Sensitive About Sentencing Reform

“Maybe I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft,” Bob Dylan worried in a 1970s song lyric.

Tonight, I turned this line on myself when I reread an essay that seemed to imply that to call for radical reductions in America’s bloated prison system is to engage in naïve, short-sighted thinking.

In their essay in a special issue of Daedalus on mass incarceration, Robert Weisberg and Joan Petersilia warn of the “dangers of Pyrrhic victories” against it. They acknowledge that America’s incarceration levels make today’s prison system an outrageous outlier both historically and internationally. But they caution that trying to bring down the preposterously high number too fast too soon might be counterproductive.

Weisberg and Petersilia are concerned that reductions in the prison population must be accompanied by a sustained commitment to addressing the causes of recidivism. In practical terms, that means more probation officers, more drug treatment counselors, and so on.

Without these resources, Weisberg and Petersilia fear, a boomlet in new crime by released inmates could occur. And that, in turn, could prompt a visceral policy backlash. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key revividus.

I’m sensitive about this because I interpreted Weisberg and Petersilia to be saying that idealistic citizen-bloggers like me tend to be too naïve. We can let our passion blur our vision and fail to see the full strategic picture involved in systematic sentencing reform.

Am I being too sensitive in suspecting that the two veteran corrections scholars would dismiss this blog as superficial and sentimental? Maybe.

I take heart, however, from the point Glenn Loury makes in his concluding essay in the Daedalus special issue. Loury points out that leaving the decisions about corrections policy to self-appointed experts has had devastating effects on local communities and civic engagement.

To be sure, experts have important roles to play in reshaping sentencing and corrections policy. But if this country is a democracy, so do citizens.

Spending a Fortune to Incarcerate, But a Pittance to Rehabilitate

The scale of the correctional Leviathan in California is truly staggering.

Joan Petersilia recites some of the round numbers in her essay in Wilson Quarterly’s recent issue on mass imprisonment. 170,000 prisoners being held, at about $50,000 per prisoner per year, leading to $10 billion in annual costs.

In some ways, however, the most disturbing figure is one that is small, not large. California spends less than $3,000 per inmate per year on rehabilitation. Only half of released inmates have participated in any type of program during their time in prison.

To be sure, prison programming cannot be expected to work miracles, especially when broad sociological trends are at work. After all, with skills at a premium in the global economy, it becomes harder and harder for low-skilled ex-offenders to get jobs.

Yet governments have added to the challenges of prisoner reentry into society by passing broad laws excluding all ex-offenders from certain fields, such as education and health care.

Understandably, no one wants a dangerous ex-felon working as a home health aide, or a convicted sex offender taking care of children. Unfortunately, though, the laws impacting ex-offender employment have not been narrowly tailored to achieve those ends.

All in all, these are ingredients in a recipe for recidivism. It should scarcely be surprising that so many people return to prison after release, either for parole violations or new crimes. It’s the well-worn path of least resistance.

Bubbles Do Burst

Veteran corrections scholar Joan Petersilia contributes the first essay to The Wilson Quarterly's examination of America’s bloated correctional system. WQ’s Winter 2011 issue features a gaggle of orange-clad inmates on the cover, with this headline:

The Seven Million: How to Shrink America’s Criminal Population

Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford, offers an essay entitled Beyond the Prison Bubble. She begins by noting that the national number of people behind bars has increased for 37 years in a row.

Yet the very title of her piece contains an element of hope. Bubbles, after all, do burst eventually. And when they do, it’s never the same again.