Why America Leads the World at Putting People in Cages

As Attorney
General Eric Holder
noted last summer, “too many Americans go to too many prisons
for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement
reason.” A new report
from the National Research Council (NRC) analyzes the causes and
consequences of the “historically unprecedented and internationally
unique” expansion in the U.S. prison population since the early
1970s. That punitive binge left us with 2.2 million Americans
behind bars and an incarceration rate “5 to 10 times higher than
the rates in Western Europe and other democracies.” In 2012, the
report notes, “close to 25 percent of the world’s prisoners were
held in America’s prisons, although the United States accounts for
about 5 percent of the world’s population.”

How did that happen? In brief, American voters and politicians
freaked out about crime, demanding ever tougher policies that
increased the likelihood and length of incarceration. The report
highlights three policies in particular: mandatory minimum
sentences, “truth in sentencing” laws that limited or abolished
parole, and “three strikes” laws imposing long terms (including
life sentences) on repeat offenders. Stepped-up enforcement of
drug prohibition magnified the impact of all those policies.

Contrary to what you might think, there is no clear relationship
between the intensity of this response and the crime rates that
ostensibly provoked it. “Over the four decades when incarceration
rates steadily rose,” the NRC report says, “U.S. crime rates showed
no obvious trend: the rate of violent crime rose, then fell, rose
again, then declined sharply.” While most studies of the question
find that all this imprisonment had some
impact on crime through deterrence and incapacitation, the
report says, the magnitude of the effect is “highly uncertain.” In
any event, the authors conclude, long prison terms are not a
cost-effective way of preventing crime, given research showing that
recidivism falls sharply as convicts age and that the likelihood of
apprehension is more important in deterrence than the severity of
the punishment.

The crime-reducing effects of incarceration, of course, have to
be weighed against the costs, not just in tax
dollars but in lost liberty, missed earnings, abandoned families,
weakened communities, alienation, and permanently impaired
employment prospects. The authors emphasize that such costs are
borne disproportionately by poor people with little education,
blacks and Hispanics in particular. “We believe that the
policies leading to high incarceration rates are not serving the
country well,” they conclude. “We are concerned that the United
States has gone past the point where the numbers of people in
prison can be justified by social benefits. Indeed, we believe that
the high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of
injustice and, possibly, social harm.”

For Reason readers, who might use somewhat
stronger language to describe this situation, the thought that our
government too readily locks people in cages and keeps them there
too long is
not exactly novel. But the 464-page NRC report, which is
available for free online (or for $75 as a paperback!), gathers
together a wealth of detail about the costs and benefits of
incarceration that can be used to win over anyone who still thinks
building more prisons is a sound investment in public safety.

The report is well timed (I hope) to influence the current
congressional debate over
sentencing reform. So far, with the exception of the 2010 law
that reduced federal crack sentences, state legislators have
taken
the lead in this area. “In recent years,” the NRC report notes,
“the federal prison system has continued to expand, while the state
incarceration rate has declined. Between 2006 and 2011, more than
half the states reduced their prison populations, and in 10 states
the number of people incarcerated fell by 10 percent or
more.”