Building More Jail Cells Will Not Make Us Safer : Crime: More prisons and harsher punishment won’t make criminals think twice before they act. Money should be redirected toward education.

Why don’t prisons do more to lower the crime rate?

Californians certainly seem to believe that the greater the number of jail cells, the safer they are. Since 1980, the state’s prison pop ulation has grown 300%. Six percent of the state’s general fund goes to corrections, up from 2% a decade ago.

Yet, violent crime in California jumped 4.3% last year, according to the FBI.

The short answer to this puzzle is that we ask too much of prisons. Jail cells have little to do with the crime levels experienced in local communities. For it is one thing to say that a person will not commit a crime while incarcerated and quite another to say that society’s overall crime rate will be affected. Put another way, more prison cells in California won’t reduce crime. Here’s why.

A lot of predatory crime is committed by juveniles too young to be eligible for prison, or by young adults unlikely to be sent to prison for most first felony convictions.

Persons under age 18 account for one-quarter of all persons arrested, and nearly one-half of all those arrested for serious crimes. Furthermore, official arrest data probably understate the contribution of juveniles to the general level of crime, because the chances of being arrested for a crime are lower for a juvenile than for an adult, and especially low for chronic juvenile offenders, who account for a large proportion of all crime.

Prison terms are usually imposed late in an offender’s criminal career when criminal activity, on average, is tapering off.

A criminal career usually begins at about age 14, with criminal activity increasing until the early 20s. Thereafter, it declines until age 30, when the majority of careers terminate. In California, the average age of arrest is 17; the average age of first commitment is 26.

Because the justice system only deals with an insignificant proportion of crime, its ability to affect crime levels is minimal.

Of the approximately 34 million serious felonies in 1990, 31 million never entered the criminal-justice system, because they were either unreported or unsolved. This means that 90% of serious crime remains outside the purview of police, courts and prison officials.

The remaining 10% is further eroded as a result of screening by prosecutors and dismissals or acquittals. In California, 65% of adults arrested for felonies are convicted, and of these, 20% are sent to state institutions.

Studies have shown that much individual crime (particularly violent crime) is an impulsive response to an immediate stressful situation, often under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.

Rational-choice models require an offender to think clearly about the costs and benefits of committing crime, weigh those costs and determine that the costs outweigh the benefits. Yet more than half of all violent offenders are under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their crime, a state of mind with little affinity for rational judgment.

For imprisonment to deter offenders and potential offenders, it must be stigmatic and punishing.

Prison is most likely to deter if the prisoner’s social standing is injured by punishment, and he or she feels in danger of being excluded from a group he or she cares about. But many of an offender’s peers and relatives have also done time. Nearly half the youths incarcerated in California training schools report their parents had been incarcerated. And estimates indicate that about one-quarter of all males living in U.S. inner cities will be jailed at some point in their lives, so the stigma attached to having a prison record in these neighborhoods may not be as great as it was when prison terms were relatively uncommon.

Imprisonment may increase post-release criminal activity.

RAND analysts recently studied a “matched sample” of California offenders convicted of similar crimes and with similar criminal records. The two groups differed only in their sentence--members of one group went to prison, the others received probation. After tracking the groups for three years, researchers found consistently higher rearrest rates for offenders sentenced to prison. Drug offenders who had been jailed were 11% more likely than their probation counterpart to be criminally charged again, violent offenders were 3% more likely and property offenders 17% more likely.

Most important, for imprisonment to reduce crime, inmates must not be immediately replaced by new recruits.

Although studies have shown that most criminal behavior is unorganized, some crime--for example, car theft, fencing stolen property and distributing illegal drugs--does appear organized along the lines of a labor market. In these instances, an arrest and a prison sentence create a vacancy. Typically, however, that vacancy is quickly filled. As a result, crime in the community continues unabated.

In general, new “recruits” constantly refresh the ranks of active criminals. A recent study of a cohort of California-born males discovered that by the time they had reached age 29, 35% had been arrested (66% for blacks). As more young people are recruited into and retained in a criminal life style, “back-end responses,” such as imprisonment, are severely limited.

Prisons, to be sure, are an important and necessary component of the criminal- justice system. A National Academy of Sciences panel recently concluded that rising imprisonment may have reduced crime in the United States by 10% to 20%. But drug clinics do more to rehabilitate drug addicts than prison, job training does more to reduce recidivism than jails and early childhood prevention programs do more than any other factor to reduce a propensity to crime.

The dichotomy between tough law enforcement and soft social programs is a false one. The choice is clearly not one or the other--it must be both. Californians have to create enough prison space to jail the truly violent and also support programs to reduce the flood tide of criminals that current conditions create. Our expectations of what justice agencies can do should be lowered; our expectations of what social programs do must rise. Especially now, in the midst of the state’s worst recession since the Depression, when every additional prison guard may mean one fewer teacher, and every prison cell constructed may mean a gang-prevention program unfunded, public education is essential to meaningful change in our approach to the crime problem.