Anyone who has been a victim of the harmful behavior of another, or who has had a loved one or friend harmed, is understandably likely to be enraged. Depending on the severity of the offence, being the victim of a harmful person can be devastating and life altering. Victims may struggle to function normally for the rest of their lives.
Murder, sexual violence, and many other crimes cause injuries that might never fully heal. Our anger and indignation, even at perpetrators of milder offenses, drive vengeful, retributive, violent responses delivered by our system of criminal justice.
With a 5 year recidivism rate estimated to be as high as 65 to 70%[1], however, our current criminal justice policies barely reduce the frequency of harmful behaviors. Rather than rehabilitate offenders, our criminal justice system takes people who are already damaged and damages them further. The costs to society of running our ineffective, retributive criminal justice system is burdensome, often creating additional innocent victims such as the offender’s families and their communities, as they too become subjected to serious harm.
The research of American sociologists Evelyn J. Patterson and Christopher Wildeman suggests that incarceration shortens life expectancy, possibly as much as two years for every year spent in prison.[2] The health impact of incarceration, where medical treatment is poor, diets nutritionally marginal, and exercise minimal is that prisoners age prematurely, and suffer with numerous health conditions at a far higher rate than in the general population, a costly burden.
The impact on the families of those who are incarcerated is generally devastating. Deprived of sufficient parenting children become at risk of incarceration (intergenerational incarceration[3].) Spouses lose their partner and often partnerships or marriages are destroyed. Studies suggest that being the immediate family member of an incarcerated person can shorten their lifespan as well.[4]
The financial cost of being imprisoned is extraordinarily burdensome to the prisoner, the family, and to the community too. In the US the average cost of incarcerating a single prisoner is estimated to be over $33,000 per year [5]. This amount does not account for the lost earning potential of inmates and the financial impact of them not being able to contribute to their families or communities which is estimated to be as high as 6% of the US GDP[6] .
Despite the high cost of our prison system which tax payers bear, prisoners are themselves nickeled and dimed, forced to pay exorbitant fees for phone calls. If they can get access to a computer or a tablet they must pay for that access and for each email message they send. Often they must pay medical copays, and there are numerous other everyday necessities that many incarcerated persons are also expected to pay for.
The high stakes nature of our punitive system makes getting mental help and/or substance rehab support to those who most desperately need it unlikely. If the only options are to be convicted and subject to brutal incarceration, or to fight with every available resource to go free, the only alternative for any reasonable person would be to do anything possible to go free.
In such an all or nothing high stakes contest there is little place for a troubled husband to get directed to the counseling he needs for having acted violently toward his wife, a behavior he is statistically likely to have witnessed as a child between his own parents. And there is scant support for people whose underlying and primary issue is alcoholism or substance abuse to get the quality responsive care they need to have a chance at sobriety.
People who harm others have probably themselves suffered considerable harm, diminishing their capacity to function in a healthy and socially desirable manner — they are both unlucky and unhealthy. Due to their unchosen genetic determinants, and/or environmental determinants, they function in a diminished capacity, and as a consequence the expression of their human potential is distorted.
Sentenced to do time in our prison system these unlucky individuals receive continuous emotional and frequently, physical abuse including beatings, pepper spray, mechanical restraints, and protracted and sometimes limitless periods of solitary confinement. Time in our prison system can permanently impair an incarcerated person’s ability to ever again function well.
Subjecting offenders to state sanctioned violence and abuse fuels a cycle of violence which never ends. By removing the violence that is currently injected into the system by the state we would see a tangible reduction in violence overall.
When we recognize the sheer brutality, the massive ineffectiveness, and the high cost of incarceration on both the incarcerated as well as for everyone else, it is hard to find a rational justification for continuing our highly punitive system.[7]
Better alternatives certainly exist.
[1] See www.firststepalliance.org
[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/07/12/family-incarceration/#lf-fnref:1
[3] https://interrogatingjustice.org/ending-mass-incarceration/intergenerational-incarceration-explainer/
[4] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/07/12/familyincarceration/#:~:text=People%20with%20one%20immediate%20family,%2Fethnicity%2C%20gender%2C%20income%20level
[5] https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends-prison-spending#:~:text=Among%20the%2045%20states%20that,of%20%2469%2C355%20in%20New%20York
[6] See paper The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the United States from Institute for Justice Research and Development– https://ijrd.csw.fsu.edu/sites/g/files/upcbnu1766/files/media/images/publication_pdfs/Economic_Burden_of_Incarceration_IJRD072016_0_0.pdf
[7] For a more comprehensive overview on the problems with our system of criminal justice visit https://www.prisonpolicy.org/