Recidivism

Recidivism is another important aspect of overcrowded prisons. According to Ryan Mack, sixty three percent of prisoners return within three years of release from prison. This has a dramatic effect on the ability of our prisons and jails to reduce inmate populations, leading to continuous growth in our prisons. If 63% of our prisoners are simply caught in a revolving door act with prisons, it is no wonder that we have such a overburdened prison system. Given the other policies and tendencies of our Criminal Justice System, our recidivism numbers only exacerbate the problem, ensuring that we keep most of those we lock up for their lives.

A Wisconsin Sentencing Commission released a comprehensive report on how best to curb recidivism and what factors to take into account when doing so. Their findings suggested that when considering a sentence, there are three factors that need to be taken into account, those being: Objectives, Facts, and Effectiveness.

What is the goal of the sentence? If it’s a drug offender, it might be to stop his addiction problem and turn him into a productive member of society. If it’s a violent sex offender, it might be to keep the community safe, considering the needs of society over the needs of the individual. Is the goal of the sentence that is being imposed to punish? Or is it to rehabilitate? Or is it to incapacitate and deter? Consider that our objective for one offender may not be the same as another. If we are dealing with a murderer, we might simply impose a sentence as a punishment for taking another human’s life, rather then to rehabilitate them. Murderers are rather unlikely to reoffend statistically (CDCR), but that doesn’t mean we should simply let them go, they need to face a serious punishment for such a serious crime.

What are the facts of the case and the offender? Semmann suggests crafting sentences customized to each offender and his or her traits. He suggests “One possible strategy to develop an effective sentence is to predict who is likely to re-offend based on some quantity of recidivistic factors”. Semmann also cautions to take into account both aggregate facts and individual facts. In other words, judges need to take into account the unique information of the case in front of them, but also consider what the statistics say of other similar offenders and their propensity to re-offend. In some ways, the courts already do this, with their different specialized courts.

It is suggested in the same report by Semmann that we do not have enough information to determine what exactly is most effective for each offender in regards to sentencing options. Semmann quotes a Judge Michael Marcus who states “sentences are selected more on perceptions of sentences intuitively fitting a crime rather than on evidence that a given sentence has been proven to be successful at preventing future crimes.” Marcus goes on to state “we send thieves to theft talk, drunk drivers to alcohol treatment, bullies to anger counseling, addicts to drug treatment, and sex offenders to sex offender treatment… as a matter of symmetry rather than of science.” Marcus is saying that while these different treatments sound like a good idea in theory, that we do not have enough scientific backing to make the case that they are actually effective in curbing the wrongful behavior.

Finally Semmann and the Wisconsin Sentencing Commission have some suggestions on how to reduce recidivism: Continue to study traits specific to repeat offender groups; consider aggregate factors when sentencing; research new and different sentences; create uniform offender I.D. system for all state justice partners; expand information collected on sentencing guidelines worksheets; create system to identify and track sentence effectiveness; and to consider all three sentencing elements (Objectives, Facts, and Effectiveness) as one to reduce recidivism.

How are we to find the answer to such a serious problem if we do not have the necessary data to inform us? Like other facets of the Criminal Justice System, Corrections has been prone to this phenomenon of simply guessing that a program would work and implementing it before studying the results it would achieve.

Ultimately, the Wisconsin Sentencing Commission is suggesting that we need to collect far more data to determine how to effectively deal with recidivism. I believe that the Wisconsin Sentencing Commission has stumbled onto a rather large problem and have hit the nail on the head. We need to conduct more studies on what works and what doesn’t with reentry programs, with halfway houses, with all those programs aimed at reducing recidivism until we find something that is truly successful at reducing recidivism rates.

Sources: Mack, R. (2009). The Optimum October Fight Against Recidivism. Accessed March 21st, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-mack/the-optimum-october-fight_b_323483.html

Semmann, S. (2006). Three Critical Sentencing Elements Reduce Recidivism: A Comparison Between Robbers and Other Offenders. Accessed March 21st, 2010. http://wsc.wi.gov/docview.asp?docid=6679

Office of Research, CDCR (2007). Untitled. Accessed March 21st, 2010. http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/Annual/RECID2/RECID2d2004.pdf

Drug users and their contribution to prison overcrowding.

Over the course of the next few blogs, I plan to delve in depth on issues that are leading to overcrowding in our prisons and looking at ways to fix them. Specifically, I’ll be looking at drug users and how they contribute to prison overcrowding in this blog post. I’ll examine what history has shown us about drug users and treatment, how much of an impact they have on the prison population, if these drug laws have had a drastic effect on females in prison, and if we should imprison them.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve been down the beaten path with draconian drug laws. In the 1950s we started instituting mandatory minimum sentences for drug crime and surprisingly these laws were still in effect when the 1960s happened. The 1960s are synonymous with drug culture, yet at this time, there existed stiff penalties for possessing drugs. Under one of the biggest expansions of drug culture to date, we had these stiff penalties, suggesting that they were not accomplishing the intent of decreasing drug use.

A commission set up by President Kennedy recommended rehabilitation over imprisonment, stating that rehabilitation of the individual should be the intended result (Gill, 2008). This commission also found that stiff penalties and sentences were not very effective at all stating “persistence of narcotics abuse, despite severe penalties for the possession of narcotics abuse, is persuasive evidence that the abuser will risk a long sentence to get his drug” (Gill, 2008). We knew this back in the 1960s, so why are we repeating our mistakes well into 21^st century?

Drug users now occupy large amounts of both federal and state prisons. 55% of those serving time in Federal Prisons are there on drug offenses, with 11% being there for violent offenses (Sentencing Project). The majority of these drug offenders in federal prison were primarily low-level drug offenders (Gross, 2008). Gross found that “by 1998, 40% of all federal sentencing was for drug crimes, and federal prisons saw more than a 400% increase in the number of inmates sentenced on drug convictions.” (2008). State prisons, according to Sabol, West & Cooper, housed 1,331,100 prisoners in 2006, with 265,800 of those being drug offenders. Another interesting statistic according to Gross “between 1986 and 1991, drug offenders accounted for 44% of the increase in the state prison population” (2008). As we can see, drug offenses and our sentencing practices based on them have clearly had a drastic impact on our prison population.

Risley (2007) makes a good point when she questions our methodology of imprisoning drug users. She states “It's not like you can't get drugs in prison. You can get drugs anywhere, in any prison in this country. As long as there is one remaining orifice on the human body, it is impossible to stop the flow of drugs. The ingenuity of a desperate addict is quite amazing.” We need to realize that hard time is not a way to cure an addiction. Why put these addicts through a revolving door that quite simply does not seem to be working?

Consider that these previous figures do not take into account females doing time for drug offenses. The war on drugs has had an even more radical impact on women in prison than men, where the amount of women in prison increased by 420% from 1986 to 1996. Which incidentally resulted in 70% of the female prison population being low level drug and nonviolent offenders (Gross, 2008). Currently, we have 114,000 females in prison, which does not include those in jail (Sabol, West & Cooper). How many mothers have we taken off the streets to these draconian drug laws from the war on drugs? Has it made any difference? If our goal is to simply get these nonviolent drug users off the streets, I suppose you could say it has. If our goal was to keep them off the streets, however, then we should be sending them to rehabilitation, not incarcerating them.

Ultimately, America needs to decide what it wants to do as a nation in regards to these drug offenders. Do we want to help cure their addictions and get them back to being productive members of society? Or do we want to lock them up and throw away the key for their transgressions? Prison is no cure for an addict; we either commit to rehabilitation or accept the fact that these drug users will be in and out of prison for the rest of their lives.

Sources:

Gross, Bruce. (2008). Mandatory Minimums. Forensic Examiner, 17(3), 64-69

Gill, Molly M (2008). Correcting Course: Lessons from the 1970 Repeal of Mandatory Minimums. Federal Sentencing Reporter, 21(1), 55-67

Risley, Cristini http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michealene-cristini-risley/changing-our-prison-syste_b_75893.html

Sabol, West and Cooper, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf