Do Prisons Prevent Crime?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

I've said it before, but people are very easy to influence, particularly with the stories we tell ourselves, via Hollywood. These stories include crime dramas, police procedurals, detective stories, and courtroom dramas. Solving the crime typically drives the plot, and the bad guys perish, or are appropriately punished roughly 90% of the time. Is there any murder plot so complex Perry Mason can't solve it? I don't think so!

In real life, the police and courts solve far fewer crimes--13% in California in 2022 (says the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice here).

Meanwhile, Hollywood's stories have an effect. Between 1982 and 2017 the US population increased 42%, while spending on policing increased 187%.  The influence also appears in US prison spending. With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 25% of its prisoners–five times the world’s per-capita average incarceration rate, seven times Canada’s or France’s rates, per-capita. Is Canadian or French crime worse than US crime? No, it's a little lower.

What’s different in Canadian and French societies that lets them incarcerate at one-seventh the US rate? For one thing, the US has more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France have none. 

Could bankruptcy drive people to consider desperate solutions like crime? Could treating people better rather than driving them to bankruptcy for health problems have an influence on crime rates? Never mind Canada and France, there are several studies (here [pdf], and here, etc.) that demonstrate treating poor people better lowers crime rates.

Yet the US continues to believe desperation cures crime, not treating people well. The impulse to punish more has local support, too. Rather than house the homeless, open local health clinics, or experiment with basic income guarantees for the poor, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors has voted to spend nearly a billion dollars enlarging the County jail.

In fairness to the County, the current jail is full, but 60 - 80% of the prisoners are convicted of nothing but being unable to afford bail. They're doubly poor too, because they'll lose whatever job they might have had if they await trial in jail. 

The County avoids any discussion of supervised release, or no-cash bail. Opponents of this kinder approach might cite a neighboring (Yolo) County that had a less-than-optimum experience (more crimes, and more recidivism) when they released inmates during COVID times.

Yet Washington D.C. and the state of Illinois have adopted no-cash bail for select offenses. In fact one headline from Illinois--“Nearly 8 months into Illinois' new era without cash bail, experts say recidivism and jail populations are trending lower”--suggests there are ways to successfully do this.

There are also ways to sabotage kinder programs. Oregon attempted to decriminalize drugs, then repealed that measure as a failure. They tried to get police to offer the alternative–rehab–with tickets. The addicts were not impressed, to say the least, and police didn’t handle addicts’ defiance well. 

Meanwhile, incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical treatment for addiction (rehab), and has a lower success rate. One study says: “if 40 percent of offenders receive rehab vs. incarceration, it saves the system $13 billion. Choosing drug treatment leads to fewer crimes, lower addiction rates, and saves society money.”. Other countries--Portugal and Switzerland among others--have successfully decriminalized drugs.

I’d suggest our addiction to incarceration is as bad an addiction as any drug. To start to address this, perhaps what’s needed, besides a change of heart, is something like tobacco's warning labels for crime shows. Here are a few:

Warning:This show might lead you to believe police solve all crimes. They don't even solve half.

Warning: Believing abuse cures criminal behavior is worse than believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus.

Warning: Believing punishment cures criminal behavior is expensive an ineffective.