Punishment & Prison

The short version of this is that the United States imprisons more people--both per capita and in absolute numbers--than any other country in the world.  We have 5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners.  No other country comes close.

• Total number of Americans in the prison system over time.
  • U. S. Prison Population 1980-2015

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  • Prison_Population
• Mass Incarceration:  The Whole Pie 2016, by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy.  Prison Policy Initiative, 2016. Excellent set of resources on the total number of persons in the criminal justice system in 2016 and and high levels of "churning" in local jails--prisoners going in or out of jail.  People go to jail over 11 million times each year.  Of the 640,000 individuals in jail at any given time, 70% have not been convicted of any crime.  99% of jail growth in the last 15 years was due to incarceration of people who are presumed innocent.  People go to jail over 11 million times each year.
• States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2016, by Peter Wagner and Alison Walsh.  June 16, 2016.  "This graph shows the number of people in state prisons, local jails, and federal prisons from each state and D.C. per 100,000 people in that state or territory and the incarceration rate per 100,000 in all countries with at least a half million in total population. This graph shows that the District of Columbia has a slightly higher incarceration rate than Louisiana and that every state in this country is more likely to incarcerate its residents than almost every other nation on the planet." 
• Trends in Incarceration.  The Sentening Project.  December 2015.  Not only tracks the number of people incarcerated, but also the costs, the distribution by offense, drug-related incarceratons, women in prison, racial disparities, number of youths, number of disenfranchised, and the number of life sentences without parole.
• Collateral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility.  Pew Charitable Trusts.  A striking report on the impact of imprisonment on subsequent economic earning-power. 
• One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008.  A classic report from the Pew Center on the States.  A bit dated now, but not much.  One in 31 persons is in the criminal justice system: prison, jail, parole, or probation.  Economic pressure--the high cost of imprisonment--has curbed this a bit.
• "Punishment Rate Measures Prison Use Relative to Crime."  The Pew Charitable Trusts, Mardh 23, 2016.  Typically, studies measure the imprisonment rate: the number of people imprisoned per 100,000 population.  Pew has proposed a new metric, the punishment rate, the size of the prison population relative to the frequency and severity of crime in a particular jurisdiction.  This promises to be an interesting metric in the coming years.

• Department of Justice Statistics.  The official resource, updated regularly.  Here's their overview of the total numer of Americansin the preson system:
• Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.  NAACP.  Special emphasis on the impact of the criminal justice system on African Americans.
• Federal Bureau of Prisons: Statistics.  This only covers federal prisons, but offers an up-to-date set of statistics with helpful breakdowns into subcategories.
• Center for American Progress: Criminal Justice

In the United States, whre you commit a crime (and are convicted) can have a significant impact on the severity of your sentence.  This is not only true going from one state to another, but even from one county (and its prosecutor) to another.  See Keller, Josh, and Adam Pearce. “This Small Indiana County Sends More People to Prison Than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., Combined. Why?.” The New York Times 2 Sept. 2016. Consider the following discrepancy, from the NYT article cited above:

According to the NYT article, local prosecutors--who are dependent on the citizens of the county for reelection--have cracked down dramatically on crime while big cities have scaled back greatly because of the cost of imprisonment.  In these small localities, even though the crime rates are declining, there is growing worry about crime and voters see longer sentences as the answer.  Interestingly, most of these incarcerations are of white men, not blacks or Hispanics. 

One of the striking aspects of the American criminal justice system is the high percentage of prisoners who are black.  Here's an overview from the Prison Policy Initiative:

Recividism--released convicts reoffending and returning to prison--continues to be high.  The National Institute of Justice notes a study of almost half a million prisoners released in 2005.  The results were discouraging:

• "Within three years of release, about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
• Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
• Of those prisoners who were rearrested, more than half (56.7 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year.
• Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime compared with 76.9 percent of drug offenders, 73.6 percent of public order offenders and 71.3 percent of violent offenders."

Recidivism of Sex Offenders

• Roger Przybylski, in a 2015 study "Recidivism of Adult Sexual Offenders," noted that accurate data are difficult to obtain, but concluded that:
  • "The observed sexual recidivism rates of sex offenders range from about 5 percent after 3 years to about 24 percent after 15 years.
  • "Sex offenders—regardless of type—have higher rates of general recidivism than sexual recidivism.
  • "Sex offenders have lower rates of general recidivism but higher rates of sexual recidivism than non-sex offenders.
  • "Different types of sex offenders have markedly different rates of recidivism....
    • "the highest observed recidivism rates are found among child molesters who offend against
      boys.
    • "Comparatively lower recidivism rates are found for rapists, child molesters who victimize girls, and incest offenders.
  • "Female sex offenders have lower rates of recidivism than male sex offenders."

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Classical theories of deterrence (Hobbes, Beccaria, and Bentham) maintain that there are three main factors determining the strength of deterrence.  It must be:

• swift (celerity)
• certain
• severe

This was largely unchallenged for several centuries.  Several criminologists, most prominently Mark Kleiman, argue that increasing severity often is the enemy of swiftness and certainty of punishmnet.  The more severe the punishment, the more procedural safeguards are raised, making the process slower and less certain. 

Typically, punishment is seen as aiming at two goals, one backward-looking and one forward-looking:

• Retribution: paying the criminal back for the pain and suffering inflicted;
• Rehabilitation: transforming the criminal into a responsible member of society who is not a danger to others.

In addition, recent theorists have advanced a third goal:, also forward-looking:

• Reconciliation, a re-establishment of the original harmony that was disrupted by the crime.

The United States is one of the few countries that treats juveniles as adults.  A great start on reading about this issue is the series of articles that have apppeared here in The Atlantic. 

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5.8 million Americans cannot vote because they have been convicted of a crime.  Although felony disenfranchisement was present in many of the original thirteen founding states, it was not until Reconstruction that a number of southern states broadened the scope of felony disenfranchisement in ways that resulted in significantly more African Americans becoming disenfranchised, and this has continued to the present day.

• One in 56 white Americans are disenfranchised because of ciminal convictions,
• while 1 in 13 black Americans are denied the right to vote.

• For more information, see the Sentencing Project's page on Felony Disenfranchisement. and its report 6 Million Lost Voters:. 2016.http://www.sentencingproject.org 
• Lai, K K Rebecca, and Jasmine C lee. “Why 10% of Florida Adults Can’t Vote: How Felony Convictions Affect Access to the Ballotl” The New York Times 6 Oct. 2016 .

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, introduced his plan for a model prison: The Panopticon. a structure that allows guards to see everything and prisoners to see nothing.  It provided, in Bentham's eyes, the most cost-effective way of keeping an eye on prisoners, with the advantage that prisoners never knew exactly when they were under surveillance.

Far before any surveillance technology allowed from group surveillance, Bentham’s design allowed a single individual to observe many prisoners—and yet remain unobserved himself.  Moreover, the prisoners could not see one another because of dividing panels between cells. 

In fact, because the observation booth was shrouded in darkness, the guard might not even be present!

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) became one of the most significant commentators on punishment and discipline in contemporary society, and he was a thoughtful and insightful commentator on Bentham’s Panopticon. 

In the United States, supermax prisons have often on the design of Bentham's Panopticon:

Built in 1927, Stateville Correctional Facility included four towers that were explicitly modeled on Bentham’s Panopticon. 

One of these towers still exists today and was used to house high security inmates.

The design of the panopticon is such that prisons cannot see the guard, but the guard can see all of them.

Many of us are familiar with stun guns, the best known of which areTasers, which shoot an electrode at a person in order to disable them.  The electrode emits an extremely rapidly pulsating current that incapacitates the person by making muscles contract so rapidly that they fatigue the muscle, rendering the subject helpless.  They are one of a category of nonlethal weapons designed to subdue without permanent injury, although there have been cases in which they have resulted in serous injury or death.  They are not intended to cause pain, but to force compliance.

In recent years, a variant of this technology was developed by Stun Tech Inc., caled stun belts, again as a tool for compliance.  These are strapped on a person (usually someone already in jail or prison) as a belt.  When activated by remote control, it renders the subject incapable of movement.  In contrast to the stun gun technology, the electrode is already in contact with the subject, so there is no "shooting" involved.  Moreover, the stun belt can be remotely activiated at any time that it is on the individual.

There are certain advantages to this technology.  When a violent prisoner has to appear in court, a stun belt can be fitted under the prisoner's clothes and the prisoner can appear in court without manacles, handcuffs, etc.  It also has applicability in certain medical situations with dangerous prisoners.  If a doctor is performing a procedure with a scapel on a dangerous criminal, there might be a concern that the prisoner could grab the scapel and either harm the physician or take the physician hostage.  If the prison is wearing a stun belt, a guard merely has to press the button to incapacitate the prisoner.  In this scenario, no electrical charge would be conveyed to the physician (or anyone else touching the prisoner).

The possibility of abuse of this technology is high, and Amnesty International has called for an international ban on the use of stun belts, aruing that they are instruments of torture.  Currently only the United States and South Africa use this technoloogy.

• Lawrence M. Hinman, "Stun Devices Open the Way to Abuse," Los Angeles Times,  August 10, 1998.
• Lawrence M. Hinman, "Stunning Morality."  Criminal Justice Ethics, 17, 1 (1998). 

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It seems peculiar, at first glance, to think that a jail or prison would charge its inmates for the cost of their imprisonment, yet this in fact has become increasingly common.  In some cases, families are sent a bill when relatives go to jail.

• "Criminal Justice Debt."  Resources on this topic from the Brennan Center for Justice.

In addition, and sometimes in conjunction with the above, jurisdictions charge defendants for unpaid court fees and jailing them when they are unable to pay.

• Joseph Shapiro, "Unpaid Court Fees Land The Poor In 21st Century Debtors' Prisons." 
• Murch, Donna. “Paying for Punishment .” Boston Review (2016): 1–14. Web. <http://bostonreview.net/editors-picks-us/donna-murch-paying-punishment>.
• Chase, Robert. “Slaves of the State: Prison Uprisings and the Legacy of Attica .” Boston Review (2016).   An interesting review of Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016) and a discussion of prison labor as slave labor.  See the IWW Incarcerated Workings Organizing Committee: https://iwoc.noblogs.org/post/2016/04/01/announcement-of-nationally-coordinated-prisoner-workstoppage-for-sept-9-2016/.

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Much of the current penal situation derives from understandable motives: legislators and voters, feeling (whether rightly or wrongly) that the situation is out of control, and the only possibility is to get tougher.  Few want to see whether being tougher is more effective--at least it's something.