Prisons In America
America's prisons have been called "graduate schools for crime."
It
stands to reason: Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and
privacy,
expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd their cell-
block,
deprive them of meaningful work, and the result is an embittered
underclass more
intent on getting even with society than contributing to it.
Prisons take the
nonviolent offender and make him live by violence. They take
the nonviolent
offender and make him a hardened killer. America has to wake
up and realize that
the current structure of our penal system is failing
terribly. The government
has to devise new ways to punish the guilty, and
still manage to keep American
citizens satisfied that our prison system is
still effective. Americans pay a
great deal for prisons to fail so badly.
Like all big government solutions, they
are expensive. In the course of my
studies dealing with the criminal justice
system, I have learned that the
government spends approximately eighty-thousand
dollars to build one cell,
and $28,000 per year to keep a prisoner locked up.
That's about the same
as the cost of sending a student to Harvard. Because of
overcrowding, it is
estimated that more than ten-billion dollars in construction
is needed to
create sufficient space for just the current prison population. The
plain
truth is that the very nature of prison, no matter how humane
society
attempts to make it, produces an environment that is inevitably
devastating to
its residents. Even if their release is delayed by longer
sentences, those
residents inevitably return to damage the community, and we
are paying top
dollar to make this possible. Why should tax payers be forced
to pay amounts to
keep nonviolent criminals sitting in prison cells where
they become bitter and
more likely to repeat their offenses when they are
released? Instead, why not
put them to work outside prison where they could
pay back the victims of their
crimes? The government should initiate work
programs; where the criminal is
given a job and must relinquish his or her
earnings to the victim of their crime
until the mental and physical damages
of their victims are sufficed. A court
will determine how much money the
criminal will have to pay for his restitution
costs, and what job the
criminal will have to do to pay back that restitution.
The most obvious
benefit of this approach is that it takes care of the victim,
the forgotten
person in the current system. Those who experience property crime
deserve
more than just the satisfaction of seeing the offender go to
prison.
Daniel Van Ness, president of Justice Fellowship, has said: All
the legal
systems which helped form western law emphasize the need for
offenders to settle
with victims. The offense was seen as primarily a
violation against the victim.
While the common welfare had been violated
and the community therefore had an
interest and responsibility in seeing that
the wrong was addressed and the
offender punished, the offense was not
considered primarily a crime against the
state as it is today. (76)
Restitution offers the criminal a means to restore
himself-to undergo a real
change of character. Mere imprisonment cannot do this;
nothing can destroy a
man's soul more surely than living without useful work and
purpose. Feodor
Dostoevsky, a prisoner for ten years during czarist repression,
wrote, "If
one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on
him the most
terrible of punishments...one need only give him work on a
completely useless
and irrational character" (77). This is exactly what
goes on in the "make
work" approach of our prisons and it is one of
the contributing factors to
prison violence. To quote Jack Kemp, author of Crime
and Punishment in Modern
America: The idea that a burglar should return stolen
goods, pay for damage
to the house he broke into and pay his victims for the
time lost from work to
appear at a trial meets with universal support from the
American people.
There is, of course, a reason that the concept of restitution
appeals to
America's sense of justice. Restitution also provides an alternative
to
imprisonment for nonviolent criminals, reducing the need for taxpayers
to
continue building prisons. (54) Working with the purpose of paying back
someone
that has been wronged allows a criminal to understand and deal with
the real
consequences of his actions. Restitution would be far less expensive
than the
current system. Experience shows that the cost per prisoner can be
as low as ten
percent of that of incarceration, depending on the degree of
supervision
necessary. Removing nonviolent offenders from prison would also
relieve
overcrowding, eliminating the necessity of appropriating billions
more public
dollars for prison construction. Restitution would deter crime
with the same
effectiveness as prison. Prisons themselves have not done much
of a job when it
comes to deterrence. Nations with the highest incarceration
rates often have the
highest crime rates. But studies of model restitution
programs demonstrate that
they greatly reduce the incidence of further crime,
since they restore a sense
of individual responsibility, making the offender
more likely to be able to
adjust to society. Reducing recidivism is the most
direct way to reduce crime.
Criminal justice authorities also tell us
that it is not so much the type of
punishment that deters crime, but rather
the certainty of punishment. With
respect to deterrence, virtually any
sanction, imposed swiftly and surely, has a
deterrent effect. An effectively
run restitution program will deter crime. It is
believed that in many cases,
aggressive restitution programs would be a greater
deterrent than the threat
of prison. To quote author David Simon, I remember
talking in prison with a
hardened convict who had spent nineteen of his
thirty-eight years locked up.
He was in for a heavy narcotics offense that drew
a mandatory life sentence.
" How in the world could you have done it?"
Simon asked. " I used to be a
rod carrier," the convict answered,
"on the World Trade Center
building-eighty floors up, getting eighteen
dollars an hour. One misstep and
I was dead. With hash I could make $300,000 a
week. One misstep and I was in
prison. Better odds." (Simon 75) The
immediate payoff of crime is so great
that many are willing to risk prison. The
certainty of restitution, by
requiring payment, takes the profit out of crime.
The assets of organized
crime members and big time narcotics dealers, for
example, could be seized at
arrest and confiscated on conviction, with the
offender ordered to make
further restitution through work programs. That is real
punishment. Many
Americans believe in our current prison system, and also
believe that it is
an effective form of punishment for the criminal. Some would
say that
criminals can live decent, civilized lives in prison and graduate to
decent,
civilized lives in the free world. My question to these people is; how
can
criminals live civilized lives in an environment that only offers chaos
and
mild forms of anarchy? It is well known what goes on behind closed doors
in
prison; terrible atrocities that make the blood boil and the stomach
curdle are
the only thing these prisoners are accustomed to while they are in
prison. Most
inmates learn little of value during their confinement behind
bars, mostly
because they adapt to prison in immature and often
self-defeating ways. As a
result, they leave prison no better-and sometimes
considerably worse-than when
they went in. The first time offender who is
arrested for burglary does not
belong in a prison where the only thing he
will learn is how to become a better
and more violent burglar. Instead, why
not make him pay restitution to the store
owner whom he robbed? In my
opinion, if this form of punishment was initiated
for the lesser offender,
our prisons will have the vacancies to incarcerate the
Jeffery Dahmers of
the world in prison for life, instead of the infamous
"ten to twenty, out in
five". Crime is the result of morally
responsible people making wrong moral
decisions, for which they must be held
accountable. The just and necessary
response to such behavior is punishment,
which may include restitution for
community service, stiff fines, or , in cases
where the offender is
dangerous, prison. But let's not kid ourselves any longer.
The prison was
not designed to cure the individual; it was made to lock him up.