Here’s a simple principle of criminological physics: What goes in must come out.
In Missouri, no less than 97 percent of the more than 30,000 inmates of the state prison system will be returning to the community, according to the Missouri Department of Corrections’ website. That’s about 20,000 per year, coming to a theater near you.
How would you like them? Would you like them more hardened, addicted, bitter, and angry than they were when their behavior was bad enough to require incarceration? If so, a good strategy might be to view the role of the prison system exclusively as a vehicle to inflict suffering and punishment in the name of retribution.
The alternative, of course, is suggested by the term “corrections,” meaning that prisons should attempt to correct bad behavior and attitudes through counseling (especially for addictions), job training, education, and the like. This was once known as “rehabilitation.”
As we all know, rehabilitation is a dirty word. Even suggest it, and you’re a knee-jerk liberal who wants to coddle criminals rather than punish them.
The common assumption—pounded into the public psyche through billions of repetitions by professional venom-spreaders in politics and media—is that rehabilitation, embraced in the ’50s and ’60s, was discredited in the ’70s. Case closed.
In fairness, rehabilitation was discredited by a famous 1974 study by criminologist Robert Martinson, who proclaimed “nothing works,” leading both sides of the political spectrum to disavow the concept: conservatives in the name of getting tough, liberals by inferring racism and unfairness in the probation process.
Setting aside the small detail that Martinson himself tried to retract much of his own work just five years later—with little to no public reaction—the experience of the past several decades has proven one fact far more profoundly than any scholar could ever demonstrate: Tough talk—coupled with the abandonment of rehabilitation efforts altogether—really doesn’t work.
Nearly four decades of hot air have produced millions of votes for conservative politicians. But that has come at the cost of trillions of dollars, collectively, to pay for the warehousing of an exploding prison population—along with social costs too great to measure.
But they’ve taught criminals a lesson.
They’ve cracked down on criminals, locked them up and thrown away the key, put them in boot camps, given them three strikes, tortured them, and otherwise let them know they’re the dregs of society. For good measure, the same conservative movement concurrently concocted a “war on drugs”—more precisely, a war on drugs-that-don’t-enjoy-corporate-sponsorship—and that caused incarceration numbers and costs to soar even higher.
Like the crackdown on crime, the “war on drugs” has produced only one measurable result of a positive nature for its advocates: It’s been great for votes—not so much for the national interest, unless an increase of more than 500 percent in those incarcerated is how one defines that.
It’s no small irony that the same passionate patriots behind these noble causes have come across another one in the new millennium: cutting the cost of government.
Oops.
As they say in NRA country, that dog won’t hunt. It is a physical impossibility to add millions of new prisoners, with longer and more stringent sentences, while reducing spending, even if you are willing to ignore that inconvenient “no cruel and unusual punishment” nonsense that some liberals stuck in the U.S. Constitution some time back (say, in 1787).
Even if the recidivism rate were zero, the public lust for more and longer sentences would be stressing the criminal-justice system to the limit. Throw in the topping—documented for years by the Pew Center on the States—that the national recidivism rate is more than 40 percent, and what do you have?
Checkmate.
Now, strangely enough, we’re tiptoeing ever so slightly back toward the center. Not to the political left, mind you, because no self-respecting politician of either party dares to appear “soft on crime.” That’s still a no-no. But in places as conservative as Missouri, we’re seeing drug courts and an array of quietly enacted sentencing alternatives as officials struggle with the impossibility of the demands previously placed upon them by angry politicians—who, by the way, are still as tough on criminals as ever (just ask them).
Some of this is good stuff. In December, a “consensus report” was issued by the Missouri Working Group on Sentencing and Corrections, a blue-ribbon group comprising judges, legislators, and executive-branch appointees in the state. Self-described as an “unprecedented, bipartisan, inter-branch collaboration,” the group’s stated mission is “to get taxpayers a better public safety return on their corrections dollars,” which, it reports, have tripled during the past 20 years to accommodate a prison population that has doubled in the same period.
That sounds like a properly conservative mission—it better sound that way if it wishes to survive the good-ol’-boy gauntlet in Jefferson City—but most of its recommendations appear perilously enlightened. (You can access the full report at stlmag.com/thinkagain.)
The report is open and candid on such verboten topics as “the over-incarceration of nonviolent offenders”; the need for more relaxed, incentive-driven probation rules; a reduction in “the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity”; and a call to reduce incarceration for technical violations of probation and parole.
The probation-and-parole section—perilously related to the notion of rehabilitation, methinks—is especially eye-opening: No less than 43 percent of the new admissions to Missouri prisons in 2010 were people who had violated conditions of their probation and parole (labeled “technical violations”) without actually having committed another crime. Yet these “technical violators” served an average of 10 months behind bars.
This comes at no small cost to the taxpayers, not to mention the families left behind.
At the risk of tainting the report with fatal liberal praise, the 10-page document is thoughtful and serious, while representing a fairly modest set of steps with a goal of reducing Missouri’s projected prison population by 245 to 677 inmates by the end of fiscal year 2017.
The real significance of the report—not stated explicitly therein—is that it effectively confirms the failure of the moronic, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality of the past. There’s no mention of the dreaded R-word, but it’s clear that even Missouri now needs to be dragged—kicking and screaming—into the realization that the system has to check its rage at the door and begin to formulate strategies that actually lower the odds that released prisoners will whirl back to prison through some eternal revolving door.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan, using his national radio address to promote a major crime bill (an early grenade in the “war on drugs”), proclaimed that “the liberal approach of coddling criminals didn’t work and never will.” He called for an end to parole in the name of “uniform and certain” sentences.
The tough talk served Reagan well at the ballot box, as it has done for generations of mad-as-hell politicians since. My personal favorite, close to home, was when then–U.S. Rep. Jim Talent responded in 1999 to a simple, nonpartisan constituent inquiry about his position on gun control with this unprovoked diatribe:
“Conservatives believe in the institutions and values of private American life…liberals don’t.
“Conservatives believe violent crime is the result of choices by a layer of bad people to do wrong. We want to catch and punish
these people.
“Liberals think the criminals are victims because society has failed to provide them with a good education or a good job, or because honest people have too many firearms. Liberals seek to ‘prevent’ crime by remedying what they see as the defects in the rest of us.”
So discussion has gone for nearly 40 years. And while I did get an easy Riverfront Times column out of Talent’s quote in 1999, it’s pretty galling that vile rhetoric of this nature has carried the day for so long.
But now that the results are in, the “catch-and-punish” brigade doesn’t look so good. And even a report carefully designed for the consumption of a conservative legislature—and certainly not partisan in nature—does no favor for the crime-fighting legacy of Reagan (and minions like Talent).
Bemoaning the fact that Missouri’s prison population exploded from 14,074 in 1990 to 30,729 last year—with a 249 percent spending increase—the Working Group report states:
“All this spending on corrections has not produced commensurate improvements in public safety. While the Department of Corrections has improved its recidivism rate in recent years, nearly four in 10 inmates released from prison will return within two years.
“Most importantly, despite the large increases in the size and cost of the prison system, crime rates in Missouri have not kept pace with the national decline.” The report cites statistics showing that while U.S. violent-crime rates dropped 18 percent from 1999 to 2009, with just a 2 percent increase in imprisonment, Missouri’s violent crime barely dropped at all—just 2 percent—despite a 7 percent increase in imprisonment.
“In fact,” the report continues, “19 of the states that experienced a decline in crime also reduced their imprisonment rates over the past decade—including Missouri neighbors Illinois, Kansas, and Oklahoma.”
Imagine that: Simply taking more criminals off the streets wasn’t the magic bullet after all. If this report had been written in 1984 as a prediction—rather than in 2011 as a statistical report—its authors would have been pilloried for wanting to “coddle criminals.”
Personally, I’d go way further. I’d legalize marijuana; focus on education, prevention, and treatment programs for all drugs (alcohol included); and find sentencing alternatives for almost all criminals found guilty of victimless crimes.
Then, maybe we could have longer and tougher sentences for violent criminals, the ones who belong behind bars. And we might even have some resources to devote to rehabilitating them, especially if they’re in the 97 percent that will be returning to the streets.
There I go again, shilling for the R-word.
But call me a criminal coddler if you must. Call me a knee-jerk liberal.
Rehabilitating makes more sense to me than reincarcerating.
SLM co-owner ray hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
