WHEN PRISON STOPS BEING A CRIME DETERRENT

High Incarceration Rate May Fuel Community Crime

TALLAHASSEE—Things were looking up in Frenchtown. After years of spiraling
out of control, crime had been declining sharply in this neighborhood of
rickety frame houses and tumbledown carryouts that forms the historic hub of
this city's African American community. Observers credited a variety of
aggressive police tactics, including more and longer prison sentences for
offenders.

But in 1997, the declining crime rate in Frenchtown began to level off,
failing to keep pace with drops in similar Tallahassee neighborhoods. And
researchers analyzing crime trends here have fingered an unlikely culprit:
the high number of Frenchtown residents sitting in prison cells.

Research here supports a controversial theory being advanced by an
increasing number of criminologists, who have concluded that although high
incarceration rates generally have helped reduce crime, they eventually may
reach a "tipping point," where so many people in a given neighborhood are
going to prison that it begins to destabilize the community and becomes a
factor that increases crime.

"Until recently, nobody has really thought about incarceration in the
aggregate," said Dina R. Rose, one of the researchers studying the
relationship between incarceration and crime in the Frenchtown area. "Many
people assume that incarceration reduces crime. But when incarceration gets
to a certain density, that is when you see the effects change."

Rose, a sociologist at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
found that in high-crime Tallahassee neighborhoods that were otherwise
comparable, crime reductions were lower in those with the greatest number of
people moving in and out of prison. With high incarceration rates, she
argues, prison can be transformed from a crime deterrent into a factor that
fuels a cycle of crime and disorder by breaking up families, souring
attitudes toward the criminal justice system and leaving communities
populated with too many people hardened by the experience of going to
prison.

Frenchtown provides abundant evidence for the thesis. There are few men
available to volunteer in the youth programs at the Fourth Avenue Recreation
Center. And every day, dozens of men line up in front of a soup kitchen run
out of a small frame house in the heart of Frenchtown.

Robert J. Roeh, who runs the soup kitchen, estimates that four out of five
of those who show up for the free meals have some type of prison record.
"Going to prison keeps you locked up without bars for the rest of your
life," he said. "We need to look at some other sanctions for people."

Dale Landry, a former police officer and Marine who heads Tallahassee's
Neighborhood Justice Center, an alternative corrections program, said the
volume of people going to prison has reached the point where it hurts the
very communities it is intended to help.

"When a crime is committed, an offender should be held accountable," Landry
said. "But the way we do it now, when a crime happens there is a damaged
relationship between people who live in this community. We need to work on
fixing these relationships. But when we send people away, those
relationships remain broken, but we are left with a false sense of security
that the prisons are working."

It is a problem recognized by local police, who have increasingly turned to
community policing in an effort to mediate some of the social problems that
often arise in conjunction with crime.

"We are looking at a lot of these issues," said Maj. George Creamer, head of
the Tallahassee police operations bureau. "But if you are trying to clean up
these neighborhoods and you don't arrest people who are breaking the law,
then what do you do with them?"

In examining the impact of high incarceration rates in Tallahassee,
researchers collected 1996 statistics on prison releases and admissions as
well as demographic data from 103 Tallahassee neighborhoods. They also
collected crime statistics for 1996 and 1997. The data then were mapped in
order to compare incarceration rates with crime while controlling for
socioeconomic factors.

While crime dropped in virtually all of the Tallahassee neighborhoods
examined in the study, the rate of the decline in Frenchtown was one-third
lower than in surrounding neighborhoods. The most telling difference between
the neighborhoods, the researchers said, was that Frenchtown had a higher
incarceration rate.

Other researchers caution that it is too early to come to definite
conclusions. Bert Useem, a University of New Mexico sociologist who is
embarking on a national study of incarceration rates and crime, said "it
remains to be seen" whether taking a relatively large number of people out
of a community has the effect of increasing crime.

"On the one hand, you have to be concerned about the number of people going
into prison," he said. "But on the other hand, communities can become
ravaged by crime. And the recent experience nationally has been these
increases in incarceration rates and decreases in crime."

In any case, notes William J. Sabol, a researcher at the Urban Institute,
"now you are getting many more people who previously were unconcerned asking
about the unintended consequences of incarceration."

Those consequences are likely to grow with the surging incarceration rate.
Swollen by increases in drug offenders and longer, mandatory prison
sentences, the nation's prison population has risen every year since 1973
and has tripled since 1980.

This wave of incarceration has had a disproportionate effect on black
neighborhoods. Justice Department statisticians project that more than one
in four black males born this year will enter state or federal prison at
some point during their lifetimes, compared with 16 percent of Hispanic
males and 4.4 percent of white males.

"When you say that [almost] 30 percent of black males are projected to go to
prison, that is a fact that no person who believes in freedom can be
comfortable with," said Todd R. Clear, a John Jay criminologist working with
Rose on the Frenchtown study.

The effect of high incarceration rates is intensified by the fact that they
are often concentrated in relatively compact communities. A study in Hudson
County, N.J., found that in 1995, one in 15 children experienced the trauma
of having a parent go to jail for at least six months. In sections of South
Central Los Angeles, an estimated 70 percent of the young men are in the
clutches of the criminal justice system.

Researchers have found that men who have been in prison are less likely to
marry, get good jobs or develop productive relationships with family members
once they are back on the street. A broad survey done as part of the
continuing study of the effects of incarceration in Frenchtown found that
people who knew people who went to prison typically held lower opinions of
the criminal justice system than others.

"Areas that have low crime rates are that way because people who live there
do the job of providing social control," Rose said. "But people typically
come back from prison more damaged and with less ability to contribute to
society."

Clear said the social impact of high incarceration is most profound for the
children and families of those sent to prison. "At some point, having some
involvement with the prison system starts to look like part of their
destiny," he said.

That's exactly what Frenchtown resident Laura Anderson is worried will
happen to her 6-year-old son Xavier. His stepfather, John L. Anderson, is in
prison for armed robbery; his biological father is in jail awaiting trial.

After her husband's arrest, Anderson and her son tumbled into homelessness
and were forced to move in with friends and double up with in-laws. Finally,
they settled in a dingy garden apartment back in Chattahoochee, her sleepy
hometown located 40 miles west of Tallahassee. Xavier transferred to three
different schools within a matter of months. He was left back in first
grade. His teachers said he wouldn't concentrate in class.

But mostly Anderson worries about how her son will come to view the specter
of prison. Once, when Xavier got into an argument with some young friends
while playing in the breezeway, he came inside sobbing, fearful that the
police were going to get him, she said. His mother said it is more than a
childish fear.

"His biological father is incarcerated. His stepfather is incarcerated," she
said. "If somebody does not come along as a mentor or something and show him
a different way, he is going to think that jail is the place where he will
ultimately be too."