LET THEM EAT PORRIDGE
lain Murray says that the only way
to rehabilitate law-breakers is to jail them
Washington, DC A FEW months ago, I had the temerity to suggest in an article that American prisons might be doing more to rehabilitate inmates. I received the following angry reply from a former Arizona prison officer named 'Gra':
Mr Murray, your article is both unfairly inaccurate and hopelessly sophomoric. Your wobbly-liberal notion of the functioning of the prisons bears no resemblance to reality.... The value of the prisons is that they keep had people locked away from the good people. Let them out and, surprise, they are still had people. Those who want to change do so. Most never will. My primary job as a correctional officer was to keep their hands from around your throat and the throats of your and my loved ones. There are plenty of things that need doing. Wasting time bleeding your heart over had apples doesn't make the cut.
After shaking off my shock at being called a Wobbly-liberal' for the first time in my life, I was spurred on by this letter to find out just how the corrections system, er, corrected people in America. My research, some of which has recently been published online by the think-tank Civitas, now seems of great relevance to the UK, following the Lord Chief Justice's and the Lord Chancellor's declaration that prison doesn't really work. If they'd bothered to look at the evidence from America, they would he extolling the virtues of the Big House.
Many Americans will tell you, like Gra, that 'nothing works' in rehabilitating prisoners, as was argued by the flamboyant sociologist Robert Martinson in 1974. The British grandees of the law seem to accept that view, holding that there is no difference between the recidivism rates of those sentenced to prison and those receiving a community sentence. This is true, up to a point. People in general reoffend at the same rate, whatever their sentence. And all the sexy community programmes that have been tried in America, such as Scared Straight, where young offenders are verbally abused for hours by brutal convicts serving life sentences (it makes great television), or VisionQuest, where offenders go off to adventure camps based on Native American mystic ritual, have been shown to he ineffective at reducing recidivism. Some even increase it.
But what has worked, whenever it has been tried, is personal intervention aimed at the real problems of the individual offender: lack of education, lack of employment opportunity, substance abuse, behavioural problems, an inability to understand consequences, and so on. In other words, treating individuals as individuals rather than as elements in some grand theory. And American research has shown that these needs are best addressed in a custodial setting, i.e., in prison. Martinson himself admitted this shortly before throwing himself out of a window in Manhattan in 1979.
Nevertheless, by shifting the debate over prison away from rehabilitation, Martinson also set American thinking down different roads from the UK. The result was the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, which stressed that deterrence and incapacitation were important goals of punishment. Neither of these ideas seems to be registering on the British legal establishment's radar, but American research into their effectiveness should show up like a squadron of Heinkels.
Incapacitation, for instance, reflects the simple concept expressed so eloquently by Griff that a bad man locked up cannot harm the innocent. It is the prime justification for tough sentences, and its effect cannot be denied. One researcher, for instance, has estimated that, without the massive expansion of prisons in the 1970s and 1990s aimed at incapacitating offenders, the American violent-crime rate would have been about 1,200 per 100,000 population instead of the 500 it reached in the late 1990s. Property offenders, on the other hand, are the prisoners most likely to reoffend. A study of prisoners released in 1994 found that 74 per cent of property offenders were rearrested within three years of their release. Almost a quarter of released burglars had committed another burglary. Burglars burgle. They can't do it in prison. QED.
Prison also deters other offenders. The Chicago economist Steven Levitt found that in America as a whole each offender imprisoned resulted in a decrease of 15 crimes overall. Moreover, it seems that it is not the length of the sentence that is important in this respect but the certainty of punishment. The more likely an offender is to be caught, convicted and sentenced to custody, the fewer crimes there are. A joint English—American study of crime rates in the 1980s and early 1990s in the two countries illustrated this clearly. In 1983 both countries imprisoned burglars at about the same rate. America then had about twice as many burglaries as England per household. By the mid-1990s, however, the American incarceration rate had increased, while the English rate had fallen to a quarter of its 1983 level, At that point, the rates had changed so that Britain enjoyed almost twice as many burglaries per household as America. Such is the benefit of a more lenient approach to sentencing burglars.
The chief argument against prison seems to be the worry that first-time offenders will learn from the old lags inside, and commit themselves to a life of crime as a result. This concern seems to be misplaced. The study of released prisoners mentioned above found that only one in five first-time offenders were rearrested within a year of their release from prison. Assuming that a certain proportion had already ticked the box labelled 'criminal' as their career of choice at school, it doesn't seem that many first-time offenders decide on a career change after their experience inside.
America teaches us that prison works. It keeps bad people off the streets. As a credible threat it deters others, and if you want to rehabilitate people, it's a better classroom than leaving them on the outside where they'll continue to consort with their established criminal fraternity. It's no surprise that America chose to expand prisons. The legal establishment's refusal to countenance such a choice in Britain verges on the criminal.
lain Murray is director of research at the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, DC.
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