IQ in UK prisons is 85 -- you need to teach such people good habits as early as possible.
Poverty and neglect are the strongest predictors of juvenile crime.
The greater the social and economic equality, the lower the prison population. There is less incentive to commit crime, and there is less fear on the part of the wealthy -- less political pressure to fill more prisons.
And the greater the neighbourhood cohesion (the network of support), the lower the crime rate.
2. Non-custodial sentences. So the idea is that: (i) prison causes crime -- once you've been to prison, you're much more likely to go back; "zero tolerance" (cracking down on minor crimes) doesn't work; (ii) rehabilitation, particularly of first-time offenders, is more effective within the community; (iii) rehab and community-based sentences are a lot cheaper than imprisonment; and (iv) prison can have indirect economic and social costs -- for instance, welfare support for broken families, increased health and justice costs, lower tax revenues.
Rene Rivkin, what's this wishy washy periodic detention crap; you do the crime, you should serve the time...
Non-custodial options are particularly desirable if the offender has mental health issues or intellectual disabilities, if they're on remand, if they're sole carers or have community responsibilities, or if the offences are minor and they'd otherwise receive only short prison sentences (90% of prisoners with a sentence of six months or less are convicted of crimes like theft, breach of justice order, minor assault, driving / traffic offences).
Circle sentencing has been shown to be effective (Aboriginal offender sits with elders, magistrate, prosecutor, victim, and others to discuss the offence and its consequences).
Juveniles who receive a caution or a youth justice conference are less likely to reoffend than those referred to the Children's Court.
3. Post-prison support.
So prison results, among other things, in loss of housing, poorer physical and mental health, reduced employment prospects, and increased isolation. And all of these increase the likelihood of crime.
You reduce re-conviction rates if you provide such services as transitional housing and employment, and access to rehab and reintegration programs.
4. Legal change. The sort of thing Baldry had in mind was simply taking offensive language off the books, or decriminalising prostitution.
(But one problem with any law change, apart from probable controversy, is that there's a whole-picture effect, a systemic effect, that can't be predicted.)
5. Home detention. Some people benefit enormously from this, but it's a niche market, said Baldry. The trend is for fewer and fewer to qualify. You have to have a home in the first place (whereas most prisoners are effectively homeless -- have no permanent, secure address). And then you have to have someone to help you, a friend or a relative, whereas a lot of prisoners have no partner, or are in domestic violence relationships. (And even if they do have a partner, making an offender's spouse their gaoler can be a recipe for disaster.)
Cornelia Rau
***
Some further remarks...
* Baldry suggested that people with intellectual disabilities are not more likely to commit crimes than the rest of the population, but face disadvantage within the criminal justice system. They're more likely to be detained for minor offences, and are less likely to understand what's happening. They're refused bail more often, and are more likely to be given a custodial sentence. They serve longer sentences, and are more likely to be the subject of violence while imprisoned.
* Parole and probation are under-resourced -- and overwhelmed. One of the things that's changed over the last 10 years is that a lot more people are coming out of prisons with mental health problems (although the quality and accessibility of psychiatric care is improving).
What's caused this? -- Well, maybe we're just better at diagnosing mental health issues, though they've always been there. But other factors include: (1) serious drug use, which didn't get underway until the 70s. In some cases, the drugs have caused temporary mental illness. In other cases, they've triggered a latent tendency; and (2) reduction in mental health access on the outside. Prisons have become surrogate mental asylums -- there's nowhere else to place some people.
* NSW has the worst rate of indigenous women prisoners in the world. Over the last 20 years, the number of inmates has increased 26-fold.
* Victoria has half the prison rate of NSW, and this has long been the case. It's not because Victorians are more law-abiding. There seems to be a different social approach -- at the sentencing stage, more people are diverted from prison terms to community service or rehab schemes. And there are much better social services there than elsewhere. In 2001, millions were poured into new post-prison programs -- for instance, "Transitional housing" and "Bridging the gap" (which provides employment) -- and the initial results of these are encouraging.
Baldry concludes: some people need to be locked up, and some people need to be constantly monitored, but the problem is that when you apply this paradigm across the board there are too many people caught up in the net. The paradigm has gone too far. The rhetorical idea of a risk-free society gets votes for politicians, but is in reality impossible.
* (Didn't quite follow what's wrong with the risk paradigm. I think it's partly to do with starting at the wrong end -- you should have addressed the root problems. And it's partly to do with the unreliableness of the risk assessment and the unfairness of prejudging people. But perhaps the main issue is how a risk profile is used. So if you're a homeless illiterate drug-addicted Aborigine, you'll show up as a high risk on the profile. And what does the system do with that information? Will you be held to higher standards of behaviour -- so that while in prison, you're kept in isolation -- and when you're released tighter parole conditions are imposed on you? -- I don't know if this is the case. But I think Baldry is suggesting that it is, and that these are bad ideas. They exacerbate the problems. You impose severely restricting orders, and then act surprised when they're breached. The people with the greatest needs are going to show up as the greatest risks.)
* Voting rights.
The legislation (in Australia? in NSW?) has recently changed so that people who've been sentenced to terms of longer than three years don't get the vote. In the US, felons lose voting rights for life.
This is a travesty, said Baldry, because prisoners are still citizens, and almost everyone gets released from prison, and then has an interest in the functioning of the community.
(And perhaps she might have added that involving people in voting is another way of integrating them into the community.)
Junee Correctional Centre -- the only privately run prison in NSW
It's not a few phenomenon -- the First Fleet was a floating private prison, and a lot of prisons in the Victorian era were private. There are large numbers of private prisons in the US, but they represent a small proportion of the whole: only about 5%. In Australia, there's a high rate of privatized prisons in Victoria -- 40% -- whereas Queensland has two private prisons, and NSW just one. Private detention centres are a different story.
People are sometimes nervous that private prisons will somehow cause there to be more prisoners -- but no real connection has been shown. Baldry believes that private prisons can work, and sometimes they can show the state prison system better ways of operating. Also, there's the option of privatizing part but not all of a prison. But in general such places require monitoring. There is a tendency to put profit over prisoner welfare, and there are various dodgy practices. In the US, there are sometimes bidding wars to house inmates at the lowest prices. And in one case, the owner of the prison had shares in KFC, so KFC provided the prison services.
***
For some notes on American imprisonment, see Glenn C Loury, "Why are so many Americans in prison?", Boston Review, July-August 2007.
| 51 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
Subscribe to this blog
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Crime and Punishment is a never ending cycle of nurture verses nature arguments. From time to time one or the other gets the hand up and twenty years later we get a backlash in the opposite direction.
Crime as defined in the law books changes and what was one a ticket to a life sentence is now looked upon more mercifully. We must never forget that stealing a loaf of bread was once enough to be deported to Australian for term of your natural life.
They were cruel times where cruel punishment were dished out.
Yet within the era the English parliament passed the Lands Act which effectively stole all the peasent owned lands and handed them to the rich nobels. The rule was if you could fence it off, you owned it.
There is always a challenge with crime and that is one of double standards. How can you expect a society to keep a bad law or an immoral law? Then at the same time you have people who are above the law. Scooter Libby is a recent example.
Prisons will always exits for several reason.
One is some prisoner are too dangerous to put in contact with the public.
Some criminals just don't get it. The commit the crime and boast about the lite sentence.
Prison may be bad but to do nothing would be worse.
Some enforces measure success by conviction rates.
Some people like the notion of keeping people away forever.
Some people want revenge.
People also like to create new monsters to fight and new places to keep them.
Terror suspect = monster
Monsters must be kept in a cold dark place.
Monsters should be treated as humans.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Incredibly brave of you to slog through this one. Sorry about the length -- I wanted to split it up, but didn't see a logical place to do so (apart from shoving all the crime stats into the previous post).
I agree with most of what you say. -- Prisons will probably always be around. People probably like to have scapegoats (and perhaps there is a tendency to anthropomorphize your bad luck, so that you look for someone to blame). The definition of "crime" is historically contingent, and your note about the former severity of stealing bread is a good reminder of how much our attitudes have changed (and that we now regard as brutal and excessive what was once normalized). And your note about "How can you expect a society to keep a bad law" is a suggestive one. It could lead, among other things, to a discussion of civic virtue, and how to create the conditions for abiding by unpopular laws (how do you make a racist South comply with anti-segregation laws, for instance).
Just a couple of comments about nature and nurture, because this might be where I'd tend to disagree --
Have there really been cycles over the past century?
There's an episode of the Simpsons where Mr Burns is measuring someone's head (maybe Smithers', or maybe Homer's), and he makes some remark about them having the brow of a born criminal (or something like that).
I don't doubt that there are genetic factors that predispose people to violence, thievery, lying. But apart from phrenologists like Burns, and apart from the Nazi race scientists, I just don't get the feeling (I haven't looked for any evidence yet) that people over the past century have spent much time on the nature side of the divide (eg, no real attempt to search for a shoplifting gene or an embezzlement gene, etc).
The difference between the two here might bear similarities to the case of cigarettes and lung cancer. There are lots of things that cause lung cancer -- it's a whole mix of things -- but some factors are more important than others (if you're making generalities across the population, and are not talking about specific individuals), and the cigarettes seem to be more important than the genetics.
Now, nature vs nurture crops up in a lot of other areas and to some extent it does cycle (discussion over language acquisition might be an example). But if criminality is an exception, and if the sociological evidence points to nurture/socioeconomic factors as much more causatively important, I think that would be quite interesting -- especially given the fact that in society generally, there IS a tendency towards nature-thinking -- it's often thought that a lot of people are simply "evil" or "born bad".
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Let me just take a second to respond to your response.
Perhaps just to clarify my line of thinking.
There are some pretty bad buggers that have been locked up to protect the rest of society. Rapists for one. There is also the question of restitution for the offence committed, restitution to the victim and to society as a whole. Not so much financial restitution but a sacrifice to indicate that level of suffering that was caused. Also to show that the criminal is restoring himself to fit into society.
Deterance is another important factor but I think revenge is not so important in the minds of most judges.
Prisons are practical in that sense.
I can't really describe the morality of law unless we agree upon what is moral in this case. A bit like the old Chinese saying that 'a bad law was meant to be broken.'
Yes I remember that episode in Simpsons.
20 year cycle of carrot veses stick mentalities. Just a suggestion with out proof and can be dismissed. I was thinking in terms of early release programs, rehab and go-carting programs. On the other side recent laws on 3 strikes and your out, anti terror laws.
Genetics and Crime?
The authors of a the best selling book called 'The Bell Curve' tried their best to link the two. Then used the same method to prove that some races were genetically predisposed to crime and had lower IQ's.(Guess who was given the status of criminal apes? No not the white people.)
Very bad scientific logic that fell appart when examined one claim at a time.
Just to put things in perspective: Violence used in war is rewarded with medals but in peacetime the same violence is punished. The theory failed to explain the genetic mechanism for why some people and not others would lie, steal and murder. Then what is strict definition of each. Why would the gene pool preserve something that is obviously counter productive to human survival?
'Not in our genes but in our selves', I think best describes my thinking on that matter.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Just to respond to one point:
Is it fair to say that you're distinguishing restitution from deterrence on the basis that restitution is merely symbolic?
A letter (not related to Damo's comment; just generally related to the post). Doesn't give any evidence, but at least puts some of the claim of the post into a nutshell: --
Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 15/7/07, letters, page 64
Hit-run answer not just penalties
HARSHER penalties do not deter offences such as hit-and-runs.
If anything, research indicates harsher sentences are associated with higher rates of reoffending.
Sending someone to jail needs to be balanced against the increased rates of reoffending when they get out. If we send lots of people to jail for a very long time then taxes and charges will need to increase dramatically to pay for that.
Running away decreases the chances of getting any penalty at all. As penalties get harsher, that gives people more reason to leave the scene.
-- Richard Parker, Mt Gravatt East
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
-- According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States -- with five percent of the world’s population -- houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia).
-- We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.
-- In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes.
-- On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.
-- One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.
-- A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime.
-- In the 1970s, the sociologist David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there.
-- An interesting case in point is New York City. Analyzing arrests by residential neighborhood and police precinct, the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues Valerie West and Jan Holland found that incarceration was highest in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, though these were often not the neighborhoods in which crime rates were the highest. Moreover, they discovered a perverse effect of incarceration on crime: higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later. This growth and persistence of incarceration over time, the authors concluded, was due primarily to the drug enforcement practices of police and to sentencing laws that require imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in high-incarceration neighborhoods, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored. Thus, discretionary and spatially discriminatory police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods, even as crime rates fell.
-- [Fagan, West, and Holland conclude:] Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.