Prison is one of the least effective ways to reduce criminal behavior, and locking up drug dealers and users has no impact on crime whatsoever. There are far more effective and cheaper ways to reduce criminality.
Unfortunately they take a generation to really have an impact, so in the meantime we probably need mass incarceration. I don’t agree with the author that we “don’t know how to rehabilitate” prisoners. We do know that teaching usable job skills, education and a strong support net upon release have a substantial impact on recidivism. They are expensive though and not popular with the “get tough on crime” crowd. There is a reason we he single advanced economy has fewer criminals and a lower recidivism rate.
The prisons are not really run by the prison guards, they are run by prison gangs. If you don’t go in a gang member, you have to become one for self preservation. That is a sad and unnecessary state of affairs.
"to keep those who obey the law and just want to live their lives safe from those who would prey on them" <- I think this is the best (and perhaps only, justifiable) reason for prisons. I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of prison for purposes of "rehabilitation." That can quickly get pretty condescending. Sometimes the circumstances of someone's life DO lead to violence as a kind of solution, but that doesn't mean the rest of us ought to bear the consequences of that violence (though we certainly have a responsibility to build a society where that happens left often." Even so, "rehabilitation" of *anyone* is mostly an internal, rather than external job (though of course loving friends and mentors helps!). Now those who are locked up OUGHT to have access to books/libraries, exercise possibilities, religious services, counseling services, 12-step resources, educational opportunities, employment, as well as nutritional food, etc. But they shouldn't be coerced into much of anything. Prisons shouldn't, then, primarily be a punitive measure either, as the state just doesn't have that kind of moral high ground. But something like, 'You violated an important societal trust, and therefore we're going to protect ourselves from you for a while' seems pretty reasonable.
I don't give a rat’s ass about these dirtbag career criminals and 'rehabilitating' them over SAVING innocent citizens' lives!!! Stopping the madness immediately is THE priority - we'll deal with attempting to help these vile, subhuman, murderous dregs of society AFTER we get them off our streets.
Glenn, are you seriously arguing against Ralph's position ? Please tell me you're ONLY playing the Devil'sAdvocate? If not, you're literally taking a position that flies in the face of every anti-evil ghetto pathological culture tenet you've become righteously famous for espousing on this very podcast!!!!
Respectfully, my God, wtf has happened to you, Glenn?
Ralph's worldview and putting it into
motion is EXACTLY the bulwark our
country desperately needs to prevent the total, existential collapse into Soros cashless bail, pro-criminal, HELL!!!
If you think prisons are bad, then imagine a society without them. Oh, wait; you don't have to imagine. You can simply look at the one city after another that bend over backwards to release offenders almost as soon as they're booked into a jail. How's that worked out for the law-abiding? We can certainly debate which offenses are worthy of incarceration.
Someone busted for weed is not the same as someone accused of a violent crime, but we have a VP whose biggest "achievement" while AG was to warehouse black men for relatively minor drug offenses. From that end of the spectrum to Illinois' virtual elimination of cash bail for just about every crime, the indifferent view toward victims already taken across most American cities, and fallout from the defund movement, there is an empirical mess left behind by the soft approach to law enforcement.
It's ironic how attacks on cops arose from a pretense of concern over black lives. I don't hear much of that concern during the current crime spike whose victims are disproportionately minorities. Why not? And the party that panders to minorities is the same party pushing to make the justice system less of a factor in society. That's easy to do when you live in gated areas and have men with guns providing daily protection. But what if you live in "that" part of town or one of those parts? Platitudes about social justice and other talking points are useless.
California convict crews fight wildfires. They are some of the best crews out there. After release, people who worked on these crews, even felons, are eligible to work for Cal Fire. It's a small rehabilitation program that provides an immensely valuable service and a potential path out for the convicts.
There are only two ways for a society to reduce the prison population:
1. You can increase the severity of the punishment, which increases the opportunity cost of committing crime. For example, there were very few instances of theft in the twelfth century after Edward recommended blinding and castrating anyone who stole cattle.
2. You remove the crime. In other words, theft becomes legal, drugs become legal, etc.
Everything else is predicated upon culture.
For example, there is no such thing as a juvenile delinquent, there are only delinquent parents". And these delinquent parents don't instill certain values in their children because they don't subscribe to any values themself. If you tell your children that whitey is oppressing them or the rich are oppressing them or ______ fill in the blank is oppressing them, that the system is rigged, then gangster culture seems like a pretty good alternative to that "rigged system". And that type of culture then progresses as every culture does from one generation to the next. Dad is in prison because the system is rigged, mom has a low paying job because the system is rigged, grandfather told me that I should try to "get rich or die trying"; my friends tell me that nothing matters but the "money and the ho's"; I've got take down the rigged system; and lo and behold, the end result is an over crowded prison for predominantly petty crimes, many of which go unpunished because prisons are already overtaxed, increasing the likelihood the crime is committed again. But that is a cultural problem, not a legal problem.
The do-gooders who seek to blame this criminal behavior on the "system" instead of within the individual who committed the crime, permit this type of cultural disease to continue on unabated.
Not sure I understand. If parents are somehow responsible for the criminal acts of juveniles (presumably for failing to instill proper values) why shouldn't "society" bear responsibility for its presumptive "failure" to emphasize those proper values and suppress negative ones? Seems to me you can't blame one source without indicting the other.
There is a significant difference between deliquency and responsbility. I didn't say parents are "responsible" for the crimes of juveniles, only that there is a correlation between delinquent parents and juveniles who later turn into delinquents. Parents who discipline their children, who instill moral values, usually produce law abiding citizens.
Delinquency is typically predicated upon the adoption of certain cultural precepts: namely, the person believes they are victims of some fictitious oppressor, that an external force seeks to subjugate them, and that their only chance to move up the social ladder is to participate in criminal behavior.
All of this is delusional. And pity and compassion, and reinforcing that delusion is not the answer to the problem.
Indicting society is also immoral. The law abiding Montana farmer is not responsible, financial or otherwise, for the individual crimes committed by some degenerate in NYC. And if a community, such as NYC becomes so degenerate that imposition is necessary, then the best imposition is the state of nature. Federal aid only subsidizes bad behavior and bad policy. When residents realize that certain policies lead to degeneracy, crime, economic collapse and anarchy, and when they realize that no aid will prop up their community, then the culture will change because survival will depend on it.
No, its a relatively small proportion of the prison population, but it’s not in absolute terms a trivial number. But it’s also important to understand what sort of criminal enterprises these people were involved in and for what and why they were charged the way they were. “Involved with drug crimes” does not to me automatically mean an entirely nonviolent, “victimless” class of offenders. If someone is knowingly dealing fentanyl for example, let alone on a large scale, let alone as part of an extremely violent cartel or gang, they’re hardly involved in committing minor let alone victimless crimes. I was arrested over twenty years ago for simple possession of marijuana - maybe an eighth of weed at most - packed in luggage in the back of a car, solely for personal use and to share with the friends we were visiting. I had to charge almost $1,000 to retain a lawyer and pay back another almost $1,000 over a six month period I was on probation. And the arrest record did come up occasionally even several years later when I was applying for jobs. I think this sort of scenario - or maybe a guy with a few ounces in his attic who sells to friends and friends of friends - is what we tend to imagine when we’re primed to think of the unjust incarceration of people who committed “low-level, nonviolent drug crimes”. And this is the message we’re getting from people who actually do send to think prison abolition is realistic and desirable, or that some absurd proportion of people in prison - like half or more -can be safely released into some sort of vague restorative community environment with no real restraints or restrictions. Notice also how many people released to public from jails or pre-trial, with electronic monitoring in places like Chicago, have quickly committed horrific violent crimes. Clearly critical decision makers judged those defendants or convicts as not posing a significant risk to the public. So I think we need to be very careful both about who these people currently imprisoned for “drug-related” crimes really are and what they really did, and clear eyed about the actual extent of the ideological agenda-driven decarceration and prison abolition advocates are calling for.
Other penal systems in other counties have a much lower recidivism rate and a much lower incarceration rate. We are obviously doing something wrong. More of the same, just harder, isn’t an answer.
There are all kinds of reasons this could be true. We’re dealing with quite different cultures and populations for one thing. I wonder if the same relatively lenient, rehabilitative approaches undertaken with some real apparent success in Nordic countries have or will be as effective in combating the unprecedentedly violent organized gang and clan crimes being committed by some newer migrants. It would be better for an expert like Rafael Mangual to explain his own findings or his conclusions from other research, but I noticed he argued that rates of incarceration in this country are not out of line with rates of incarceration in other countries, relative to rates of violent criminal offending. I saw Lara Bazelon’s debate with Mangual in Bari Weiss’s Commonsense, and she almost immediately implies that the same stats: lower rates of offending and lower rates of incarceration in certain other countries must mean lower rates of incarceration “work” and either are the cause of lower rates of offending in those places or do not make those rates worse. She appears obsessed with how hard prison is on prisoners while regarding talk of what’s done to the victims of violent criminals in society as almost solely some sort of racist sensationalism, the mention of which warps our criminal justice policies in the most counterproductive ways. She appears obsessed with the notion that this is driven almost entirely in the US by a societal desire to just demonize and brutalize people with dark skin on behalf of an almost nonexistent cohort of sympathetic (white, young, old) victims. Personally, I wonder which horror stories she’s cherry-picking and extrapolating from, and what decade of American life she thinks we’re currently inhabiting. Of course it could be that rates of incarceration in the countries to which she refers could be lower because there is just less serious crime, especially violent crime. There could be less concentrated poverty or less of a cultural endemic to some areas which justifies and normalizes violent crime. It could be that in some largely affluent, at least heretofore very culturally homogenous, high-social-trust societies, with very generous welfare states there is less serious and deeply-engrained criminality and greater available resources available for and ease at developing and applying effective means of rehabilitating prisoners and providing them with educational and vocational programs which would plausibly offer them a much better chance of enjoying a decent life post-incarceration if they earn and work towards those opportunities while in prison. Maybe there are or at least were until recently in those countries simply much less of a concentrated culture of violent criminality for an ex-convict to be drawn back into. It’s not like I think dehumanizing or brutalizing prisoners is a great idea or one justified by the demand for retribution.
There need to be consequences and clear incentives, good and bad. Generally, I’d tend to favor the least punitive and certainly the least cruel outcome that really truly actually works when it comes to serious criminals in this society, this context in which we actually live. It would be great to achieve better success at rehabilitation and reintegration into society. But where we see social justice-fueled leniency in the US, we tend to see results which make the advocates of such policies look awfully naive if not blinded by ideology or even a predetermined refusal to hold accountable members of certain intersectionally prized groups. We still have vestiges in this country of a culture that laughs at prison rape. Or treats inmates being horribly beaten by other inmates as entertainment or just desserts. These phenomena - the violence and justifications of it - make me sick. I don’t want anyone to suffer more than they have to. But the implication that we’ll somehow get to lower rates of violent criminality if we mimic what other affluent western countries have been able to achieve with very different cultures, populations, concentrated centers of endemic criminality or relative lack thereof …and of course with much lower rates of violent crime in the first place, strikes me as wildly, almost delusionally naive. I think Mangual is right to focus on the necessity of incapacitation absent proven, scalable alternatives. Whereas Bazelon comes across as the ultimate, ultra-privileged white savior who is driven to rescue black men in particular from the criminal justice system because she seems convinced most could have only ended up there due almost entirely to bad luck, being victims of mistaken identity or circumstance, or, most of all, personal and institutional racism.
Ted: Old saying: "Seeing is believing." Whatever happened to "Scared Straight," taking at risk youth on a tour of prison hell-holes to see what awaits them for choosing to break the law? No longer feasible? Do they disbelieve? Offer the salvageable constructive alternatives, such as job skill training if academic achievement is a bad fit. Their choice. We have prisons to protect society from wrongdoers. Repeat offenders have chosen a life of crime so deserve what they get, including a record that bars them from honest pursuits thereafter. Honest or crooked, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Do the crime, do the time, worsening the odds of a decent life, assuming they don't die while breaking the law. Voluntarily spending an hour in solitary confinement should be enough to convince any hot shot from any background if he has any sense at all. "Save thyself, fool!"
Although I can see the psychological impact/value that retribution can play in society and can serve as a deterrent for people taking the "law into their own hands" in some cases, morally, it is not something that I'm in agreement with. I do feel that the role that prisons should serve is deterrence and as an isolation of the dangerous element from society. But I'd also like to see a greater emphasis on rehabilitation. Often prison sentences carry a punishment way beyond that which is served behind bars and former inmates do not have the tools to reenter society as well as being shunned. We need better systems for ensuring that once the "debt is paid" they get a better chance at starting over. There is also a difference between someone who commits a violent crime vs a non-violent one. We need to do a better job learning which rehabilitative practices work, and also prison systems should not be a one-size-fits all. There are some in countries that are rather self-sustaining—even in max security, an incentive for well-behaved prisoners, who get to live more independently and grow their own crops, etc. The costs are also lower as result. It currently costs about 50-60k per inmate, yet their lives are pretty awful. I don't think they need to be a walk in the park (eg. for the deterrent element) but nor do they always need to be hell...it needs to be whatever is going to ultimately serve the best outcome for both the prisoner and the community.
I just finished Shane Bauer's book, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (NY: Penguin Press, 2018). And it's the business end--the privatization of prisons--that leads to the greatest abuses. I think anyone interested in prison reform should read this well-researched and sobering insider's view. Includes photos and transcripts.
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
This subject is extremely difficult to discuss rationally. People have trouble holding in their mind at one time two seemingly incompatible ideas:
1. We have a moral obligation to maintain the social compact as justly as possible (I won't take justice into my own hands if I have a reasonable assurance the state will protect me). This includes the incapacitive benefit of incarceration.
2. We have a moral obligation to treaty people we incarcerate - even the deeply and irredeemably sociopathic or psychopathic - humanely.
Furthermore, there are many deeply mentally ill people who are - if we are fair - less than fully in control of their actions. Some of them are very dangerous. The obligation to protect the innocent from these people requires that we find a decent way to isolate and protect them and us. We have not yet found such a way.
If the formal criminal justice system is seen as failing to stop violent crime an alternate informal system will take its place or operation side by side. It is called vigilante justice. And it is ugly and not terrible accurate in targeting the right people. Keeping people's faith in the formal system is the only way to avoid that outcome. And currently that is not happening.
Great conversation. May I recommend an excellent book for those interested in this topic? “ghettoside” by joy Leovy. Exceptionally well written and, IMO, accurate capture of the dynamics at force in cities addressing violent crimes. I was a prosecutor of violent crime for several years in a big city and this book sums it up perfectly. Highly recommend.
It's not just the victims of violent crimes that are impacted. I grew up in central Oakland and having seen a murder crime scene at the very intersection where I used to do "traffic patrol", I am now concerned for my safety enough not to want to go back and stroll my old neighborhood. I hope we don't regress back to the Wild West where most everything was settled with a .45 on the spot, from what I see we're getting too close to that for comfort!
Prison is one of the least effective ways to reduce criminal behavior, and locking up drug dealers and users has no impact on crime whatsoever. There are far more effective and cheaper ways to reduce criminality.
Unfortunately they take a generation to really have an impact, so in the meantime we probably need mass incarceration. I don’t agree with the author that we “don’t know how to rehabilitate” prisoners. We do know that teaching usable job skills, education and a strong support net upon release have a substantial impact on recidivism. They are expensive though and not popular with the “get tough on crime” crowd. There is a reason we he single advanced economy has fewer criminals and a lower recidivism rate.
The prisons are not really run by the prison guards, they are run by prison gangs. If you don’t go in a gang member, you have to become one for self preservation. That is a sad and unnecessary state of affairs.
"to keep those who obey the law and just want to live their lives safe from those who would prey on them" <- I think this is the best (and perhaps only, justifiable) reason for prisons. I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of prison for purposes of "rehabilitation." That can quickly get pretty condescending. Sometimes the circumstances of someone's life DO lead to violence as a kind of solution, but that doesn't mean the rest of us ought to bear the consequences of that violence (though we certainly have a responsibility to build a society where that happens left often." Even so, "rehabilitation" of *anyone* is mostly an internal, rather than external job (though of course loving friends and mentors helps!). Now those who are locked up OUGHT to have access to books/libraries, exercise possibilities, religious services, counseling services, 12-step resources, educational opportunities, employment, as well as nutritional food, etc. But they shouldn't be coerced into much of anything. Prisons shouldn't, then, primarily be a punitive measure either, as the state just doesn't have that kind of moral high ground. But something like, 'You violated an important societal trust, and therefore we're going to protect ourselves from you for a while' seems pretty reasonable.
Ralph is 100% right!!!!
WE HAVE TO STOP THE BLEEDING!"
I don't give a rat’s ass about these dirtbag career criminals and 'rehabilitating' them over SAVING innocent citizens' lives!!! Stopping the madness immediately is THE priority - we'll deal with attempting to help these vile, subhuman, murderous dregs of society AFTER we get them off our streets.
Glenn, are you seriously arguing against Ralph's position ? Please tell me you're ONLY playing the Devil'sAdvocate? If not, you're literally taking a position that flies in the face of every anti-evil ghetto pathological culture tenet you've become righteously famous for espousing on this very podcast!!!!
Respectfully, my God, wtf has happened to you, Glenn?
Ralph's worldview and putting it into
motion is EXACTLY the bulwark our
country desperately needs to prevent the total, existential collapse into Soros cashless bail, pro-criminal, HELL!!!
If you think prisons are bad, then imagine a society without them. Oh, wait; you don't have to imagine. You can simply look at the one city after another that bend over backwards to release offenders almost as soon as they're booked into a jail. How's that worked out for the law-abiding? We can certainly debate which offenses are worthy of incarceration.
Someone busted for weed is not the same as someone accused of a violent crime, but we have a VP whose biggest "achievement" while AG was to warehouse black men for relatively minor drug offenses. From that end of the spectrum to Illinois' virtual elimination of cash bail for just about every crime, the indifferent view toward victims already taken across most American cities, and fallout from the defund movement, there is an empirical mess left behind by the soft approach to law enforcement.
It's ironic how attacks on cops arose from a pretense of concern over black lives. I don't hear much of that concern during the current crime spike whose victims are disproportionately minorities. Why not? And the party that panders to minorities is the same party pushing to make the justice system less of a factor in society. That's easy to do when you live in gated areas and have men with guns providing daily protection. But what if you live in "that" part of town or one of those parts? Platitudes about social justice and other talking points are useless.
Excellent analysis of the issue.
It is enough to examine incentives.
However one defines transgression, it is obvious that it accelerates when it becomes an adaptive response.
The way to halt adaptive learning is to interrupt it.
If we wish to prevent jails and prisons from being trade schools for criminal activity, the teachers must be separated from the students.
California convict crews fight wildfires. They are some of the best crews out there. After release, people who worked on these crews, even felons, are eligible to work for Cal Fire. It's a small rehabilitation program that provides an immensely valuable service and a potential path out for the convicts.
There are only two ways for a society to reduce the prison population:
1. You can increase the severity of the punishment, which increases the opportunity cost of committing crime. For example, there were very few instances of theft in the twelfth century after Edward recommended blinding and castrating anyone who stole cattle.
2. You remove the crime. In other words, theft becomes legal, drugs become legal, etc.
Everything else is predicated upon culture.
For example, there is no such thing as a juvenile delinquent, there are only delinquent parents". And these delinquent parents don't instill certain values in their children because they don't subscribe to any values themself. If you tell your children that whitey is oppressing them or the rich are oppressing them or ______ fill in the blank is oppressing them, that the system is rigged, then gangster culture seems like a pretty good alternative to that "rigged system". And that type of culture then progresses as every culture does from one generation to the next. Dad is in prison because the system is rigged, mom has a low paying job because the system is rigged, grandfather told me that I should try to "get rich or die trying"; my friends tell me that nothing matters but the "money and the ho's"; I've got take down the rigged system; and lo and behold, the end result is an over crowded prison for predominantly petty crimes, many of which go unpunished because prisons are already overtaxed, increasing the likelihood the crime is committed again. But that is a cultural problem, not a legal problem.
The do-gooders who seek to blame this criminal behavior on the "system" instead of within the individual who committed the crime, permit this type of cultural disease to continue on unabated.
Not sure I understand. If parents are somehow responsible for the criminal acts of juveniles (presumably for failing to instill proper values) why shouldn't "society" bear responsibility for its presumptive "failure" to emphasize those proper values and suppress negative ones? Seems to me you can't blame one source without indicting the other.
There is a significant difference between deliquency and responsbility. I didn't say parents are "responsible" for the crimes of juveniles, only that there is a correlation between delinquent parents and juveniles who later turn into delinquents. Parents who discipline their children, who instill moral values, usually produce law abiding citizens.
Delinquency is typically predicated upon the adoption of certain cultural precepts: namely, the person believes they are victims of some fictitious oppressor, that an external force seeks to subjugate them, and that their only chance to move up the social ladder is to participate in criminal behavior.
All of this is delusional. And pity and compassion, and reinforcing that delusion is not the answer to the problem.
Indicting society is also immoral. The law abiding Montana farmer is not responsible, financial or otherwise, for the individual crimes committed by some degenerate in NYC. And if a community, such as NYC becomes so degenerate that imposition is necessary, then the best imposition is the state of nature. Federal aid only subsidizes bad behavior and bad policy. When residents realize that certain policies lead to degeneracy, crime, economic collapse and anarchy, and when they realize that no aid will prop up their community, then the culture will change because survival will depend on it.
https://www.city-journal.org/myth-of-the-nonviolent-drug-offender
Some more thoughts germane to this conversation.
About 20% in federal and state prisons are locked up for drug crimes. It’s 400,000 people, not a small number.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
No, its a relatively small proportion of the prison population, but it’s not in absolute terms a trivial number. But it’s also important to understand what sort of criminal enterprises these people were involved in and for what and why they were charged the way they were. “Involved with drug crimes” does not to me automatically mean an entirely nonviolent, “victimless” class of offenders. If someone is knowingly dealing fentanyl for example, let alone on a large scale, let alone as part of an extremely violent cartel or gang, they’re hardly involved in committing minor let alone victimless crimes. I was arrested over twenty years ago for simple possession of marijuana - maybe an eighth of weed at most - packed in luggage in the back of a car, solely for personal use and to share with the friends we were visiting. I had to charge almost $1,000 to retain a lawyer and pay back another almost $1,000 over a six month period I was on probation. And the arrest record did come up occasionally even several years later when I was applying for jobs. I think this sort of scenario - or maybe a guy with a few ounces in his attic who sells to friends and friends of friends - is what we tend to imagine when we’re primed to think of the unjust incarceration of people who committed “low-level, nonviolent drug crimes”. And this is the message we’re getting from people who actually do send to think prison abolition is realistic and desirable, or that some absurd proportion of people in prison - like half or more -can be safely released into some sort of vague restorative community environment with no real restraints or restrictions. Notice also how many people released to public from jails or pre-trial, with electronic monitoring in places like Chicago, have quickly committed horrific violent crimes. Clearly critical decision makers judged those defendants or convicts as not posing a significant risk to the public. So I think we need to be very careful both about who these people currently imprisoned for “drug-related” crimes really are and what they really did, and clear eyed about the actual extent of the ideological agenda-driven decarceration and prison abolition advocates are calling for.
Other penal systems in other counties have a much lower recidivism rate and a much lower incarceration rate. We are obviously doing something wrong. More of the same, just harder, isn’t an answer.
There are all kinds of reasons this could be true. We’re dealing with quite different cultures and populations for one thing. I wonder if the same relatively lenient, rehabilitative approaches undertaken with some real apparent success in Nordic countries have or will be as effective in combating the unprecedentedly violent organized gang and clan crimes being committed by some newer migrants. It would be better for an expert like Rafael Mangual to explain his own findings or his conclusions from other research, but I noticed he argued that rates of incarceration in this country are not out of line with rates of incarceration in other countries, relative to rates of violent criminal offending. I saw Lara Bazelon’s debate with Mangual in Bari Weiss’s Commonsense, and she almost immediately implies that the same stats: lower rates of offending and lower rates of incarceration in certain other countries must mean lower rates of incarceration “work” and either are the cause of lower rates of offending in those places or do not make those rates worse. She appears obsessed with how hard prison is on prisoners while regarding talk of what’s done to the victims of violent criminals in society as almost solely some sort of racist sensationalism, the mention of which warps our criminal justice policies in the most counterproductive ways. She appears obsessed with the notion that this is driven almost entirely in the US by a societal desire to just demonize and brutalize people with dark skin on behalf of an almost nonexistent cohort of sympathetic (white, young, old) victims. Personally, I wonder which horror stories she’s cherry-picking and extrapolating from, and what decade of American life she thinks we’re currently inhabiting. Of course it could be that rates of incarceration in the countries to which she refers could be lower because there is just less serious crime, especially violent crime. There could be less concentrated poverty or less of a cultural endemic to some areas which justifies and normalizes violent crime. It could be that in some largely affluent, at least heretofore very culturally homogenous, high-social-trust societies, with very generous welfare states there is less serious and deeply-engrained criminality and greater available resources available for and ease at developing and applying effective means of rehabilitating prisoners and providing them with educational and vocational programs which would plausibly offer them a much better chance of enjoying a decent life post-incarceration if they earn and work towards those opportunities while in prison. Maybe there are or at least were until recently in those countries simply much less of a concentrated culture of violent criminality for an ex-convict to be drawn back into. It’s not like I think dehumanizing or brutalizing prisoners is a great idea or one justified by the demand for retribution.
There need to be consequences and clear incentives, good and bad. Generally, I’d tend to favor the least punitive and certainly the least cruel outcome that really truly actually works when it comes to serious criminals in this society, this context in which we actually live. It would be great to achieve better success at rehabilitation and reintegration into society. But where we see social justice-fueled leniency in the US, we tend to see results which make the advocates of such policies look awfully naive if not blinded by ideology or even a predetermined refusal to hold accountable members of certain intersectionally prized groups. We still have vestiges in this country of a culture that laughs at prison rape. Or treats inmates being horribly beaten by other inmates as entertainment or just desserts. These phenomena - the violence and justifications of it - make me sick. I don’t want anyone to suffer more than they have to. But the implication that we’ll somehow get to lower rates of violent criminality if we mimic what other affluent western countries have been able to achieve with very different cultures, populations, concentrated centers of endemic criminality or relative lack thereof …and of course with much lower rates of violent crime in the first place, strikes me as wildly, almost delusionally naive. I think Mangual is right to focus on the necessity of incapacitation absent proven, scalable alternatives. Whereas Bazelon comes across as the ultimate, ultra-privileged white savior who is driven to rescue black men in particular from the criminal justice system because she seems convinced most could have only ended up there due almost entirely to bad luck, being victims of mistaken identity or circumstance, or, most of all, personal and institutional racism.
https://www.city-journal.org/myth-of-the-nonviolent-drug-offender
I wanted to append this piece to this discussion - which I appreciate.
Ted: Old saying: "Seeing is believing." Whatever happened to "Scared Straight," taking at risk youth on a tour of prison hell-holes to see what awaits them for choosing to break the law? No longer feasible? Do they disbelieve? Offer the salvageable constructive alternatives, such as job skill training if academic achievement is a bad fit. Their choice. We have prisons to protect society from wrongdoers. Repeat offenders have chosen a life of crime so deserve what they get, including a record that bars them from honest pursuits thereafter. Honest or crooked, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Do the crime, do the time, worsening the odds of a decent life, assuming they don't die while breaking the law. Voluntarily spending an hour in solitary confinement should be enough to convince any hot shot from any background if he has any sense at all. "Save thyself, fool!"
Although I can see the psychological impact/value that retribution can play in society and can serve as a deterrent for people taking the "law into their own hands" in some cases, morally, it is not something that I'm in agreement with. I do feel that the role that prisons should serve is deterrence and as an isolation of the dangerous element from society. But I'd also like to see a greater emphasis on rehabilitation. Often prison sentences carry a punishment way beyond that which is served behind bars and former inmates do not have the tools to reenter society as well as being shunned. We need better systems for ensuring that once the "debt is paid" they get a better chance at starting over. There is also a difference between someone who commits a violent crime vs a non-violent one. We need to do a better job learning which rehabilitative practices work, and also prison systems should not be a one-size-fits all. There are some in countries that are rather self-sustaining—even in max security, an incentive for well-behaved prisoners, who get to live more independently and grow their own crops, etc. The costs are also lower as result. It currently costs about 50-60k per inmate, yet their lives are pretty awful. I don't think they need to be a walk in the park (eg. for the deterrent element) but nor do they always need to be hell...it needs to be whatever is going to ultimately serve the best outcome for both the prisoner and the community.
I just finished Shane Bauer's book, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (NY: Penguin Press, 2018). And it's the business end--the privatization of prisons--that leads to the greatest abuses. I think anyone interested in prison reform should read this well-researched and sobering insider's view. Includes photos and transcripts.
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
This subject is extremely difficult to discuss rationally. People have trouble holding in their mind at one time two seemingly incompatible ideas:
1. We have a moral obligation to maintain the social compact as justly as possible (I won't take justice into my own hands if I have a reasonable assurance the state will protect me). This includes the incapacitive benefit of incarceration.
2. We have a moral obligation to treaty people we incarcerate - even the deeply and irredeemably sociopathic or psychopathic - humanely.
Furthermore, there are many deeply mentally ill people who are - if we are fair - less than fully in control of their actions. Some of them are very dangerous. The obligation to protect the innocent from these people requires that we find a decent way to isolate and protect them and us. We have not yet found such a way.
If the formal criminal justice system is seen as failing to stop violent crime an alternate informal system will take its place or operation side by side. It is called vigilante justice. And it is ugly and not terrible accurate in targeting the right people. Keeping people's faith in the formal system is the only way to avoid that outcome. And currently that is not happening.
Great conversation. May I recommend an excellent book for those interested in this topic? “ghettoside” by joy Leovy. Exceptionally well written and, IMO, accurate capture of the dynamics at force in cities addressing violent crimes. I was a prosecutor of violent crime for several years in a big city and this book sums it up perfectly. Highly recommend.
It's not just the victims of violent crimes that are impacted. I grew up in central Oakland and having seen a murder crime scene at the very intersection where I used to do "traffic patrol", I am now concerned for my safety enough not to want to go back and stroll my old neighborhood. I hope we don't regress back to the Wild West where most everything was settled with a .45 on the spot, from what I see we're getting too close to that for comfort!
Gun sales went up dramatically after the riots beginning in 2020 and all the “defund police” talk. What did they think would happen?
I believe 9mm and .40 S&W are the calibers of choice these days...