It is rare than one comes across a book that covers a topic as thoroughly and dispassionately, but also as eloquently and as accessibly as this masterpiece criminologist John Pfaff has penned on reducing incarceration rates in the US.
That is not to say he lacks a strong view, but he does not allow it to blind him. Indeed, it seems as if he was very happy to lie low and carry on working hard in the trenches, until he felt the discourse was at risk of being hijacked by a narrative he does not disagree with at all, but considers dangerously incomplete and a risk to the more comprehensive approach he finds necessary.
Before I continue, I feel compelled to highlight the one shortcoming of this book: if you’re looking for the author’s arguments as to why the US needs to keep fewer people in its prisons, you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a book about how to bring the numbers down, not about why. You do encounter the author’s views on the topic, nary a page goes by where you do not see the reasons the author believes that to be an imperative, but this is quite simply not the purpose of the book. You won’t find a chapter or even a section here on the relative merits of incarceration versus other ways of keeping the public safe, let alone on the merits of spending money on jails rather than schools or hospitals, public golf courses, the space program or bank bailouts.
The book quickly goes over the numbers (summary: 1. There are more people in US jails than anywhere else, and that’s before we start talking per capita, where the US is five times more aggressive than any other nation 2. That’s five times more than in 1960 3. crime peaked in 1991, but incarceration rates only did so some five years ago and at a rate where it will take longer than a century to go back to normal) and moves on to debunk the “Standard Story” as detailed in Michelle Alexander’s “the New Jim Crow,” to which he opposes some cold numbers:
• Prisoners doing time for drug offenses are only 20% of the total
• Prisoners doing time for non-violent drug offences are only 6% of the total
• Private prisons account for only 6% of prisoners
• Contrary to public opinion, prison sentences aren’t getting longer, overall
The author is entirely sympathetic to the argument that the above statistics probably understate the reality on the ground, what with drug offenses being heavily related to other forms of crime and drug offenses being much more heavily prosecuted in black neighborhoods than white, among other things, but the main message he wants to shout from the rooftops is that we have been working that angle for ten years now and incarceration rates will not come down anywhere near enough until we go for the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter happens to be violent offenses, because that’s what an overwhelming majority of people in American jails are serving time for. The majority of a number that’s five times too high is by itself some three times too high. You don’t deal with that, you’re going nowhere.
Along the same lines, the vast majority of people in jail are in a public jail and you could shut down every private jail and it would not move the needle. It’s just that people who work in the field of decarceration also happen to have ideological issues with the involvement of the private sector (that the author, incidentally, shares) and that may allow ideology to creep into the argument, crowding out the more pressing need to do something about the actual incarceration rates.
The narrative, Pfaff believes, may also be driven by the fact that there is much richer data on the federal system and 100,000 out of 200,000 people in federal prisons (fully 50%, then) are serving for drug offenses. However, only 200,000 out of 1,300,000 people in state prisons and jails are serving drug-related sentences and the other authors who are talking about drugs have failed to grasp that there is hard work to be done at the local level of 3,000+ counties, rather than quick reform at the federal level, if we want to make real progress.
Rather than one system, we must basically reform 3,000 systems and they’re all different, but they all share one important actor: the prosecutor. And it’s him we need to focus our attention on:
We need to make sure he’s likelier to be deciding on cases in his community, not on cases from the inner city next door, for example. If he’s unnecessarily depriving a home from a father, make it a home in the place he lives. We need to make sure he bears the financial costs of his decisions, sending as few prisoners as possible to jails that hit somebody else’s budget. Conversely, we need to give him the budget to maintain statistics, of which there are currently none. We need to perhaps protect him from the electoral process and make him an appointee (and then, perhaps not: both arguments are presented). We need to restrict the manner in which he wields the nuclear weapon of plea bargaining, perhaps by setting much more prescriptive (and, other than for select well-specified cases, much more lenient) sentencing guidelines. We urgently need to fund his nemesis better, the public defender. Perhaps we need to give him strong budgetary incentives, as California is experimenting with.
We also need to understand his point of view: he faces a demand for punishment. People remember the case where leniency led to recidivism more than they remember or even notice unnecessarily harsh sentences. People have very little concept of how much crime there actually is, let alone whether crime is increasing or decreasing from one year to another (though people can distinguish between decades). He also faces politicians who want the budgets that come from prison populations and unions who want to protect prison jobs.
Away from the prosecutor, we need to study the people who commit violent crimes. We need to understand better why and when they offend, we need to make the connection between their incarceration and their potential for further violence and we need to stop calling them violent offenders and start thinking of them as people who have committed a violent offense but who regardless cost society value beyond the monetary expense of their incarceration every day they stay behind bars. The case of “three strikes you’re out” detainees who were released after 15 years is very poignant, as they’ve turned out to be an order of magnitude less likely to re-offend than the expectation.
While we’re on the rhetoric, we need to stop arguing that nonviolent offenders are occupying a bed that should be taken by a violent offender (oops, what did I just say?), the logic that we want the fewest possible people in jail, “provided our safety is not compromised.” Instead, we need to make the argument that everything is negotiable, because actually it is. At the very least, we need to recognize that, at current levels of incarceration, money spent on policing makes us much safer than money spent on punishment.
The conclusion of this book is given by the author when he introduces the chapter on “the third rail,” which is what he calls violent offenses:
“Any significant reduction in the US prison population is going to require states and counties to rethink how they punish people convicted of violent crimes, where ‘rethink’ means ‘think how to punish less.’”
The author does not stop with the conclusion. He actually finishes with a very strong 30 page chapter (“Quo Vadis”) where he outlines his best ideas. It’s the best chapter of the book and “worth the purchase price” alone, as they say.
So I loved it. But what I loved most has nothing to do with any of the above:
I’m a keen student of the recent financial meltdown, particularly as part of the general economic situation. On page 97 of the book there’s a chart of “Correction and Criminal Justice Spending as Share of State Budgets 1952-2012.” It is ENTIRELY self-similar to the chart for labor force participation that the economists bandy about on the first Friday of every month when they complain that the unemployment rate is fakely low because the low “labor participation rate” flatters it.
If the chart for participation in the labor force and the chart for spending on criminal justice are one and the same (despite the fact that if you are in jail you are REMOVING YOURSELF from the labor force) you can’t but conclude that crime is quite simply something that happens. Crime is but a feature of our economy and all the jailing in the world won’t stop it. So rather than punishment or even prevention, our duty is to concentrate on justice and fairness. That’s hard enough by itself.
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Top reviews from other countries
Charles
Very informative, though equally convoluted.
Reviewed in Canada on September 9, 2018