Incarceration, an outdated system?

As I recently read an interesting article, “Reconsidering Incarceration”, published by Vera Institute of Justice in January 2007, I would like to bring up a few points for consideration.
In 1990, America saw a rapid drop in crime rate and a continued decrease for more than a decade. However, in the past couple of years, crime rate appeared to rise again. This shift in the crime rate may call for tougher and longer sentences. This actually will transform our prisons in human beings warehouses. Our already crowded prisons will become even more crowded, absorbing enormous resources. It costs tax payers annually $40,000 and up to incarcerated one inmate, depending of the type of prison.
We all know that in 1970 America began one of the largest experiments in the world, mass incarceration. From 1970 until 2005 our prison population grew by 628 percent. By the year 2000, 5.6 million Americans spent some time in a state or a federal prison. These huge numbers urged the scholars in the field to analyze if imprisonment is the most effective way to reduce crime. The result of these researches showed that incarceration was responsible for only 25% in the crime drop, registered between 1992 and 1997, and the remaining 75% was due to factors other than incarceration. Some of these factors were policing, education and employment. One study estimate for NY City shows that 24.3 billion dollars can be saved by investing in policing and not in incarceration to achieve the same level of public safety.
Incarceration is used to reduce crime by incapacitating active offenders and deterring “future” offenders. However, massive incarceration of drug offenders may reduce the effectiveness of prison. Most drugs offenders are non-violent offenders. So, by incarcerating these types of offenders and crowding our prisons, we prevent the incarceration of offenders that commit serious crimes. Incarceration is a reactive measure that responds to crime. Incarceration does not take into consideration the causes of crime. In the past 20 years, correction budget increases by 202 percent. All the other factors that seemed to have such a high impact on crime were mostly ignored. For example, in the same time frame, higher education grew by only 3 percent.
My question is: If there are so many other factors that can increase our public safety and save tax payers money, with all the studies done in the field, why policymakers still put emphasis on incarceration as the only measure to reduce crime?

Resilience: What Neil Young Can Teach Microsoft, And Us

Hi All,

I'm Stew Friedman, and I'd like to thank Prof. Stein for inviting me to post here. My Web site is http://www.totalleadership.org/, but I'm not yet posting blogs there. I will be soon.

In the meantime, I also blog at harvardbusiness.org, and here's my latest:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/friedman/2008/10/resilience-what-neil-young-can.html.

I'd love to get your comments.

/Stew

Continuning our discussion

I hope I'm not breaking the rules by posting.

I was sent a link to the Vagina Festival, and although I can't attend I thought maybe it would be of interest to some folks in the Vera Seminar, especially in light of the conversation we had on Thursday.

It's this weekend and it seems to be a collection of visual and performance art about femininity and also justice issues. One piece is about female genital cutting.

I believe parts of it are free. The link is vaginafestival.com

Being a Lady vs. Being a Woman

So far we’ve talked a lot about the injustices of the system that comprises our conception of criminal justice, especially those faced by the “accused”. We’ve also spent some time talking about some of the struggles we will and have faced as criminal justice workers or even observers. But, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the unique challenges, we, as women face; especially as we attempt to become leaders in a male dominated world and field.


A few weeks ago the New York Times had an article about the growing number of female corrections officers in New York City prisons. One of the officers interviewed for the article describes her need to harden herself for her job. She makes a distinction between ladies and women. Ladies, she explains, “do not belong in jail”. This is an issue I often discuss with my sister, as she is in construction management. There’s an inherent contradiction between being a good woman and being a good professional. On one hand we’re expected to be soft, pretty and helpless, but to do our jobs we need to be tough, serious and capable. This contradiction seems to be especially palpable when women have the responsibility of leading or delegating to male subordinates. I regret to say that my sister and I have yet to come up with a solution. We usually leave the conversation feeling very uneasy. Not only do we have to overcome sexual harassment and overall inappropriateness, but then it seems we have to work harder than our male counterparts just to prove ourselves. I understand that many of these problems are larger societal issues. So realistically, we may simply have to employ coping mechanisms to tolerate them. I wonder what coping mechanisms are appropriate and when they are healthy as opposed to enablers of injustice.

But, the article also pointed out some the benefits of having more women corrections officers. Statistically, NYC jails seem to be getting safer and less violent. This means that whatever dynamic the shift in the gender of corrections officers brings has had some positive effects. Whatever unique abilities women bring to their jobs (stereotyped or not) they can improve things. We shouldn’t necessarily abandon all things ‘feminine’ for success, when success is measured by a masculine paradigm. Rather, we should assess our abilities on an individual level. Hopefully, we can cultivate our personal virtues and talents and apply progressive compassionate justice to all levels of our mission in a way that transcends gender.

Wired for Justice

I recently read an article in the New York Times titled “Wired for Justice.” You can find the link on the right side of this page. While the article focused on our yearning to punish those who were responsible for the economic crisis, I would like to discuss the themes of the article in a broader sense. (Actually, I just want to avoid talking about the economic crisis...)

The piece discussed the “public’s urge for punishment.” One experiment mentioned in the article identifies the psychological motivation for this urge not as deterrence, but rather as just-deserts retribution; people tend to want to punish just for the sake of punishing. The article also said that the need for punishment is instinctual to humans and other animals.

The article mentioned one downside of our urge to punish: that the punishments seem to be spiteful. I have been thinking about the negative impact that our instinct to punish can have, like when we support punishments that do not effectively address the crime, criminal, or victim; when we want to punish, or get revenge, rather than identify a solution to the problem. I immediately think of sex offender notification laws, which were created basically on a whim to calm down the public’s hysterical reactions to sex offenders living “undetected” in their own neighborhoods. The enforcement of these laws has been problematic, and there has not been evidence to show that they effectively reduce sexual offending, but they do make the public feel safer- and therefore the public continues to support them. Many laws seem to do nothing but allow the public to retaliate against the criminal. Maybe the offender deserves to be retaliated against, and the public deserves to get their revenge, but I am wondering: are we “wired for justice,” or wired for revenge- and what, if any, difference is there between those two concepts?

Thinking out loud about the Mentor Coffee talk

We liked what we heard on Thursday about your intitial impressions of the experience so far. We'd like to hear more -- and we know that you are each other's best audience. So use the blog this week to talk about what you might talk about and to offer feedback to one another. You can post and then receive comments from others, or you can write your thoughts in the comments section to this post. Whatever works for you. Remember, we want 3 minutes max with a clear point and a memorable example. Professors Stein, Waterston and I will be reading, too, so feel free to ask questions.