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20 Chapter 2 Prisons and Crime This chapter provides an overview of numerous issues that need to be considered in an examination of prison systems. These issues include exploring how philosophies, policies, politics, and economic factors drive the growth of prison systems, and whether there is a relationship between the growth of prisons and a reduction in crime. Before we can begin to examine whether a bigger prison system is better , we have to define what we mean when we ask whether one type of prison system is better than another. For the purposes of this book, a better prison system is one that has a crime suppression effect, or one that reduces the level of crime in society .After all, isn’t this why societies build and employ prison systems: to reduce crime? To be sure, crime reduction, whether through rehabilitation , deterrence, or incapacitation, has always provided the philosophical underpinnings for imprisonment (except if one adopts a pure retributive perspective, Newman, 1985). Indeed, if all society wanted to achieve was the simple punishment of criminal offenders, there would be better options or at least other alternatives to consider (Newman, 1985). In any event, the first criterion of a better prison system is that it should reduce crime. Thus, we can ask two questions about America’s prison system. First, does the big prison system currently operating in America fulfill this goal? And second, has making the prison system bigger led to continual reductions in crime? We could add additional questions here, perhaps addressing the marginal gain in crime reduction that would occur for every 100 persons sent to prison. At this point, any additional questions can wait since asking and answering them is contingent on establishing the answer to the first two questions. In addition to reducing crime, being better also implies that bigger prisons should do their task more efficiently than some other alternative. Prisons and Crime 21 That“something else”may be smaller prisons,or prisons organized around a different approach to crime and criminals than the current system, or even the use of responses to crime that do not involve imprisonment, such as adding jobs, enhancing the educational system, or improving life in other ways. An additional criterion that we can consider is the cost of imprisonment .Why consider costs? It may be that prisons are equally as efficient as other crime control mechanisms. But, if the other mechanisms cost less, then they could be considered more effective because the unit costs (cost per crime) are lower.The “costs” of a system of punishment, however , are not restricted to financial issues.There are, for example, social costs involved when systems of punishment get too big (Clear, 1994), which may involve immeasurable impacts such as threats to democratic principles of social organization that may move society toward totalitarianism (Christie, 1994). There are also human costs to the offenders we lock up that we often disregard (Clear, 1994). These costs are not, however, limited to the offender. If we lock up and ignore large numbers of inmates, we create an even bigger problem than we started with—we create a population of alienated ex-offenders who might be more willing to resort to crime upon their release. There are also costs to the families of offenders and their communities that typically are not addressed when we examine the effects of imprisonment on society (Clear, 1994; Rose and Clear, 1998). Several of these aspects of “being better” will be touched upon in the pages that follow, but interested readers are directed to Todd Clear’s research for more extensive discussion. Even though being better implies that prisons are better than something else, this book cannot possible hope to provide the ultimate answer to the question of whether our big prison system is a better crime solution than some other system. It would be impossible to test the assumption relating bigger prisons to crime control everywhere, in every possible circumstance, or all its forms.To do so would require vast amounts of data on various historical periods, different cultures, and for a number of penal alternatives, some of which have not been fully or correctly implemented. Consider, for instance, that the data needed to address this question from a historical perspective are limited to the extent that recorded crime data are not necessarily available for the entire history of a prison system. For example, in the United States, the prison system dates [3.141.30.162...

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