So welcome back to Hot Topics in Criminal Justice, the second installment. Today, we're going to talk about punishment and prevention. How we go about dealing with people convicted of crime? Now, if you remember in our last lecture, we talked about mass incarceration, the fact that incarceration rates have increased six to seven times since the 1970s. At the end of that session, I mentioned several possible reform movements that could reduce our incarceration rates. Shorter sentences, community-based interventions, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, and so on. These are the kinds of reforms that are being contemplated. The video you saw about what goes on in Germany, suggests that other changes can be made as well. We can change our prison systems, for people who are sent to prison, to make them more rehabilitation-oriented, to make sure prisoners are treated with dignity, to make sure that they get vocational resources, and they are treated like human beings, to put it briefly. So what I want to talk about in this lecture though, is what if we do move in that direction? What if we do make sentences shorter? What if we do have more community-based interventions in lieu of prison? What if we have rehabilitation-oriented programs of this type we saw in the video on Germany? Will we be endangering the public. Is there a possibility there'll be less deterrence, that people would be led out more often and more early and will have higher crime rates, because of that approach to criminal justice? That's an empirical question that needs to be answered before we can really enthusiastically endorse these reforms. Then there's a second question. Even if we can be sure that those reforms will not increase crime rates and perhaps even reduce crime rates, there is a political moral question of whether politicians and the American public would be willing to go that route. Are there maybe other concerns the American public has besides crime prevention, besides crime rates that suggest we shouldn't move in the direction that are suggested by the last lecture? I just suggested in terms of shorter sentences. So that's what we're going to talk about, both the empirical questions and the political questions. As to the empirical question, if you remember from our last lecture, one way of approaching the empirical questions to point out, that even though European imprisonment rates are much lower than American imprisonment rates, European crime rates in terms of violent crime, the violent crime are much lower than American rates. In terms of property crime, we're about the same. What that suggests, is that we can afford to lower incarceration rates without a huge increase in crime. In fact, there might actually be a decrease in crime. So that is something to consider. Why might that occur though? Why might there be an actual decrease in crime? I want to show one of the piece of empirical evidence suggests that might happen. Here is evidence from Norway. Norway has a very similar kind of prison system to Germany's. It's rehabilitation-oriented, treating prisoners with dignity, people released much earlier than in the United States, and you look at the recidivism rates. The recidivism rates in Norway are much lower than the recidivism rates in the United States. So once again it suggests maybe, we can have a cake in either too. Maybe, we can lower incarceration rates and not increase the crime rates, but actually decrease the crime rates. Now how might that be possible? Well, we suggested in the last lecture. Much research has shown that prisons can often function like schools. The people learn how to commit crime in prison. Imagine a 19-year-old who's convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. If all that happens to them in prison, as they sit in their cell with no vocational programs, with only violent or criminal role models to deal with, with no real treatment as dignified human beings, you already have a recipe for disaster. Worse, if they are in prison between the ages of 19 and 25 in particular, that's the age at which most people develop their stakes in life. Getting married, finishing their education, getting a good job. If you do those things, you might not likely to be a criminal. You're not likely to commit crime. But if you're deprived of those years, then one could argue, once you get out of prison at age 25, there's not too much choice other than to commit crime. Now that may be an exaggeration, but you get the point. Then might explain some of these recidivism rates. In fact, research right here in the United States, suggests that if we reduce prison time, we actually can also reduce recidivism or at least not increase it and we can save lots of money. That's the first study. The second study, shows that the kinds of programs I've been talking about actually reduced recidivism. I don't know if you can read this on this slide by up to 20 percent. So, that's very encouraging. Those are results we'd like to see and maybe, suggest we can have our cake if we needed too. But, maybe not. For one thing, Norway's approach and Germany's approach to imprisonment is more expensive than ours. If the person ends up in prison, the cost is about $10,000 more per prisoner. Then, what we're now spending in the United States. You spread that over two million prisoners, which is what we have in the United States. That can be a pretty costly proposition. Put aside the costs, we also have another issue. That is, as this slide suggests, Norway is not the United States. Germany is not the United States. I think even if Germany and Norway had harsher penalties and longer sentences, we still might not see the recidivism rates there than we see in the United States. We are just a different country, for all the reasons we talked about in the last lecture. Economically, culturally, psychologically, we're different. So maybe that we're not going to see the reduction in crime rates, the lower recidivism rates here than we see in Germany. At least, the American public would have a right to make sure we will see them before we adopt the kinds of programs I'm talking about. Independent of that, even if we can be sure that we will see a reduction in crime, we'll see little recidivism rates. It's also possible, the American public will be leery of moving in the direction I'm talking about, because it's important to recognize there are other purposes of punishment besides preventing crime. What I've been talking about up to now, is basically the correctional approach. That is, figuring out whether the person's high-risk or low-risk, whether treatable or not, and endorsing and proposing and developing the programs that are needed to reduce recidivism. That's individual prevention approach. That's the approach that I've been linking to Germany and Norway. But there are other purposes of punishment. You see them here. If I had to simplify, they are these three. The first you see here on the slide is general deterrence. We're not only interested in preventing an individual prisoner or individual offender from re-offending, we also want to send a message to the general public, people who have not yet offended, that they shouldn't do this. That's general deterrence. We also read about retribution. We also, in the United States and particularly, I think around the world, want to make sure that people get the punishment they deserve. So maybe then some of these shorter sentences will not enable us to give the punishment the American people think particular criminals deserve. That is a purpose of punishment that needs to be considered as well. So when we come back, we're going to talk about this question. Is it possible to implement all three of these purposes of punishment, in a useful way and still reduce incarceration? That's the question we'll be addressing in this lecture. When we come back, we'll try to answer that question. We will see empirical results and philosophical arguments that are related to that.
