The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

In his marvelous 1974 book, The Future of Imprisonment, Norval Morris, the distinguished criminologist and long-time consultant to the Federal Bureau of Prisons wrote:

The criminal law’s reach has been extended in this country far beyond its competence, invading the spheres of private morality and social welfare proving ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic. This overreach of the criminal law has made hypocrites of us all and has cluttered the courts and filled the jails and prisons, the detention centers and reformatories, with people who should not be there.

When that was written, we had about 350,000 men, women and children in our nation’s jails and prisons. Today we have over 2,200,000 and prisons here and throughout most of the world are still ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic.

It is widely recognized that we have locked up too many social nuisances who are not real threats, too many petty offenders and minor thieves, severing such few social ties as they have and pushing them further toward more serious criminal behavior. In the US, we inappropriately incarcerate the mentally ill and the alcohol and drug addicted. Prisons generally make people worse.

The 1973 national commission, The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, recommended that “the institution should be the last resort for correctional problems.” They gave their reasons – failure to reduce crime, success in punishing but not in deterring, providing only a temporary protection to the community, changing the offender but mostly for the worst – and concluded that “the prison has persisted partly because a civilized nation could neither turn back to the barbarism of an earlier time nor find a satisfactory alternative.” Today, over 30 years later, we have a new national commission that is looking at the abuses in and the problems of prisons in America.

Again, nothing has changed except that there are many more people in prison, our prisons are now larger and more destructive of the human personality with fewer programs and harsher regimes. Many years of studies have revealed that only three possible changes in the life of the prisoner during his or her incarceration are correlated with later conformity to the conditions of release and with the avoidance of new criminal behavior – the availability of a family or other supportive group to join on release, the availability of a reasonably supportive job, and the process and duration of aging itself. Getting a job and preserving or creating social relationships are exactly what prison most interferes with although time for aging it does provide. We cage people, it is clear, not to treat them but for a variety of other reasons. Increasingly prisons are places of punishment and have nothing to do with rehabilitation.

One of the great prison reformers in the world, Baroness Vivien Stern, Secretary General of Penal Reform International, in her 1998 book A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World, wrote:

It is a great strength of the reform movement that the people in the system know that what is going on is wrong. They say so through the associations to which they belong. They need to be reinforced in their conviction that whilst they are contracted to carry out their instructions and follow their rule book, they have a higher loyalty to a set of values and principles. It will not be an excuse for the perpetrator of a clear human rights abuse to say, “I was just obeying orders”. Prison staff need to be given the confidence and courage to keep on pointing out what is wrong. Perhaps they should require that the international norms and instruments governing the treatment of prisoners should be written not just into prisoners’ rights, but into their rights too, as staff. There are rules governing how prisoners should be treated. So also should there be equivalent rules governing what prison staff can be asked to do, and making it clear what they cannot be asked to do.

As Nelson Mandela once said, “Prison not only robs you of your freedom, it attempts to take away your identity. Everyone wears a uniform, eats the same food, follows the same schedule. It is by definition a purely authoritarian state that tolerates no independence and individuality.”

In 1999, a large group of criminal justice professionals, academics and officials from 50 different countries in all five continents met for five days in Egham, England, to consider “a new approach for penal reform in a new century.” At the end of the five day meeting they drafted without any dissents an agenda for that new approach which included among them the following:

The understanding that penal reform is an essential part of good governance.The awareness that penal reform cannot proceed without changes to the criminal justice system as a whole and that crime prevention in and by civil society is essential to the success of penal reform.The determination to make sure that everyone, especially the poor and marginalized, has equal access to the justice system.
The recognition that drug abuse is usually better dealt with inside the health or social welfare care system rather than the criminal justice system, especially when there is no violence involved.
The need to enrich the formal judicial system with informal, locally based, dispute resolution mechanisms which meet human rights standards.

During the past 40 years I have visited hundreds of prisons and jails in the United States and many prisons in Asia, Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe. The best, least destructive, prison that I have ever been to was a maximum security prison in the city of Ringe, in Denmark, which I visited on a number of occasions.

This was a small maximum security prison which housed men and women prisoners together, all of them recidivists, in which every prisoner worked at a productive job every day, where correctional officers wore no uniforms and worked side-by-side with the prisoners and had many other marvelous features. Every time I left the prison and walked out through the main entry way I was accompanied by the prison governor, Eric Andersen. Each time I left, I would say, “Eric, this really is a marvelous prison.” And his answer each time was, “But remember, Al, all prisons damage people.”

* Alvin J. Bronstein is Director-Emeritus of The National Prison Project of the ACLU; US Board Member, Penal Reform International (London). This editorial originally appeared in the August 2005 edition of Corrections Today magazine.