Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Chapter 8. What Now?

chAPter 8 what now? In this book, we have documented a tremendous shift in criminal justice policy in the United States that has rendered the nation first in the world in the number of its residents who are involuntarily confined in prisons and jails. Over three decades, our incarceration rate has more than quadrupled, with commensurate increases in the public resources devoted to maintaining our prisons and jails. There is very little evidence that this shift is the result of higher crime rates. In fact, U.S. crime rates are at all-time lows. On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence that a constellation of federal and state legislation intended to allow law enforcement “to be tough on crime” has increased the propensity to punish offenders with a prison sentence and increased effective sentence lengths. It is true that higher incarceration rates do to some degree buy us lower crime rates. There is a crucial and highly policy-relevant distinction, however, between the average impact of a change in the incarceration rate on crime and the marginal effect of a change in the incarceration rate on crime. That is to say, on average the increase in the incarceration rate from 100 to 500 per 100,000 lowered crime, and we could tabulate the average number of crimes prevented per inmate. However, the policy changes that marginally increased our incarceration rate from, say, 400 to 500 per 100,000 generated much smaller, perhaps negligible effects on crime. At higher incarceration levels, WHAT NOW? 241 policy-induced increases in the incarceration rate come from adding to already lengthy sentences for inmates who are relatively old in terms of the age-offending profile or from incarcerating more marginal offenders who pose relatively low risk to society when not institutionalized. A key implication of this distinction between average and marginal effects is that further increasing an already high level of incarceration generates increasingly smaller benefits per inmates in terms of crime reduction. Conversely, lowering the incarceration rate from a high level does not necessarily increase crime rates. Our analysis raises an important question: are we overusing prisons in the United States? We can think of several possible frameworks for thinking about this normative question. First, we could ask whether the benefits in terms of crime prevented of increasing the incarceration rate from, for example , 400 to 500 per 100,000 outweigh the budgetary and social costs associated with such an increase. In other words, holding constant all other efforts and social investments devoted to controlling crime, can we justify our policy of maintaining a high incarceration rate based on the crime effects alone? Of course, framing the question in this manner ignores the fact that there are other options in the policy tool kit that can be used to address crime. The many possible interventions that have proven to be effective in reducing national crime rates include policing and specific policing strategies, drug treatment , early life human capital investments, remedial educational investments, and cognitive retraining for adults with criminal history records. Hence, a complete assessment of whether we overuse incarceration must consider the relative benefits of all possible policy interventions and the effects of reallocating resources from one intervention to another. In other words, can we come up with an alternative constellation of crime control policies and criminal sanctions that would reduce incarceration and the attendant collateral costs yet maintain crime rates at acceptably low levels? We believe that the answer to this question is yes. However, affecting such a policy shift would require a proactive approach to crime control rather than a reactive set of institutions that address crime after the fact. Such a policy would require fundamental reforms to sentencing practices and the creation of a more balanced distribution of discretion in the criminal justice system between prosecutors, judges, and correctional authorities. Such a policy shift would also require that we acknowledge and accept that low crime rates today 242 WHY ARE SO MANY AMERICANS IN PRISON? can be achieved from social investments made in the past and that lower crime rates in the future require that we maintain current levels of social investment today. Finally, such a policy shift would also require that we explicitly acknowledge the enormous social costs of the incarceration boom that extend way beyond the budgetary impact on states. Here in our final chapter, we offer our thoughts on these questions. We begin by...