Stop Revolving-Door Justice

July 2008

How Corrections Systems Can Reduce Recidivism

Prisons in the United States are full to overflowing. More than one in every 100 adult Americans are now in prison or jail -- the highest rate in our nation's history. Whether the United States locks up "too many" people is an interesting and contentious question. What is beyond dispute, however, is this: The more offenders we put behind bars, the more who will eventually be sent home. In fact, 95 percent of prisoners will one day get out, and released prisoners have unleashed a crime wave in many U.S. communities.

Approximately 650,000 inmates are released from prison each year. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), two-thirds of them will be rearrested, and over half will return to prison within three years. In fact, parolees accounted for more than 35 percent of the people entering prison in 2000, almost double the proportion from two decades ago.

In addition to the number of individuals on parole -- which at the end of 2006 numbered just short of 800,000 -- there were more than 4.2 million on probation, leaving more than 5 million ex-offenders under some sort of community supervision (1 million more than in 1995). Add to that the more than 2 million people in jail or prison in 2006, and the total number of offenders in the corrections system totaled 7.2 million, the highest ever. In contrast, only 1.8 million people were in the corrections system in 1980.

Such statistics put America's corrections system in the spotlight. While criminals are locked up, the system does too little to prepare them to be reintegrated into their communities as productive, law-abiding citizens. And it fails to effectively supervise people on probation and parole, even though their propensity to commit more crimes is well known.

The escalating crime rate among discharged prisoners also highlights a basic defect in conservatives' reflexively punitive approach to law enforcement. Their disdain for prisoner rehabilitation guarantees that most offenders will simply be dumped back into the communities they came from, without the skills, tools and incentives they need to change their lives. In their zeal to punish the wicked, many conservatives have lost sight of public safety.

Progressives should not shy from tough sentences for cold-blooded predators and drug profiteers, even if that means high incarceration rates. At the same time, however, they should insist that the U.S. corrections system be tasked with preventing crime as well as punishing it after the fact. In practice, this means that everyone involved in corrections -- wardens, sheriffs, parole officers, and probation supervisors -- must be held responsible for reducing recidivism rates.

..For the rest of the report.. by Jason Newman