Conflicts of Criminal Interest: A Program for Streets and Jails

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported last month that the nation’s prison population increased by more than 46,000 in just the first six months of 1989, the largest such increase on record.

Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh celebrated the increase as “an indication that more criminals, many convicted of drug-related offenses, are being caught and punished.” But he didn’t mention the FBI report issued a few weeks ago showing that, despite the incarceration bulge, violent crime was on the increase. Nor did he mention how many of the nation’s prisons and jails are overcrowded, understaffed, and extremely costly to operate.

For their part, liberal criminal justice experts lamented the record increase in the prison population and called for more “alternatives to incarceration.” But they didn’t mention that more than 90% of all prisoners are violent offenders, repeat offenders--or violent repeat offenders. Nor did they mention that many community-based corrections programs involve little or no direct supervision, leaving convicted offenders free to prey upon new victims--as about two-thirds of them eventually do.

Liberals want to punish softer, conservatives want to punish harder. It’s time, however, to punish smarter. That means rationally balancing our need for more prisons and jails with the development of no-nonsense probation and parole programs. It means recognizing the need to govern America’s expanding correctional complex in a tough, humane and cost-effective fashion.

Today, more than 1 million citizens are behind prison and jail bars. Another 2.6 million are on probation or parole. This means that about one of every 50 adult Americans is now under some form of correctional supervision. Lest readers of the preceding sentence think they must check their vision, let me repeat: 2% of all adult Americans are convicted criminals whose daily lives are currently governed in whole or in part by corrections commissioners, wardens, prison and jail officers and probation and parole agents.

It’s not too much to say that there are now two forms of government in America, one for law-abiding citizens whose freedoms are intact, and another for the increasing criminal fraction of the population whose freedoms are abridged. As the corrections population continues to soar, the question of how best to govern this latter, “criminal America” is becoming urgent, if only because of the immense financial burden of keeping so many citizens in government custody.

American taxpayers spent more than $20 billion on corrections last year; adjusted for inflation, that is double what they spent on corrections just a few years ago. In most states and localities, corrections is the fastest growing item in the budget. And at the federal level, billions of dollars are in the pipeline to construct and staff dozens of new federal prisons--and that is not counting the further expense connected with President Bush’s drug-control strategy.

But if it were only a matter of cost, the question of how to govern criminal America would not be nearly so ideologically charged as it has become. It is also a question of poverty and race relations.

In the 1960s, self-styled radical and liberal reformers charged that, in America, “the rich get richer, the poor get prison.” They had a point. Then as now, members of disadvantaged minority groups were incarcerated at much higher rates than whites.

One can debate the socioeconomic reasons for such racial disparities in criminal justice; indeed, some academics make a good living and keep out of a jail doing just that. But nobody denies that as the nation’s corrections population has skyrocketed, the nonwhite proportion has reached historic highs.

But what the ‘60s penal reformers, most of them well-to-do whites, “forgot” is that the favorite victims of predatory minority criminals are poor minority citizens. That was true a quarter-century ago, and it’s true now; in 1986 about 80% of all violent crimes against blacks were committed by blacks.

Good citizens living in crime-torn inner-city neighborhoods want and deserve government protection from the violent crack dealers and predatory street punks in their midst. Already struggling with poverty, they cannot afford any infatuation with correctional programs that return violent convicted criminals to the streets after they have served an average of less than half of their sentences in confinement. Neither, however, can they afford simple-minded “get tough” correctional practices that treat ghetto criminals as human refuse and make no effort to rehabilitate them. In short, neither they nor the rest of us can afford either the liberal or the conservative vision of how to govern convicted criminals.

Let me therefore highlight three sets of penal reforms for the 1990s that constitute a fair but firm approach to governing convicted criminals without employing the public purse.

Better community-based alternatives to incarceration.

Three-quarters of all persons now under correctional supervision are not incarcerated. While prison populations have doubled, probation and parole populations have tripled. In many jurisdictions, probation and parole agents have caseloads totaling more than 300. Obviously, this means that hey cannot provide anything like adequate supervision, let alone help their charges find jobs, enroll in educational programs or seek drug treatment--things that may assist them to “go straight.” No surprise, then, that most released criminals are rearrested within a few years.

But certain community-based programs for offenders without a history of chronic criminality or violence do work. Three are especially promising.

1) House-arrest-plus programs. Offenders stay in or around their homes for all but court-approved activities (e.g., work), meet curfews and other restrictions, wear an electronic monitoring device, have regular direct contacts with supervisors, undergo drug testing, and suffer immediate incarceration for any violation. These programs are not to be confused with traditional house-arrest programs involving little or no direct monitoring of the offender’s whereabouts and behavior, hence the “plus” designation.

Plus programs have succeeded wherever tried. Florida has one, called the “Community Control” program; since 1983 it has supervised more than 5,000 offenders. More than 80% of the participants completed the program without incident. It costs about $30 a day to keep somebody in one of Florida’s overcrowded prisons; it costs less than $5 a day to keep an offender in its plus program.

2) Community - service sentences. Offenders are placed in the community under close supervision and required to perform socially useful tasks. One well-studied example is New York City’s program, run by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. Begun in 1979, by 1983 it had more than 2,400 offenders, most of whom would have been sent to jail if the program did not exist. Each participant performed at least 70 hours of community service, such as fixing up abandoned buildings.

The program was a net success. Recidivism rates were much the same as for comparable offenders released from city jails. But keeping an offender in the program for a year cost only about 4% of what it would have cost to keep him locked up and useful public work was performed.

3) Intensive - supervision programs (ISP). Offenders are subjected to mandatory work, public service, education and random drug tests. Participants must make financial restitution to victims and have regular face-to-face contacts with probation or parole supervisors. Each supervisor has not more than two dozen charges.

About 20 such programs are in operation. A Georgia ISP for probationers began in 1982. The recidivism rate was about 25%, much lower than the rate for the state’s prisoners. Through taxes on their wages, ISP offenders typically covered more than 90% of the cost of their supervision (about $6,000 a year per offender versus $14,000 for a prison bed). In a few years, the program saved Georgia taxpayers an estimated $145 million. Similar results have been achieved in New Jersey and elsewhere.

Better-run prisons and jails.

The overwhelming majority of the nation’s probationers and parolees are not in programs such as the three outlined above. Until they are, “community corrections” will remain a threat to the public and a drain on its purse.

But even if every alternative program were structured intelligently, over the next decade we would still need to build and staff hundreds of new prisons and jails. Many offenders are simply too dangerous to handle in the community.

Yet just as there are better and worse ways to handle convicted criminals on the streets, there are better and worse ways to govern them behind bars. Even overcrowded and financially strapped institutions can be safe, civilized and programmatic. Let me cite three examples:

1) California Men’s Colony (CMC). A maximum-security prison in San Luis Obispo spends less per inmate than any comparable prison in the state. While it is one of the most overcrowded prisons in the non-communist world, with an increasing share of hard-core and hard-to-handle offenders, rates of violence decreased as the prison became more crowded. CMC has remained one of the country’s safest, cleanest, most program-oriented, and most cost-effective prisons.

2) New York City’s Tombs Jail. In 1974, New York closed its old dungeon-like jail and built a new one. Rates of violence at the new Tombs have been extremely low.

Some observers attribute success to state-of-the-art architecture. But other new jails with similar populations and physical plants have been much less successful. The New York secret was not new architecture but new management.

The new Tombs has unit management; security staff and counselors work as a cohesive team in a given wing of the jail. Skeptics said that might work in the Tombs but wouldn’t work in any of the city’s old Riker’s Island jails. They were wrong. Where it has been tried on Riker’s, unit management has reduced rates of violent incidents and improved inmate-staff relations.

3) The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Founded in 1930, the BOP is widely recognized as one of the nation’s finest corrections agencies, even while facing all the usual problems of overcrowding and dilapidated facilities. BOP pioneered the use of unit management

One popular explanation for success is that BOP spends more per inmate than other systems. Not so; throughout its history, BOP has spent at or below the national per-prisoner median. Another explanation is that BOP gets “a better class of criminal,” mostly white-collar. This “Club Fed” explanation is also misleading. The BOP has always held a significant percentage of hardened predatory criminals; last year, nearly half its 50,000 prisoners had a history of serious violence. Each year, states transfer many of their “too-hard-to-handle” inmates to the federal system.

The real reason for BOP’s relative success in running civilized and cost-effective prisons has been outstanding, consistent management. The agency had only four directors in its first 57 years; in most corrections agencies, leaders change every two or three years.

An expanded National Academy of Corrections

If we are to punish smarter, corrections systems must learn from each other’s successes and mistakes. The best and least expensive way to do that is for Congress to expand the mandate and budget of the National Academy of Corrections, making it the linchpin of research and training, bringing together federal, state and local authorities to share information, promote strategies and educate the public. An additional $5 million a year would cover the expansion cost--less than the bill for constructing 100 prison cells.

The moderate idea of punishing smarter is not sexy or sensational. Liberals have criticized my call for more and better-run prisons and jails; conservatives have taken me to task for advocating certain alternatives to incarceration. In corrections, however, it is time for political moderation and policy analysis to replace the ideological musings of pseudo-experts, left and right.