Today I had planned to release the video from Friday’s livestream, but we hit a small production snag. I’ll have it for you in the coming week. Instead, I’d like to present this guest essay from my friend Robert Cherry, economist, professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, author and editor of many books, and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His idea is simple but provocative: longer prison sentences for youthful offenders may help them find sustained employment after release.
Some will find this idea cruel or uncaring. Knowing Robert and his work, I cannot agree. While I’m not sure I concur with his recommendations—I need to think about it further—I have no problem believing Robert when he writes that he finds his own conclusions troubling. In his decades studying problems of labor, unemployment, and inequality, he’s demonstrated his compassion for those who are born into disadvantaged environments and struggle to escape them. As an economist, he can run the numbers, but I think empathy is a driving force behind his research.
The real question is how chronic unemployment and repeat youth offending have gotten so bad that a compassionate and pragmatic thinker like Robert Cherry finds himself advocating for prison as a solution. That’s an indication of a society-wide failure to find less extreme solutions to a nagging problem. Surely such solutions exist. But can we implement them effectively? I remain open to plausible theories, and in the coming weeks I hope to post some responses to Robert’s provocative essay that take up that subject.
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More, Not Less, Prison May Improve the Life Chances for Youthful Offenders
by Robert Cherry
The conventional wisdom holds that young criminal offenders are best served by diversion programs and the shortest possible prison sentences. As the Vera Institute, a leading proponent of diversion, contends, “Diversion programs can target the root problems that lead to criminalized behavior, like food and housing insecurity, joblessness, lack of educational resources, and unmet mental health needs.” This viewpoint is reflected in the election of so-called social justice district attorneys in a number of major cities, including Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles. As a result, a substantial cohort of young people with multiple criminal convictions has served little time in prison. While well-meaning, this approach may actually harm youths whose life chances would have been improved if they had spent more time in prison.
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch agrees. She highlighted the downside of the Raise the Age law that was instituted five years ago. It requires all those under 18 who committed crimes to have their cases handled by family courts, almost always with no penalties. “Every day brings new proof that RTA is failing its objective of diverting vulnerable youths from their criminal trajectory,” Tisch wrote. “Under RTA, juvenile gun arrests have reached a quarter-century peak, with 486 arrests last year. Young felony assault victims also hit an 18-year peak of 2,451.”
I advocate for increased incarceration with a heavy heart. In the more than forty years that I have been studying and promoting policies to improve the lives of workers and their families, this is the position that has troubled me most. I support increased prison time for youths reluctantly, because too many young men are lost to the street life, and prisons no longer have the same downside they had in the past.
Today, most prisons substantially focus on preparing inmates for reentry. There are extensive efforts at improving educational outcomes. Many states, like New York, shorten sentences for inmates who successfully complete their high school equivalency degree. The Residential Drug Abuse Program is a federal prisons program that begins with 500 hours of prison counseling and also provide job training, including programs that lead to nationally recognized certificates.
National corporations today have become much more accommodating to ex-offenders who have completed educational or training programs. Even those who don’t complete these programs have an easier time finding employment than they used to, because prison imposes demands similar to that of ordinary jobs. It requires punctuality, following orders from supervisory personnel, and working out differences through dialogue. This is why many work-first programs for ex-offenders, like those offered by the Center for Economic Opportunities, are successful: they build on the personal discipline developed in prisons.
To be sure, most released offenders struggle. They resume old, problematic friendships, embroil themselves in family tensions, and endure employment disruptions. But for many, remaining in dangerous environments without the behavioral discipline they could have gained in prison is riskier than the alternative. Without the order and discipline acquired in prison, more felons would continue breaking the law and remain ensnared by damaging personal relationships.
Across the country, the vast majority of homicide victims have extensive criminal records. In Illinois, 65% of 2015-16 firearm homicide victims had at least one felony arrest. In Baltimore, nearly 90% of the 344 homicide victims in 2015 had criminal records, and the average victim had been arrested 13 times before death.
Of course, most youth diverted from prison are not killed in street violence. But they remain on the margins of society, like George Floyd or Eric Garner, living off of petty crimes, illegal sales, and maybe some government support.
A friend of mine working at the Community Service Society of New York worked on their “The Unheard Third,” a report documenting the lives of the poorest individuals in the city. He told me that group includes many individuals who had avoided significant prison time. Some went to youth groups and described how their bad choices destroyed their lives. While looking forward to making these presentations, they no longer had the behavioral traits necessary to sustain regular employment.
Many of these men qualified for food stamps after Obama made adjustments to the program during the 2008-09 downturn. A large share of these new enrollees had no paid employment. Calls for work requirements attached to food assistance have faced resistance from those who don’t want to impose barriers to aid. But what actually happens when the government enforces even modest work-related requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWD)? Those requirements include employment but also job training and volunteering. All studies estimate a substantial enrollment decline. For the five states that imposed work requirements in 2014 and 2015, the ABAWD caseload reductions were between 40% and 60%.
Few if any of these former recipients entered the paid labor market. While this probably reflects a modest share of former recipients working off-the-book jobs, I believe many of these marginalized men are either no longer capable of maintaining a work, training, or volunteer schedule or unwilling to try. Many of these men deserve our sympathy—they’ve had hard lives. However, there must be better ways to help them than abandoning what are quite reasonable work-related requirements. Indeed, more requirements, combined with necessary social services, are warranted.
Perhaps I’m overestimating the benefits of prison discipline and skill development. But I am less willing to concede that I have overstated the downside experienced by at-risk young men from unrealistic aspirations held by many liberals involved in the criminal justice system. In New York City, released prisoners who completed their high school equivalency degree were funneled into the community college system. At Bronx Community College, these students had extensive support to help them achieve an associate’s degree.
The students, by and large, wanted to succeed. But life got in the way. Some were on parole, which required them to maintain paid employment. Many had families. Almost all had weak academic skills, which required them to take substantial remediation before entering fully credit-bearing courses. As a result, despite weekly individual counseling, only one-quarter successfully completed the associate’s degree.
With weak academic skills, most were counseled into the liberal arts track, which is only useful if students progress to a four-year college. A few did earn four-year degrees that led to well-paying employment. The vast majority didn’t. By contrast, those who did not qualify for the college track entered work-first programs, where a majority gained long-term employment that helped them immediately.
It would be wonderful if there were effective alternatives to prison for these at-risk young men. After all, there are myriad government and foundation-funded programs for disconnected youth who are neither in school nor paid employment. But few diversion programs avail themselves of these resources, many of which have no proven success rate. Few will force participants to develop the behavioral traits they lack, since only extreme instances of lax attendance and insubordination are punished. These youths need compassionate drill sergeants not babysitters.
Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of the forthcoming book, Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come? (Wicked Son, Winter 2025).
Oregon is but a medium-sized state, but voters passed a “Serious crime, serious time” initiative that mandated sentences ranging from 6 years for child molestation to 25 years for murder for older teenagers. The law was a major success and contributed to major declines in the worst crime by older teenagers.
Giving probation to a 17 year old who commits an armed robbery is doing neither the community or the young thug any favors.
Just a thought. If the U.S. required some type of mandatory service for young people (men and women), either the military, community service organizations, a new program, there might be a lot less need for prisons. Since we don't have that requirement, youth convicted of a crime will get the structure and the adult supervision they need in prison.