In Florida, Republican state senator Paula Dockery said that lawmakers had been discussing similar proposals for three years without effecting any change. “It’s politically difficult to do,” she observed.8 Florida, in an orgy of punishment, had in 1983 abolished parole and now required inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences.9 But that still wasn’t good enough for Republican state senator Mike Fasano, who wanted everyone to serve 100 percent of every sentence.10
In California, where one out of six prisoners is serving a life sentence, a survey conducted by the Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences showed a clear shift in attitudes toward less harsh sentencing. The poll, conducted in July 2011, found that the ailing economy easily outweighed crime as the respondents’ top concern.11 Nearly 70 percent approved the idea of early release of low-level offenders whose crimes didn’t involve violence. Only 12 percent of respondents said they’d be willing to accept less state spending on health care or education to pay for more prisons. Less than two years after the poll was taken, state voters approved Proposition 36, which at last began reforming the harshest three-strikes law in the nation.
The same week the California poll on criminal justice came out, a study was released showing that the state’s higher education system ranked last among states in state funding per student and that fewer state students were able to afford the spiraling costs being tacked on to their bills. The analysis by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy at California State University–Sacramento also found that California, once celebrated nationally for its three-tiered system of public colleges, ranked forty-first in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded for every hundred high school graduates six years after graduation. The report was titled “Consequences of Neglect.”12
The teetering criminal justice system appears to stand apart from society because so much of it is hidden behind walls. But, in fact, the system affects all of us, and its failures are contagious. It is yet another segment of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure that is being passed from one generation to the next in the hope that someone down the line will plunge in and try to fix it. But a bridge in need of reinforcement won’t do real harm until it collapses. The broken justice system inflicts harm around the clock, ruining lives and even ending them as sure as waves breaking on the shore.
We know that certain strategies work, and imposing excessive prison sentences isn’t one of them. “Prisons should not be used with the expectation of reducing criminal behaviour,” concluded academicians at the University of New Brunswick and University of Cincinnati who conducted an exhaustive recidivism inquiry. The study of inmates and ex-inmates also examined the effect of prison versus “community-domain” supervision and rehabilitation. It found higher recidivism rates for the incarcerated group. Based on their findings, the authors declared, “The primary justification of prison should be to incapacitate offenders (particularly those of a chronic, higher risk nature) for reasonable periods and to exact retribution.”13
An appreciable reduction in drug use would deal a terrific blow to crime in general. In the early seventies, an amazingly effective program was implemented after U.S. Representatives Robert Steele (R-CT) and Morgan Murphy (D-IL) returned from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam in May 1971 and reported that approximately 15 percent of U.S. servicemen there were addicted to heroin. The next month President Nixon created the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention, which laid out a program of prevention and rehabilitation. Nixon ensured that whatever the results of the program, they would be scrupulously documented. Jerome Jaffe, the director of the new office, hired psychiatric researcher Lee Robins to help with the project, promising her unprecedented access to service members.14
As part of the program, every enlisted man was tested for heroin addiction before he was allowed to return home to the United States. Robins discovered the problem was even worse than feared. About 20 percent of the soldiers identified themselves as addicts. They were kept in Vietnam until they dried out, and their rehabilitation was remarkably successful, so much so that for years experts thought the reported results must have been phony. In the first year only 5 percent of returning soldiers returned to heroin. How could this be when addicts who’d become hooked in the United States were relapsing at rates that hovered around 90 percent?15
Robins “spent months, if not years, trying to defend the integrity of the study,” Jaffe recalled. But forty years later, its findings are widely accepted as real, not fudged. Many behavioral scientists believe that the plan worked because the soldiers, after being treated for their physical addiction in Vietnam, returned to a place radically different from the environment in which their addiction took hold. “People, when they perform a behavior a lot—especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting—outsource the control of the behavior to the environment,” explained Duke University psychologist David Neal.16 In a new environment without the habitual triggers, addicts have a much better chance of interrupting their past behavior. Smokers who always light a cigarette after finishing a meal in the kitchen may, if they want to quit, have to stop eating in that particular kitchen. Jaffe’s team concluded that addicts in programs that let them remain in the environment where they were chasing after and using drugs have a much lower chance of kicking their habit. Yet we still rely excessively on nonresidential regimens because they appear less costly on the surface.
When the Job Corps, an antipoverty program that was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, was on the ropes and facing deep budget cuts in the mid-1990s, popular two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman came to its defense. “Job Corps,” he said, “took me from the mean [Houston] streets and out of a nightmare lifestyle into a mode where the most incredible of dreams came true.” There’s plenty of evidence to back up Foreman’s tribute. Studies find that the Job Corps measurably improves the education and job prospects of disadvantaged youth. Its sixty thousand annual graduates, all of them at-risk youths, make more money than control groups and are 20 percent less likely to be arrested, charged with, or convicted of a crime.17 If convicted, they served less jail time. Mathematica Policy Research, an objective referee of social policy research, examined the data and concluded that the Job Corps is “the only large-scale education and training program shown to increase the earnings of disadvantaged youth.”18
It costs about $26,000 to put a youth through the eight months of Job Corps training. That’s comparable to the price of incarceration for approximately a year. But the Job Corps produces productive citizens, whereas pragmatic experience backed up by studies such as the one conducted by the University of New Brunswick and University of Cincinnati (see above) show that prison does not. In 2011, however, the Republican-controlled House tried yet again to gut the Job Corps. This time it wanted to close 85 of its 124 centers. Enemies of the program scoffed that for approximately the same amount, taxpayers could send someone to Harvard. But Harvard’s true costs are of course much greater than the $36,000-plus tuition, and Harvard isn’t charged with undoing a lifetime of deprivation. In January 2013 the Labor Department discontinued accepting new Job Corps recruits as a cost-saving measure. It wasn’t clear if or when the freeze would be lifted.19