Pubdate: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 Source: Fortune (US) Section: Crime and Punishment Copyright: 2001 Time Inc. Contact: letters@fortune.com Website: http://www.fortune.com/

Author: Cait Murphy

THINK THAT STUFFING PRISONS WITH LAWBREAKERS MAKES SENSE?

You Clearly Haven't Run The Numbers. Here Are Some Better Ways To Buy Safety.

America is an exceptional country. Compared with citizens of other nations, Americans tend to be more religious and more entrepreneurial. We send more people to university, have more millionaires, and enjoy more living space. We are the world leaders in obesity and Nobel Prizes.

And we send people to prison at a rate that is almost unheard of. Right now, almost two million Americans are either in prison ( after conviction ) or jail ( waiting for trial ). Of every 100,000 Americans, 481 are in prison. By comparison, the incarceration rate for Britain is 125 per 100,000, for Canada 129, and for Japan 40. Only Russia, at 685, is quicker to lock 'em up.

America was not always so exceptional in this regard. For the 50 years prior to 1975, the U.S. incarceration rate averaged about 110, right around rich-world norms. But then, in the 1970s, the great prison buildup began. This was a bipartisan movement. Democrats like Jerry Brown of California and Ann Richards of Texas, for example, presided over prison population booms, as did Republican governors like John Ashcroft of Missouri and Michael Castle of Delaware. Bill Clinton worried in public about rising prison populations but signed legislation, much of it Republican sponsored, that kept the figures rising. No surprise, then, that spending on incarceration has ballooned from less than $ 7 billion in 1980 to about $ 45 billion today.

Just because the U.S. is different doesn't mean it is wrong. But prison is a serious matter in a way that, say, America's inexplicable affection for tractor pulls is not. Accordingly, a number of people--social scientists, prison professionals, even a few politicians--have begun to examine how and why the U.S. sends people to prison. What they are finding, in broad terms, is that there is a substantial minority of prisoners for whom incarceration is inappropriate--and much too expensive.

Who deserves to be imprisoned is, of course, partly a question of moral values. Prison keeps criminals off the streets; it punishes transgressors and deters people from committing crimes. But it is also a question of economic values. Everyone agrees that caging, say, John Wayne Gacy is worth whatever it costs, but that locking up a granny caught shoplifting makes no sense. The question to consider, then, is not "Does prison work?" but "When does prison work?" Economics can help draw the line.

On one level, it makes sense that America imprisons more people than its peers. The U.S. has historically been more violent than Europe, Japan, or Canada--in particular, our homicide rate is well above world norms--and the public wants violent people punished while freeing society from their presence. "We are a culture that believes change is possible, that human beings can be saved," says Francis Cullen of the University of Cincinnati, who specializes in public attitudes toward crime and rehabilitation. "The dividing line is violence. That's where people start becoming unwilling to take risks."

Fundamentally, America's prison population grew because people got sick of feeling scared and elected politicians who promised to deliver freedom from that fear. Moreover, it could be argued that America had some catching up to do: From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, the violent-crime rate rose sharply while the incarceration rate actually fell. Those trends probably helped spawn the "tough on crime" mentality that has reigned since. In the 1980s lawmakers delivered mandatory minimums--statutory requirements for harsh sentences for certain offenses, mostly gun- and drug-related. In the 1990s came "three-strikes" laws, designed to target repeat felons; truth-in-sentencing legislation; and the abolition of parole in many states.

All those policies filled prisons, but not necessarily with the hardened thugs people thought they were putting away. Though there are now 400,000 more violent offenders behind bars than there were in 1980, the proportion of violent offenders in the prison population has actually fallen. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the percentage of violent offenders in state prisons has dropped from almost 60% in 1980 to 48% at the end of 1999; 21% were in prison in 1999 for property crimes, 21% for drug crimes, and the rest for public-order offenses, such as immigration, vice, or weapons violations. In the federal system, home to about 145,000 offenders, 58% are in for drug offenses ( compared with 25% in 1980 ) and only 12% for violent crimes--down from 17% in 1990. Of the six crimes that account for the great majority of prisoners ( murder, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, drugs, and sexual assault ), drug offenders made up 45% of the growth from 1980 to 1996, figures Allan Beck of the BJS. Every year from 1990 through 1997, more people were sentenced to prison for drug offenses than for violent crimes.

Because imprisonment went up in the 1990s and crime went down, you might conclude that locking up so many criminals bought us less crime. Up to a point that's true. Steven Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has cleverly provided an empirical foundation to prove the link between incarceration and crime reduction. In 1996 he studied what happened after the courts ordered 12 states to reduce overcrowding in their prison systems. By looking at how the states responded, either by releasing convicts or by building new prisons, he estimated that the effect of imprisoning one additional lawbreaker for a year was to prevent two fewer violent crimes and about a dozen fewer property crimes. The social costs of these crimes Levitt estimated at $ 53,900 ( a figure derived from published estimates commonly used by social scientists ). That's well above the $ 25,000 or so it costs to keep a prisoner behind bars for a year.

But that doesn't prove that every prison cell built in America's 25-year construction spree was worth it. There could be ways to deliver just as much public safety for less money. Take Canada. Like the U.S., Canada saw a sharp decline in violent crime in the 1990s--but while America's prison population almost doubled, Canada's rose only slightly. Or take next-door neighbors New Hampshire and Maine. In the first half of the 1990s, both saw similar declines in crime, but New Hampshire sharply increased the number of people it imprisoned, while Maine did not. Ditto for Kansas and Missouri; the latter built lots more new prisons, but the crime rates in the two states remained similar. In short, building prisons is not the only way to fight crime--and often not a cost-effective way to do so.

In economic terms, this is because not every prison cell delivers equal returns, in terms of havoc unwreaked. As more and more people are imprisoned, the nastiness of the inmate population diminishes, so the crime control delivered per convict drops. Consider the research of John DiIulio, the new director of President Bush's office of faith-based programs; Bert Useem, director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of New Mexico; and Anne Morrison Piehl, a professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 1999 the trio surveyed male inmates in Arizona, New Mexico, and New York about their criminal pasts. Then they multiplied each crime by its social cost, using National Institute of Justice numbers. ( The cost of a rape, for example, is estimated at $ 98,327; of a burglary, $ 1,271. )

They found that the social cost of the crimes committed by the median inmate in New York--that is, one whose crimes rank 50 on a scale of 100 in terms of seriousness--was $ 31,866; in New Mexico, $ 26,486; and in Arizona, $ 25,472. That's slightly more than the $ 25,000 cost of incarceration. For the 40th percentile, though, that figure dropped to less than $ 14,000 in all three states, and for the 20th, less than $ 7,000. At the 80th percentile, the monetary value of crime caused was almost $ 240,000 for New York and $ 163,311 for New Mexico--marking the perpetrator as the type of person for whom prison is clearly an appropriate solution.

The major dividing line between cost-effective and non-cost-effective incarceration? That turns out to be fairly easy to figure. As a general rule, those who were imprisoned for property or violent crimes caused damage to society that cost more than their incarceration; those convicted solely of drug offenses did not.

Drug dealing is not harmless, of course. Having an open-air crack market on the corner kills commerce and devastates neighborhoods. But the authors became convinced that the incarceration of so many drug-only offenders--28% in New York and 18% in Arizona--made no economic sense, because one drug seller sent to prison just created a job opening for another seller. Consider the example of a Milwaukee street corner. In 1996 a Wisconsin task force noted that although the police had made 94 drug-related arrests in three months at the corner of 9th and Concordia, most of them leading to prison sentences, the drug market continued and public safety did not improve. And the price was substantial: It costs about $ 23 million to jail 94 people for a year.

In short, the authors found that for drug offenders, "the crime averted by incarceration is low," says Piehl. "We need to come up with sanctions that are graduated so that our only options are not nothing, or prison, or probation." What made that conclusion particularly noteworthy was that Piehl and DiIulio had argued for years in favor of more prisons. But by last year DiIulio, who is no one's idea of a bleeding-heart liberal, was writing an article for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal titled "Two Million Prisoners Is Enough."

Are there better, less costly alternatives to prison for drug offenders? Lisa Roberson offers one answer to that question. She is a resident at the Phoenix Career Academy in Brooklyn, N.Y., which offers residents--many of them repeat offenders who would otherwise be in prison--intensive drug treatment, vocational training, and after-care assistance. Roberson, 31, who started selling drugs at 17 and using them at 21, spent four years at Clinton State in New Jersey for selling drugs to an undercover cop. "All I did there is learn how to jail," she says. When she was arrested again in 2000, the court gave her a choice: prison or two years at Phoenix.

This is no country club. Residents sleep ten to a room. Just about every minute of their day, starting with a 6 A.M. wake-up call, is plotted for them. If Roberson makes it through the program--and about 60% do--she will be drug-free and will have completed training as a drug counselor. Phoenix will help her find a job, an apartment, and child care for her 4-year-old son. Yes, Roberson may regress--of those who complete the course, about a third eventually go back to drugs--but clearly she has a much better shot at establishing a real life than if she had spent several more years "learning how to jail." The cost of her treatment, funded mostly by state and local governments: $ 17,000 to $ 18,000 a year.

Many successful drug-treatment programs are run out of prisons too--such as Amity Righturn, a program in a medium-security facility in San Diego that provides more than a year of assessment and counseling, plus further treatment after the inmates have left prison. A 1999 study found that three years after release, 27% of inmates who completed all three parts of the program had returned to prison; among those who got no treatment, 75% did.

On the subject of drug treatment, cost-benefit analysis has something to say: It works. Numerous studies have concluded that well-run drug-treatment programs, particularly long-term residential ones with follow-up care, can pay for themselves just by reducing crime. Add in the value of incarceration avoided and taxes paid by the freed, and it adds up.

Given this context, it's little short of tragic that drug-treatment programs in prison are not keeping pace with the need for them. In 1991 about a third of the inmates who reported drug use in the month prior to their arrest were getting treatment; by 1999 that was down to less than 15%, according to the Department of Justice, and much of that was of the nonintensive variety that has little long-term effect. Treatment is no panacea: Lots of people will drop out or go back to their bad habits. The point is simply that treatment works often enough for the benefits to outweigh the costs--the exact opposite of the economics of prison for drug offenders.

What about other prison programs? Social scientists have applied cost-benefit analysis to those too. They have found that busy inmates--those given the chance to learn to read, to finish high school, to learn basic job skills--are significantly less likely than idle ones to return to prison. In Maryland, for example, a follow-up analysis published last October of 1,000 former inmates found a 19% lower recidivism rate for those who had taken education programs in prison than for those who hadn't. Extrapolating that 19% figure for the state as a whole suggests that Maryland could save $ 23.2 million a year in reduced incarceration--double what it spends on prison education programs.

More evidence that educational programs save money: In 1999 analysts from the state of Washington surveyed studies dating back to the mid-1970s on what works and what fails in reducing crime. The researchers concluded that for every dollar spent on basic adult education in prison, there was $ 1.71 in reduced crime; for every dollar on vocational education, $ 3.23.

If you think such data have prompted more educational programs in prisons, think again. Congress passed "get tough" legislation in the 1990s that eliminated Pell grants to prisoners for college courses; it also reduced the requirements for basic and vocational education for prisoners. Many states have therefore taken the opportunity to cut back. Prisoners have a limited constituency, after all, and nixing programs for them is a politically painless way to cut budgets.

Ironically, surveys show that the public strongly supports prisoner-rehabilitation programs. So do many who run the prisons. Tommy Douberley, warden of Florida's Moore Haven Correctional Facility, is convinced that no-frills prisons are a mistake. "These people are going to be returned to society," he says. "We need to make some provision for them that when they get out they are better than when they went in." Politicians, however, seem to have interpreted the public's clear desire for greater safety as a mandate for more and harsher prisons. And they are not the same thing at all.

There are signs that America is beginning to recognize the limits of prison. Drug offenders are less likely to be sentenced to prison today than they were in 1992 ( though still more than three times as likely as in 1980 ), in part because of the emergence of drug courts in many states, which force defendants into treatment on pain of prison. But past policies continue to exert expansionary pressure. From June 1999 to June 2000, the last 12-month period for which figures are available, the incarcerated population rose 3%. Though the smallest rise in decades, that still meant that 31,000 more Americans were behind bars. To house them means building a prison every ten days or so--an expensive hobby, considering that a medium-security facility for 1,000 inmates can cost $ 50 million.

Make no mistake: A large proportion of inmates thoroughly deserve to be exactly where they are. Incarceration is an effective way to isolate really awful people. But too many prisons stuffed with nonviolent, idle inmates is simply wasteful, of both people and money. We would do better to learn from several states that have lowered the crime rate without substantially raising prison populations--as New York did at least in part by aggressively funneling drug offenders into treatment, for example. Instead of being exceptional for its willingness to jail its citizens, the goal for America should be to become exceptional in the application of wisdom to its criminal population. At the moment, it is not even close.

FEEDBACK: cmurphy@fortunemail.com

BOX STORY:

The land of the free?

Incarceration rate per 100,000 residents

Russia, 685

USA, 481

Singapore, 465

Canada, 129

Britain, 125

China, 115

Spain, 110

Australia, 95

Germany, 90

France, 90

Italy, 85

Japan, 40

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice, World Prison Population List, Statistics Canada

U.S. prison population

Drug-only offenders

1980 7%

1998 24%

In state and federal prisons. Does not include the 76,000 people in private prisons, or those in jail awaiting trial.