When a judge hands a sentence to someone who’s about to go to jail, there are four main factors that go into the decision. There’s retribution (punishing the person for doing something wrong), rehabilitation (correcting problematic behaviour), safety (keeping threats out of the community) and deterrence (making sure both they, and others, are scared off of breaking the law in the future).
Research shows that long prison sentences don’t really work on several fronts... there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that the threat of prison time actually deters ex-prisoners from committing crimes. Criminals seem to value the future less than non criminals, one study found, meaning that long sentences can seem “arbitrary”, and only work to deter up to a point. Education played a role too, with lesser educated criminals seemingly less put off by a harsher sentence.
It seems to make sense that if you don't have much to live for you won't value your own behaviour, or care very much if you're punished and you're already miserable.
Studies also show that reoffending remains high. A 2009 study found that in the US, after three years in prison, 67% of the prisoners were rearrested for a new offence, 46.9% were reconvicted for a new crime, and 25.4% were resentenced to prison. In the UK, almost 70% are reconvicted within a year of release.
Major caveat :
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/10/why_do_so_many_prisoners_end_up_back_in_prison_a_new_study_says_maybe_they.html
In short (someone please do correct me if I'm wrong !!), taking a random sample of prisoners from a limited period and tracking them later is biased. At any given moment you're more likely to be sample those serving long duration sentences and/or the kinds of criminals who do re-offend, while you'll be missing those who were imprisoned once and then never got in trouble at all.
I haven't read the linked paper claiming that most criminals actually don't re-offend at all, but what surprises me is why any study would sample the data like this. I would (hugely naively) presume that government statisticians could simply access the records of everyone ever incarcerated and very easily determine the fraction of the total who ever re-offended. Then you could do all kinds of interesting cuts on the data but this basic total ought to be easy... ? I'm currently envisaging that some statistician is now rolling on the floor with laughter at my naivety.
One reason is because many criminals think they won’t get caught… even after they’ve been caught once, experts say. The threat of a long prison sentence does not therefore deter them from a criminal lifestyle.
The US, in particular, is a near all-encompassing case study of what happens in a place with long prison sentences. In the US, the number of prisoners has quadrupled since the 1970s – and now, as prison terms get longer, people are spending even more time in prison. Most prisoners are incarcerated for drug or violence-related offences.
The US also has some of the longest prison sentences in the world due to its cultural values including an extreme emphasis on personal responsibility, religious belief in good and evil, and the idea that a community has the moral imperative to stamp out bad deeds. It may be little surprise that a common US argument in favour of long prison times is the old maxim “if you can’t serve the time, don’t do the crime.”
Well, as I was saying not so long ago, it's an interesting question as to when personal responsibility is dominant and when the effects of the system are more to blame. In Europe there's much more of a balance between the two. In the US there's an attitude that people just need to be better, somehow.
King says countries like the US needs to look at alternatives – more violence prevention so that crimes aren’t committed and people don’t end up in jail in the first place. “I don’t mean hiring more cops and prosecutors,” King says. “Relying on police coming in is a reactive response. Doing something more proactive requires deeply investing in these communities.”
Thomas Ugelvik, a criminology professor at the University of Oslo, says that these open prisons are cheaper, built on prisoner trust and, in some ways, may be tougher to do time in: more responsibility is expected of the prisoners. It’s almost like freedom, but the inmates still have sentences to serve.
These Norwegian prison sentences help lead to rehabilitation, something not always seen in long prison sentences. Research shows it has among the lowest rates of reoffending in the world – 20% compared to 67% in the US over two and three years of leaving prison, respectively. Even more surprising perhaps is that the average prison sentence length in Norway is only eight months.
Even for allowing for the possibly flawed statistics, I would imagine that the relative comparison should be fair.
Ugelvik adds that there’s no real perimeter security in such places and that often, prisoners have been transferred there from a more high-security facility. The threat of being shipped back there if you act out is a successful deterrent, he says.
Low security isn’t for everyone, though, and when the system takes a chance on someone, it’s a result of strict risk assessments. The belief, Ugelvik says, is that prisoners thrive on trust. “When you have spent time in high security and get a transfer to a more open regime, it feels like the system trusts you at least a little bit,” he says. “You have to be able to put your own imaginary walls around yourself in a low-security prison, and most prisoners, most of the time do that successfully.”
Which seems plausible enough to me. If you educate (and suitably provide for) people to realise that they actually have a life worth living without criminal behaviour, whilst simultaneously showing them the downsides of crime, then using both the carrot and the stick together ought to be more effective than either alone.
When it comes to drug offences at least, the best way to overcome the downsides of long prison sentences may be to look at the issues that resulted in prison time. The hope here is that it could prevent people from entering into the criminal world.
That’s why Nellis explains that the criminal justice system doesn’t have to be the only response to illegal behaviour, “particularly for non-violent drug and property offences. Usually there’s an underlying addiction. We can address the addiction with a more evidence-based approach – one that deals with prevention and intervention and treatment, rather than a criminal justice system, which has [little] expertise on drug addiction at all. We can make a bigger impact.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180514-do-long-prison-sentences-deter-crime
Scandinavia in its collective and unabashed experimental and progressive humanism almost always excels in embarassing the rest of the world. Portugal also struck a telling blow in favour of intelligence and sanity when they inverted their drug policy. There are so many governments in this world, so many policy-makers, and there are so few intelligent and conscientious people in positions of power. Alas...
ReplyDeleteCommon effects of having ADHD include poor impulse control, which can contribute to a whole class of crimes, and 'future blindness', which can contribute to overactive discounting of future, in both the intuitive analysis of rewards and costs. By a catch-22 cleverly designed by Nixonistas, possession of what were once readily available OTC ADHD medicines has become punishable more heavily than most of the crimes their judicious administration could prevent.
ReplyDeleteThe US is a special case here because prisons make money (or divert it from public to private coffers) for some actors/corporations/political lobbyists. The incentives are different and attract both different behaviours and different kinds of actors - specifically ones that have no interest in rehabilitation but are smooth enough marketers to pretend that they’re concerned about safety. They thrive on the willingness of the US public to turn a blind eye to the problems of “bad people.”
ReplyDeleteThat same willingness completely changes the inprisoned/free distinction for people with criminal records, for whom “outside” is a lot like being in prison but without a bed or food provided. Almost the only people in “free” society who are willing to employ an ex-con are themselves criminals.
One case where long prison sentences is justified is for those with a compulsion to commit violent crime. Specifically, serial killer and serial rapists. Those are (to simplify a bit) mental conditions that are impossible to cure. The problem is, in this case, "long" must be "life sentence". In France, life sentences don't exist in practice - most prisoners with a life sentence end up released after 20 years (maximum 30 for the most barbaric crimes).
ReplyDeleteWhich means that a serial killer caught at 20 will be back at 40, and they generally aren't caught again. They learned from their mistakes the first time, and only the dumbest and/or unluckiest ones are caught in the first place.
Of course, one can wonder about the horror of locking anyone to life, even those kind of individuals. One can also wonder about the financial cost to the State. And the same problems are also there with death sentence.
In a society with ubiquitous surveillance, such individuals can be controlled, which (if they know the surveillance is efficient) can also work, but we are barely reaching the required tech level.