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The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking Our Response by Henry Ruth and Kevin R. Reitz Harvard Univ. Press, 2003  When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) by Joan Petersillia Oxford Univ. Press, 2003 |
Last year, the United States marked an inauspicious milestone. The Department of Justice announced that as of June 2002, for the first time ever, two million of its citizens were behind bars. One of every 142 Americans was in prison or jail, one of the highest rates in the world.1 One in 37 is or has been incarcerated, including one in three African American males.2
The two-million mark could have been hailed as an achievement. President Gerald Ford all but set the goal of the past three decades of crime fighting in a 1975 address to Yale Law School. Since violent crime was caused by a "relatively few persistent criminals," the solution was simply to "get them off the streets," to "separate the law-breakers from the law-abiding society."3 Ford was complaining specifically about plea-bargain-happy prosecutors at a time when the nation's inmate population was less than half a million. But then and since, the call to "get tough on crime" has dominated political rhetoric. Now that we have incarcerated two million offenders, we should be feeling much more secure.
Yet even among many who believe that tougher enforcement and sentencing have been good for the nation on balance, the staggering size of the prison population has begun to raise some unsettling questions. Ten years after violent crime began to drop steadily, are we actually filling prisons faster at a time when there are fewer criminals to fill them with? And is violence really the reason many of them are locked up? As counterintuitive as it seems, it turns out to be difficult to demonstrate a relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates. Over the last three decades, rates of homicide and rape rose and fell like tides, with no clear causal relationship to the steady, nearly sixfold rise in the inmate population (and the corresponding surge in prison construction).4
In The Challenge of Crime, drawing on the work of criminologist Frank Zimring, Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz argue that the incarceration boom should be seen in roughly three phases. In the 1970s, Ruth and Reitz contend, more "marginal" felons (such as auto thieves) were sentenced rather than put on probation, as Ford wished. In the 1980s, prisons swelled in response to a new commitment to the war on drugs; ten times more drug offenders were in prison in 1996 than in 1980. Then, in the 1990s, a wave of reform-minded crime laws mandated longer sentences, allowing fewer inmates to vacate cells for new arrivals.
Moreover, Ruth and Reitz find that violent crime—the kind that most strongly inspires the get-tough rhetoric, as opposed to property, drug, and public order violations—cannot satisfactorily account for the prison boom. They cite a Department of Justice statistician who found that only one third of prison growth in the 1980s, and less than one half in the 1990s, was attributable to violent crime.
Even John DiIulio, Jr., the widely influential political scientist who helped to popularize the concept of "superpredators"—and who had previously justified prison building with the erroneous assumption that "virtually all prisoners are violent or repeat offenders"—relented and declared in a 1999 Wall Street Journal op-ed that reaching the two-million inmate mark (then rapidly approaching) should lead policymakers to change course. "The nation has 'maxed out' on the public-safety value of incarceration," DiIulio wrote, adding that we should be "aiming for zero prison growth."5 Now the question is posed by liberals and conservatives alike: will we be any better off at three million? And how will we afford it?
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