Imprisoning People Doesn't Protect the Public
- 6 years ago
The massive rise in the prison population isn't one of the primary reasons that crime has decreased.
Question: Why has crime, generally, declined over the past 20
years? Robert Perkinson: We have seen a historic
decline in crime all through the 1990's. It has not yet in a very
significant way picked up with this recession. We've seen, and this is
very important for people to realize, crime rates in some cases drop
more steeply in states that have not incarcerated such huge portions of
their populations. One of the steepest declines has been in New York
City, which has sent a whole lot of people to jail on Rockefeller drug
laws, but nothing like the South. And yet crime in New York has fallen
much more steeply then in Houston or Dallas. So the crime drop is a
great riddle for social scientists to figure out, but critically, at
least I think it's important for people to know that the massive growth
of incarceration is, we think, not one of the largest determining
factors in decreasing that crime. Incarceration has been going up
straight since the 1970's. In some of the periods incarceration
has been going up crime has been going up, other times down. But there
is not a clear correlation between incarceration and protecting the
public. In fact, one of the statistics you would think you would have
gotten if you believe in a kind of weak version of deterrence, you would
think that all of these harsher penalties would at least deter some of
the people who know the criminal justice system best—criminals and
former prisoners—from committing crimes. Because they do become, even
if their levels of education attainment are somewhat limited, through
being cranked through the criminal justice system, they learn a lot of
the criminal law and they know the penalties are very harsh. So if
deterrence were to work and if imprisonment was an effective way to deal
with crime, you would think that recidivism rates in the United States
would be lower now than they were when the prison boom began, when
penalties were comparably more mild. Instead, the opposite has
occurred, recidivism rates have gone up. One more piece of evidence
that shows this experiment in mass incarceration has been one the one
hand a total failure in terms of protecting the public. On the other
hand a catastrophe for the weakest members of our... the most vulnerable
members of our society, including those who are more victimized by
crime. That's also in the poor neighborhoods. It hasn't helped them in
any way. Their people are getting shipped off to rural prisons and
then those rural prisons are getting the census money and so on, and
they are still suffering high rates of crime. So, it's a mess, I'm
afraid. Question: Is the monetary cost of
incarceration less than the cost of crime?Robert
Perkinson: People have tried. It's harder to do than people have
claimed. Some economists have said, well even if you are spending
$50,000 a year to lock someone up, as is the price in California where
the corrections officers are well paid, because that person you are
putting behind bars would have committed 'X' number of crimes, then
you're actually saving money. But those studies kind of fall apart for a
whole series of reasons. They're based on surveys of certain classes
of criminals that don't correlate very well to who is actually in
prison. They don't take into account the ways that crime can't just be
thought of as a subtraction from the economy. I mean as strange as it
sounds... If I steal $100 from you, that doesn't decrease the GDP of the
United States, that just means that I have $100 to spend and generate
economic activity and you don't. So, it's not a subtraction, it's not a
cost to society, it's a cost to you. It's not a cost to society. So
those studies don't hold up very well. I mean, it's true that I think,
you know, that incarceration is not something that we're going to be
able to get rid of entirely. There are people who are extremely
dangerous. A very small portion, it's important to realize. We think
that prison beds are filled with dangerous sexual predators and armed
robbers and serial killers because that's how it seems watching the
nightly news. That's not the case. Most people going into prison are
non-violent offenders in a given year, and most of them are drug
offenders, or are hooked on alcohol and so on. Recorded April 14, 2010
Question: Why has crime, generally, declined over the past 20
years? Robert Perkinson: We have seen a historic
decline in crime all through the 1990's. It has not yet in a very
significant way picked up with this recession. We've seen, and this is
very important for people to realize, crime rates in some cases drop
more steeply in states that have not incarcerated such huge portions of
their populations. One of the steepest declines has been in New York
City, which has sent a whole lot of people to jail on Rockefeller drug
laws, but nothing like the South. And yet crime in New York has fallen
much more steeply then in Houston or Dallas. So the crime drop is a
great riddle for social scientists to figure out, but critically, at
least I think it's important for people to know that the massive growth
of incarceration is, we think, not one of the largest determining
factors in decreasing that crime. Incarceration has been going up
straight since the 1970's. In some of the periods incarceration
has been going up crime has been going up, other times down. But there
is not a clear correlation between incarceration and protecting the
public. In fact, one of the statistics you would think you would have
gotten if you believe in a kind of weak version of deterrence, you would
think that all of these harsher penalties would at least deter some of
the people who know the criminal justice system best—criminals and
former prisoners—from committing crimes. Because they do become, even
if their levels of education attainment are somewhat limited, through
being cranked through the criminal justice system, they learn a lot of
the criminal law and they know the penalties are very harsh. So if
deterrence were to work and if imprisonment was an effective way to deal
with crime, you would think that recidivism rates in the United States
would be lower now than they were when the prison boom began, when
penalties were comparably more mild. Instead, the opposite has
occurred, recidivism rates have gone up. One more piece of evidence
that shows this experiment in mass incarceration has been one the one
hand a total failure in terms of protecting the public. On the other
hand a catastrophe for the weakest members of our... the most vulnerable
members of our society, including those who are more victimized by
crime. That's also in the poor neighborhoods. It hasn't helped them in
any way. Their people are getting shipped off to rural prisons and
then those rural prisons are getting the census money and so on, and
they are still suffering high rates of crime. So, it's a mess, I'm
afraid. Question: Is the monetary cost of
incarceration less than the cost of crime?Robert
Perkinson: People have tried. It's harder to do than people have
claimed. Some economists have said, well even if you are spending
$50,000 a year to lock someone up, as is the price in California where
the corrections officers are well paid, because that person you are
putting behind bars would have committed 'X' number of crimes, then
you're actually saving money. But those studies kind of fall apart for a
whole series of reasons. They're based on surveys of certain classes
of criminals that don't correlate very well to who is actually in
prison. They don't take into account the ways that crime can't just be
thought of as a subtraction from the economy. I mean as strange as it
sounds... If I steal $100 from you, that doesn't decrease the GDP of the
United States, that just means that I have $100 to spend and generate
economic activity and you don't. So, it's not a subtraction, it's not a
cost to society, it's a cost to you. It's not a cost to society. So
those studies don't hold up very well. I mean, it's true that I think,
you know, that incarceration is not something that we're going to be
able to get rid of entirely. There are people who are extremely
dangerous. A very small portion, it's important to realize. We think
that prison beds are filled with dangerous sexual predators and armed
robbers and serial killers because that's how it seems watching the
nightly news. That's not the case. Most people going into prison are
non-violent offenders in a given year, and most of them are drug
offenders, or are hooked on alcohol and so on. Recorded April 14, 2010