1.  We should just put the criminals in prison and throw away the keys.

Easy to say and it certainly makes us feel good.  People have the impression that most criminals are “getting away” with their crimes and aren’t paying the penalty.  The media feed this idea since they only report the few cases where someone does beat the system.  The reality is that the majority of people charged with crimes are found guilty and do pay the penalty.

Question is, what should the penalty be?

My prosecutor friend brought up several recent empirical studies that show short, intensive punishment combined with rehabilitation efforts tend to have the best results.  Why?

Putting aside the serial murderers and career criminals, I believe it’s because simply locking people away can be counter-productive.  For many of them, the hardest part is when the doors to the jail slam shut.  After months or even years, the deterrent effect of incarceration drops off.  So, it makes sense to send people for a limited amount of time–with supervised probation and release afterward.

2.  Criminals will never change–there’s no hope they’ll reform themselves.

Some psychologists maintain that criminals are people who have chosen to live a life of crime and will continue to do so no matter what we do to them.  I’m not sure this is true all the time.  I think that most criminals balance the risks of getting caught with the rewards of crime.  I believe some can be persuaded to go straight.  The best persuasion is a combination of prison and probation.

3.  Many criminals are drug addicts who commit crime to feed their habits. No.  I would say in my own experience that the majority of crimes are committed when people are high–by far alcohol is the most prevalent–when they commit crimes but they’re not doing the crime to make money to supply themselves with drugs.  And for all the attention to dangerous drugs, alcohol still remains the most widely abused chemical substance that leads to crime.

4.  The crime news in the papers never seems to end–crime is up.  It’s definitely down, especially since a peak during the 1980’s as measured by the FBI.  Violent crime and all types of crime are down significantly.  Why does it seem the opposite?  The news media report criminal acts–not the drop in crime.

5.  “Get tough on crime” laws and longer prison sentences deter crime. I don’t think so.  In my experience dealing with defendants charged with crime, the last thing they think about is getting caught and certainly, they never think about penalties.  The one area that’s different is in drinking and driving crimes.  People do think about that when taking another drink.  But particularly for crimes of passion and anger, very few people stop to think about the penalties–therefore, I don’t think tougher penalties act as a deterrent.

What are you ideas?  Get tougher?  More probation?  More community service?  What can we do?

The post Five Myths about Crime Today appeared first on Colin T. Nelson.

At first, it looks great: the taxpayers can reduce the high cost of building, maintaining, guarding, providing medical care, and programming for offenders.  Why not let a private company take-over the costs?  The state would probably agree to some fee per inmate–which would be much lower than the present costs.  All the laws about incarceration and parole would remain the same, determined by the legislatures.

At present, because of the “Great Recession,” many states are looking at cutting this high expense.  But there are two factors that may have raised the cost of prisons beyond what anyone expected.

A couple of years ago, National Public Radio reported on Folsom Prison in California.  When Johnny Cash gave his concert there in 1968, it was a model for the entire nation.  See story at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111843426

Today, it’s a disaster which may actually be making the public less safe than ever.  Even as most of the progress and programs have been cut at prisons like Folsom, the costs are higher than ever.  Why?

The NPR report suggests two reasons that may apply to prisons in all states:

1.  The “get tough on crime” laws of the past twenty years.

2.  Strong public unions of prison workers.

Let’s look at the first reason.

In the years since 1968 legislatures across the country decided to “get tough on crime.” That meant, usually, more incarceration penalties for more crimes and longer sentences for existing crimes.  The result has quadrupled prison populations–which states have to pay for.  Promoters of the get tough idea didn’t anticipate the consequences of putting significantly more offenders behind bars.

Though many people have the opinion that criminals should be locked-up and “throw away the key,” that’s not realistic.  Almost all offenders, except the most dangerous, are released at some point.  Without adequate programming for education, job skills, chemical dependency treatment, and mental health treatment these lower-level offenders come out with the same criminal tendencies they entered with–or worse.

People say, “So what?  I’m not going to spend tax dollars for social workers to help criminals.”  Those same people fail to realize that an “unimproved” offender coming out of prison poses the greatest threat to public safety.  Besides the heightened incidence of re-offending, the costs of police, courts, lawyers, jurors, and prisons is far greater than the cost to tax payers of the prison programs.

At some point, we must decide as a community how much we want to imprison people.  Most studies have shown that except for the violent, most dangerous offenders, close supervision by probation officers as the offenders live in the community not only is the best prevention for further criminal activity, but it is also the cheapest.

Of course, show me a politician that is courageous enough to point out these costs to the taxpayers and say, “let’s put fewer people in prison.”  Instead, we’re looking at privatizing the prison system.  It will reduce the direct costs to the taxpayer but won’t reduce the recidivism rate–since prisons like Folsom Prison in California now have some of the highest rates.  In 1968 they had the lowest rate.

What should we do?  In my next post, I’ll look at California and the power of the public employee union and its effect on the costs of the prison system there.

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