REINVENTING CRIMINAL JUSTICE

This week a House subcommittee held hearings on a bill, the Second
Chance Act, which is meant to deal with the problems that prisoners
encounter on their reentry into society and also with their need for
substance abuse treatment.

The concern over prisoners and recidivism is justified. Though
national crime rates declined steadily over the past decade, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the percentage of released
prisoners re-arrested within three years increased from 62.5 percent
in 1983 to 67.5 percent in 1994. And given that offenders are
arrested for only a fraction of the crimes they commit, even this
depressing statistic is an underestimate. Few would dispute that the
correctional system must be changed. But how?

If history is any indication, state and federal correctional systems
will be pressured to emphasize rehabilitation over justice, the
former being an umbrella term that includes everything from
psychodrama, social skills training and art therapy to college
coursework and drug abuse treatment. Some psychologists have pointed
to a series of large treatment initiatives in the United States over
the past few years as evidence that the "pendulum" is swinging from
punishment to treatment. These initiatives include California's
Proposition 36, under which adults convicted of nonviolent drug
possession offenses can choose community drug treatment in lieu of
incarceration, and even the eventual decision by Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, when he was the White House anti-drug czar, to
de-emphasize interdiction of drugs in favor of treatment.

Over the past several years, a large segment of the public seems to
have warmed to the idea. According to a national survey commissioned
by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2001, 40 percent of
Americans believe that the primary purpose of prison should be
rehabilitation rather than punishment, deterrence or maintaining public safety.

As noble as this preference may be, it is based on the common
misconception that effective rehabilitation programs exist and merely
need to be expanded. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of the
state and federally funded interventions in use have never been
evaluated, and the few rigorous assessments that have been published
in journals of psychology and criminology show that these traditional
rehabilitation programs have no lasting effect.

As a psychologist who studies offender interventions, I hope that, as
lawmakers begin to survey the evidence to inform their decisions,
they will give attention to the data showing that the more certain an
offender is that he will be caught and (swiftly) punished for the
next crime he commits, the less likely he is to follow through on
that criminal act. In fact, the certainty and swiftness of being
caught and penalized appear to be more important than the severity of
the punishment.

A 2002 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research sought to
assess the link between increased felony and misdemeanor arrests in
New York City in the 1990s and the substantial drop in crime during
that period. The authors found that for every increase of one
percentage point in arrests for various offenses there were the
following declines in that offense: murder -- 0.6 percent; assault --
0.4 percent; burglary -- 3.1 percent; robbery -- 2.4 percent; and
motor vehicle theft -- 5.9 percent. These findings held even after
controlling for economic changes in New York over this period. The
authors concluded that while both economic factors and deterrence are
important in explaining the decline in crime in New York City,
deterrence was more important.

The dramatic results seen in New York suggest that serious crime
prevention can be achieved by increasing an offender's certainty that
there will be negative consequences for committing criminal acts --
even low-level offenses. (In fact, a survey of arrestees in New York
in the late 1990s showed that almost all were aware of the increased
risks associated with committing a crime, and two-thirds cited
increased police pressure as their reason for committing fewer crimes.)

It is an intervention of consequences and accountability rather than
of social programs and therapy. And it may even be better suited as
an approach to supervising known offenders (i.e., probationers and
parolees) in the community than as a general crime prevention strategy.

Implementing effective reentry policies will require a shift in
thinking and the resolve to make practical changes, such as reducing
the size of probation and parole caseloads so that supervising
officers can be effective monitors. Embracing new technologies could
help -- for example, use of global positioning systems to enforce
"exclusion areas," such as schools or the home or workplace of the
parolee's victim, and requiring parolees to complete a three-year
period of supervision without a single new offense.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a sponsor of the Second Chance Act,
correctly observed that the U.S. criminal justice system needs to be
"reinvented." But there is nothing inventive about returning to the
intuitively appealing programs that we correctly rejected 30 years
ago. Tackling prisoner recidivism is a serious business requiring
serious solutions, and it is unlikely to involve workbooks, videos or
talk therapy.