Ken’s Comments:
This article from The Atlantic has some excellent observations about flaws in our criminal justice system.
He highlights points I have addressed over the years, such as:
It is far wiser to rehabilitate inmates than to hammer them with punishment.
Police should spend more time preventing crime, rather than reacting to it.
Powerful forces – private prisons, prison guards’ unions, and others – oppose needed reforms.
and more!
Perhaps the most important observation of his is that nothing is perfect; implementation of needed changes will inevitably see some flaws, and we will see calls for more harsh measures … the very same “Tough on crime” backlash crap which got us into the current mess!
Excerpts from the Article:
What if doctors prescribed the same treatment to every patient with a particular symptom, without trying to diagnose its cause? Or if they offered powerful medications, without bothering to figure out if they worked?
That, Marc Levin argues, is how America’s criminal-justice system presently operates. “We’re still basing the sanction on the specific offense they’ve committed,” Levin said, without attempting to figure out its underlying causes. “We need to diagnose someone as soon as they’re arrested, and figure out what would reduce their criminogenic needs.”
That argument is part of a broader push by Levin, and like-minded reformers, to overhaul the criminal-justice system with evidence-based programs. Levin is the director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-enterprise oriented think tank. He made the comments on Monday at a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.
“Releasing people directly from solitary confinement to the public which we know happens thousands of times a year? It’s illogical,” Levin said. Those inmates aren’t equipped to reintegrate directly into society, and face high recidivism rates. “By and large, we ought to be focusing on getting results rather than getting even.” There are, however, significant impediments to pursuing such an approach. For one thing, there’s no shortage of groups that benefit from the status quo. “Yes, you have privately operated prisons,” said Glenn Loury, a professor of social science and economics at Brown University. “But you also have corrections-officers unions … Self-interested behavior in the system is not limited to profit.”
“We have perverse incentives in what we call the criminal-justice system,” Levin added. He pointed to police officers, rewarded more for making arrests to solve the crimes that have already occurred, than to prevent those crimes from taking place, or to prosecutors rewarded for securing convictions, and not for reintegrating offenders into society.
Then there are the steep costs of rehabilitation programs, where a day of treatment can be more expensive than a day of prison. “The key is getting way from the obsession with the duration and focusing on the quality of the time,” Levin argued. Perhaps offering treatment for substance abuse or mental health problems costs more per day, “but overall, in the long-term, the person would be kept there for a much shorter period and so ultimately you would be saving money.”
Despite that optimism, shifting to an outcomes-based approach, though, still faces one key hurdle. It will—invariably—lead to the release of some individuals who reoffend. When that happens, there’s often a political backlash, as voters seek an infallible approach.
“We should tell the public: Nothing’s perfect,” Loury said. “We’re going to do better here than we would do if there weren’t this intervention.” He argued that leveling with the public could help change expectations, creating the political space for experimentation and reform. Public officials, Loury said, need to tell the public that no matter how effective a particular change, it’s “going to leave us with some risk; there is no zero-risk environment.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/evidence-based-criminal-justice-reform/488984/
