What Are Prisons For?

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The liberals and hard-liners in Zimring's sketch would best go beyond simple sentiment and ideology. A Rand Corporation study suggests, soberingly, to just what degree crime may be reduced directly, and at what human and fiscal costs, by keeping criminals in prison. The findings are like statistical good news-bad news jokes. With a sentencing policy under which every second-time adult felon got a five-year sentence—impossibly tough by the strictest real-life standards—the study predicts a 16% reduction in violent crime. The bad news: the prison population would triple. The national cost would be perhaps $40 billion immediately, $12 billion more every year to keep the new inmates. "Incapacitation" does work. But, too broadly used, it can at most make dents in crime, and those only at a very heavy price. A more sparing, acute application, however, bearing down hard on those who commit dozens of crimes a year, can produce cost-efficient results. Six percent of the criminals commit 28% of the crimes in Manhattan? Get them.

Criminologists Michael Sherman and Gordon Hawkins, in their recent book Imprisonment in America: Choosing the Future, make an erudite, persuasive case that prisons be used exclusively for violent and otherwise hardened criminals. "A substantial fraction of people now incarcerated," they unblinkingly allow, "would not be imprisoned under our proposed principles." There is general, if sketchy, agreement about what to do with the tens of thousands each year who deserve, as Sherman and Hawkins write, "punishments with real content that lie between 'nothing' and 'prison.' " So complete has been the U.S. commitment to imprisonment, however, that comparatively little energy or money has gone to trying out such punishments.

As a result, probation is the penalty routinely imposed. More than 1.2 million people are currently on probation, most of them first offenders. For many, probation could be ideal, but is in practice slapdash: in Los Angeles County, for instance, each probation officer is supposed to keep an eye on 350 "clients." For other offenders, probation is just not severe enough. "There have to be alternatives," says Texas Corrections Director W.J. Estelle Jr. "Take restitution in theft cases. People would have their anger assuaged if you say, 'Hey, we're gonna make this fella pay you back and keep him under strict supervision.' And it brings home to the offender that crime doesn't pay." Really hurtful fines could be used more often in lieu of prison. A smalltown drunk who beats up people in his spare time could be denied free time: house arrest nights and weekends. Unchained chain gangs might be mobilized to do the scut work of local governments.