For And Against Views On Non-Violent Offenders Incarceration

In the US criminal justice system, only people convicted of violent crimes should be sentenced to prison. Violent crimes: murder, rape and sexual assault, robbery, and assault. Non-violent crimes: burglary, racketeering, fraud, drug possession, distribution, and manufacturing. An alternative to prison sentencing: probation i.e. suspending the sentence of a convicted offender and giving the offender freedom during good behavior under the supervision of a probation officer. It should include:

Restoration:

• Apology to a victim and reconciliation process when possible;
• Paying a fine or restitution of damage in another form;
• Unpaid work (community service): building and repairing social infrastructure e.g. removing graffiti from buildings, clearing rubbish from wasteland, decorating public spaces and buildings like a community center, working at a hospital (caring for people) and so on;
• Giving speeches to schoolchildren about the dangers of drunk driving or being in a gang and selling drugs.

Control:

• House arrest i.e. not being able to leave the residence without permission;
• Wearing an electronic tag;
• Specific court orders and injunctions (e.g. not to drink alcohol, not to go to certain pubs, meet certain people);
• Supervision by and regular reporting to someone (offender manager, probation officer);
• Curfew;
• Drug and alcohol testing and swift-and-certain punishment: sending substance abusers on probation and parole back to jail for short periods immediately following a dirty urine test;
• Probation i.e. you are free, but if you commit a crime again, your sentences will be summed up with a previous one.

Change:

• Drug or alcohol rehabilitation treatment: medical and psychological therapies;
• Back to work programs, vocational training e.g. introduction to health care for nursing, medical assisting, computer network management, word processing applications, office management sills, food and beverage management;
• Behavioral change e.g. CBT, building empathy and aggression control, mindfulness meditation, attending lectures given by crime victims.

A Case For

Firstly, it is unnecessary and thus unfair to deprive non-violent criminals of family and community.

1. Humans are social beings and need communal bonds. They bring a sense of belonging, joy from social interactions, and emotional well-being. Its absence has proved to have adverse effects on an individual health.
2. In prison, day after day, year after year, imagine having no space to call your own, no choice over who to be with, what to eat, or where to go. There is threat and suspicion everywhere. Love or even a gentle human touch can be difficult to find. You are separated from family and friends.
3. So, it is only justified to deprive someone of these ties, when mere physical presence of that person in society poses a threat. Similarly, as it would be unfair and cruel to put every prison inmate into solitary confinement, if they did not pose a threat to others.
4. Unlike violent criminals, potentially dangerous activity, which might expect from the non-violent ones such as drug consumption and sale or financial fraud, are preventable under strict probation supervision without social isolation. Thus, depriving a person of family and community is unnecessary and therefore unfair.

Secondly, it would reduce recidivism, including violent crimes, among non-violent offenders.

1. Today, 1 in 5 incarcerated people are locked up for a drug offence which is around 500,000 people.
2. Re-offending in the US: 68% prisoners rearrested within 3 years, most within the first year. Especially property offenders (82%), followed by drug offenders (77%), public order offenders (74%) and violent offenders (71%).
3. Approximately 39% of the nationwide prison population (576,000 people) is behind bars with little public safety rationale. And they can be released, significantly and safely cutting our prison population.
4. In prison, to survive you need to change and adapt.

• Even a previously decent person gets much worse.
• You’re put in the environment – an incentives structure – where you’re pressured to join some group (usually a gang based on race) for survival and protection, as otherwise you could be assaulted or exploited by another gang e.g. through extortion, sexual exploitation and so on.
• To prove allegiance and sustain membership of your own group, one has to commit immoral and / or illegal acts e.g. beating or raping someone, smuggling in drugs, bribing a guard and so on.
• Socialization among criminals leads to internalization of certain attitudes, develops an antisocial mindset. Previously horrible and unthinkable becomes normalized. It leads to significant personality changes.
• One starts to use vernacular, behave and think like a criminal. You forget normal social clues and manners. All of that impedes successful reintegration. This does not happen under probation.
• Over the last decade, a majority of states reduced their prison populations while cutting crime. From 1999 to 2012, New Jersey and New York reduced their prison populations by about 30%, while crime fell faster than it did nationally.
• Texas decreased imprisonment and crime by more than 20% during the same period.
• California cut its prison population by 27%, and violence in the state also fell more than the national average.

Research shows long sentences aren’t very effective. A 2007 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that prison stays longer than 20 months had “close to no effect” on reducing commission of certain crimes upon release.

If there are fewer inmates, solving the common problem of overcrowding, the effects of rehabilitation efforts within prisons would be higher.

Incarceration also costs the government about $25,000 per person per year, whereas parole costs only about $2,000 per year, meaning the government could save billions annually.

Releasing these inmates would save $20 billion annually, enough to employ 270,000 new police officers, 360,000 probation officers, or 327,000 school teachers.

That would allow to further improve rehabilitation facilities and strengthen social fundamentals, which keep people from committing crimes in the first place.

Upon release, when you have a conviction on your record, you become ineligible for welfare, student loans, public housing, food stamps. Without this basic social safety net, it is much easier for an individual to resort to criminal behavior again. Newly acquired attitudes and connections make this scenario even more likely.

Also, with probation and community-based punishment, you are less likely to lose family and friends due to stigma and the time of absence. They can help to uphold one’s humanity and civility by providing role models and reasons for productive social life.

But wouldn’t this policy allow these people to continue to be trapped in the circumstances, which lead to the crime in the first place? Only in the tiny minority of cases. As provided in the model, supervision by the probation officers, whose salaries are tied to the success of the people they control, would do their best not to allow these factors to re-occur. Lastly, it would help ethnic minorities (African American and Latino communities).

1. They are disproportionately affected by these policies as quite often, racially-biased police forces target these communities for marijuana consumption and selling, which is widespread all across the US.
2. Upon detention, many can’t afford to pay bail to go on probation.
3. As a result, many working age males are incarcerated which contributes to economic devastation in their areas through unemployment. Which means, forgone earning and taxes, which in the US are pulled locally for social purposes. On the contrary, community service would provide actual improvement of the neighborhood and facilitate a proper role model.
4. Upon release, it normalizes criminal behavior as a role model for young boys, which are growing up without one parent and thus with looser control.
5. African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of our population; they make up 60 percent of our inmates.”
6. Also, due to a prison record, new offences lead to much bigger sentences, taking productive members for much longer than average. The portion of New York State's prison population that is incarcerated for drug offenses has been consistently falling, while Oklahoma's rose to a peak in 2006 and has been consistently above 25% since 1999. Whites are a majority of the total U.S. population, but a minority of the prison population. Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are a disproportionately larger share of the incarcerated population than they are of the total U.S. population.

A Case Against

It prevents people from committing non-violent crimes

1. As Steven Levitt showed in a 2004 paper that at least 58% of the violent crime drop in the 1990s was due to incarceration.
2. This new policy would substantially skew the decision making of potential offenders towards committing a crime.

3. Basically, your worst case scenario is coming back home and working for some time. It is not remotely as threatening as going to a prison. It is justified to incarcerate some non-violent criminals.

4. They do pose a threat by mere presence in the society e.g. by selling drugs or stealing stuff. All they need for that is freedom of movement, which they get under probation.
5. The “Future Victims Argument” does not stand as it can occur on both sides of the House. Note, that there is no over incarceration epidemic.

6. Firstly, it would actually increase the amount of crime and especially affect the minority communities.

7. If you were a thief or a drug dealer, you can do that again when you’re not in jail. Probation does not incentivize you not to do that, as: a. Underlying causes for a crime e.g. poverty are still present, and, more likely, even exacerbated after being caught; and b. You believe that you’re not going to be caught again.
8. To sell cocaine all you need is access to your “community”, which is effectively your market. Given that people are able to smuggle and sell drugs even in prison, they certainly can do that under house arrest.
9. As a result, illegal drug market would be better off. More people would become addicted, which is especially deadly today, when an avalanche of prescription medication and cheap imported drugs have created an opioid epidemic.
10. Most affected would be the communities of color themselves, as young people even more likely to see that this way of living does not entail much risk.

In November 2014, California voters passed Proposition 47, which reclassified a range of drug and property felonies as misdemeanors, so that the offender would face no chance of a prison sentence, no matter how egregious his criminal history. By June 2015, the state’s jail population had fallen 11 percent, and its prison population was down 5 percent. In the first half of 2015, violent crime rose by 13 percent and property crime by 9 percent in California cities with populations over 100,000, erasing the 14 percent decline in violent crime and 6 percent decline in property crime over the previous four years.

Secondly, that would not solve the issue of over-incarceration of minorities.

1. Drug convictions do not drive high rates of black incarceration: 37 percent of all prisoners are black, compared with 39 percent of drug convicts. Put another way: if all drug convicts were released tomorrow, the black share of the prison population would fall from 37.4 percent to 37.2 percent.
2. Only 42 percent of convicted felons in 2009 received a prison term;
3. In 2013, drug offenders made up less than 16 percent of the state prison population (which accounts for 87 percent of America’s prisoners), whereas violent felons constituted 53 percent of the rolls and property offenders accounted for 19 percent. Only 3.6 percent of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession, usually as the result of a plea bargain.
4. It is not about race. In 1986, it was members of the Congressional Black Caucus who demanded that Congress respond forcefully to the crack cocaine epidemic.

5. Note, that to solve the problems raised by the Proposition, we need to improve prisons, but not convert communities into them.