[Alyssa Rosenberg]
I was reading Dwayne's post on Juvenile Life Without Parole this morning, and the last paragraph really stood out me:
"I don't think our justice system has evolved to something more
productive and effective than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. In
most other industrialized nations, life is something conceivable like
30 years or 50 years, and parole is an option. These nations have lower
incarceration rates than the US - they have less crime. Somewhere our
justice system got off track - we replaced medieval guillotines and
rope for jail cells that don't aim to rehabilitate."
As I mentioned yesterday, I did some volunteer work in the Massachusetts prison system a while back, and in my day job at Government Executive, I occasionally write stories about staffing and the challenges prison guards face in the federal prison system. So I'm interested in the question of how we can create strong, sustainable rehabilitative programs for people who are incarcerated, and how we keep prison guards feeling secure enough to do their jobs and create disincentives for prisoners to use violence against guards and vice versa.
Clearly, it's possible to create good rehabilitative programs. The one I worked in required the women involved to go through alcohol and narcotics treatment, and intensive job training and parenting classes. The incentives were pretty good: if they completed their classes, they got to see their daughters twice a month, through a program that was handling all the hassles of getting their daughters to the prison and also checking in on how they were doing in school, with foster families, etc. The one mother who got out of prison while I was involved with the program did find work when she was released. But as sections of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family (and of course many other sources) point out, who gets into those programs can be haphazard, and they're not necessarily widely available, given the stark cuts in funding for educational programs in prisons. I think it's good to have volunteer-run programs, but unless they operate on a very wide scale, volunteer programs can erode fairly easily, and if they rely on bringing people in from the outside, risk getting snarled in swiftly-shifting bureaucracies.
Mark Salzman's book about the writing classes he teaches in Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, True Notebooks, make a point that dovetails with Dwayne's argument. After Salzman's been teaching for a while, one of the prison staffers he's built a relationship with tells Salzman he's making the boys he teaches feel special. Salzman takes it as a compliment, but the staffer explains that it's not: Salzman's classes make it harder for his students to blend into the general prison population, a problem that's particularly acute for the many prisoners he teaches who are facing life sentences without the possibility of parole for murder. In other words, JLWOP doesn't just foreclose kids' lives, it provides an extremely strong argument against engaging in any sort of rehabilitative activity.
All of which highlight exactly how awful our adult prison system is. And it's awful for guards as well as for prisoners. Not that their experiences are the same, of course. But it's well worth reading Ted Conover's Newjack, his memoir of working in Sing Sing, especially the scene where he subdues his own child with a "use of force" technique he learned on the job, as a jumping off point for a discussion of what working in a prison does to a person.
My reporting experience is based in the federal prison system, where between 2002 and 2006, the number of prison guards fell by 4,600, even as the federal prison population rose from 145,000 in 2000 to 205,000 today. (And the Sacramento Bee reports today that Michigan is trying to save prison guard jobs by offering to house California prisoners for a fee, a policy that would dramatically uproot prisoners from family and whatever ties they have left to the outside world.) I'm entirely receptive to the idea that we're incarcerating far too many people, but I think that preserving a relatively low prisoner-to-guard ratio is a good idea. Having more guards creates disincentives for prisoners to attack them, and having more guards available means it's easier to subdue someone without using lethal force. The Bureau of Prisons and the American Federation of Government Employees are currently negotiating over whether to provide all prison guards in the federal system with custom-fitted stab-resistant vests and non-lethal weapons like pepper spray and tasers. I'm not really sure about the wisdom of the latter, but it does seem like helping prison guards feel that, even if they're attacked, they're likely to survive, is probably a good thing.
The issue is particularly heated because of the stabbing death of a federal prison guard, Jose Rivera, last year, who was attacked by inmates drunk on jailhouse-brewed liquor. The prison where he worked wasn't disciplining inmates who were caught drinking (nor were they, as it turned out, aware that inmates were ripping up cleaning equipment to make weapons). When he was attacked, he was the only guard inside a secure area of the prison, and administrative staffers came to his defense first because there wasn't anyone in proximity who had a key to let other guards into the secure unit. When someone dies under circumstances like that, you can see why the union representing the prison guards is heated.
But those circumstances are possible only when you've got a system that isn't even bothering to try to change for the better the people it's incarcerating. If your reaction to the wide availability of home brew is relief that it gets folks drunk and docile, rather than to try to get folks into AA, you're giving up both on the possibility of improvement of prisoners and the safety of officers. If rehabilitation can give prisoners another chance at life, and can make prison guards safer, it seems like a worthwhile investment. There are costs to giving up on people that locking them up forever doesn't eliminate.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I emailed a link to the earlier post about juvenile justice to my lawyer friend, and her reaction was very much this-- we keep working on a 19th-century paradigm, which didn't work particularly well back then.
The problem in a nutshell is conservatives. They want punitive "justice", by which they really mean revenge.
Josh,
Spoken as a true believer who has no idea what conservatives want. They want to be safe. Since rehabilitiation fails for the vast majority of criminals they prefer prisons. Maybe in your next reponse to a well reasoned post noting there are no easy answers you can avoid suggesting an easy answer so incredibly naive it doesn't even pass the laugh test among leftists.
Are you talking about violent or non-violent criminals? 1st-timers or repeat offenders? Without clarification and some support I'm more than a tad skeptical of your statement.
You certainly can't be suggesting that we should be locking up every 18 year old kid unlucky enough to be caught with a few grams of weed with murderers and rapists, can you?
It certainly doesn't help to have prison systems which benefit financially from keeping people locked up and local govts which see prisons as replacements for factories. And from what I have heard from older guards the drug trade has just corrupted everything. But in my clincal experience mandated treatment is almost an oxymoron as it's very hard to stay clean and sober when you have self-motivation and hope so we have to be careful about trends like the drug courts which send people to rehab as if that will do the trick. I think that if socgrad where here we would be reminded that without the opportunity for meaningful employment there is little hope for folks who find themselves at the edges of our society and many of these people lack the social skills needed to even begin job training so this will require massive and interconnected efforts for which we currently lack any real govt office/program so we will see what Obama and all do.
Rehabilitation is largely irrelevant unless the justice system offers a meaningful parole system. But that won't happen unless sentencing systems move away from determinate-sentencing models where the convict serves a specified amount of time and is then automatically released. Otherwise rehabilitative activities are a nice thing for prisoners to do, but there's little incentive to do them.
The better question may be can we create more pockets of productivity in prison. I agree with Bill that there has to be a meaningful parole system, but I don't see how that is possible when people get sentenced to thirty and forty years and a hundred years. At some point we have to take a step back and admit that prison is a land where the rule of law is violence. It's what is put in place by guards, by other inmates and by the judicial system. But that's just not effective. Still, since we have no alternatives, we are trapped with prisons as the most unproductive places.
Even medium and low security prisons are unproductive - because getting there is never really about a means to better programming, it's about a way to escape violence and get closer to one's family.
Also, this just isn't a popular topic. Prisons are filled with men who have been found guilty of crimes, and people think that they should pay for their crime - not be able to sit in a cell and get better than the people who never committed crimes.
Our society generally disdains "social engineering", but according to criminologist Elliott Currie, mass imprisonment is the most thoroughly implemented social experiment in US history.
MJ - Spoken as a true believer who has no idea what conservatives want. They want to be safe.
Nah. They want revenge. It's why they support torture. Not because it works, but because it hurts people they're angry at.
The safety thing is a sham to get people to think that's what they're getting. If real safety was an issue, they'd actually look at places that had low crime rates and try to emulate them, instead of piling on punishment and expecting it to work, despite evidence to the contrary.
I think Alyssa Rosenberg's post on prisons is spot on, and her experience seems similar to that of guards and inmates in at least some state prisons. One of my brothers is a prison guard in Huntsville, another spent four years in prison, and I work for an organization called Grassroots Leadership that works to prevent privatization of public jails and prisons. (We have a blog if anyone is interested: texasprisonbidness.org)
The state falls short of meeting the required 1-48 guard-to-inmate ratio by nearly 3,000 guards, and the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice requested $200 million to fill that gap before the legislative session began. Because of the state's strapped budget, TDCJ received no additional funding. So we have eighteen and nineteen year olds-- like my brother and his fiance-- guarding the understaffed prison facilities.
I must add this, though-- When we add to the slew of normal problems in prisons the complicating element of privatization, things get worse-- less oversight by the state, unresponsiveness to open record requests, annual staff turnover rates of 90% (compared to 43% for public facilities), lower guard-to-inmate ratios, and perhaps worst of all-- a financial interest in housing more and more prisoners. By allowing privatization of prison facilities, we actually make guards and prisoners less safe, and we see real threats to public safety manifest themselves. The organization I work with has teamed with a criminologist and a public policy analyst to faithfully document the outcomes of Texas' privatization experiment on a blog, http:www.texasprisonbidness.org.
Every once ina while I catch one of the prison documentaries on MSNBC or some other channel. What always amazes me is that for being such a supposedly controlled environment how much goes on that should not be tolerated. Guards are very candid about who belongs to what gangs and what contraband prisoners have access to. Why is this tolerated? The prison system should exist to enforce discipline, breakdown criminal networks and reintegrate people into society. There should be intensive efforts to identify those prisoners who are willing and able to be reformed and maximize resources to ensuring that happens.
I worked in correction for two decades. We can and have in the past made corrections less harmful than it is currently. We lack the leadership will. Perhaps the crushing expense of prisons can cause us to loosen our variety of ideological grips and look to what social science and a few agencies find can lower recidivism and incarcerations in the first place. That we lump those enslaved to addiction and the mentally disabled in with the few cold blooded is at best an incredible embarrassment.
Senator Webb has introduced legislation designed to take an honest look at what should be done. S.714 is making its way through the process with extensive support. Perhaps we realizing that the actual assaults on our standards of living are not from street criminal rather by those we trusted with our economic well being.