Treating offenders with humanity yields progress
but watered-down bill called the First Step Act. This legislation would make changes on the exit side of incarceration — increasing funding for education and job-training programs and allowing inmates to earn credits for early release. As a result of opposition from Sessions and others, the bill does not focus on the entrance side of incarceration — sentencing reform that would encourage alternatives to imprisonment for less dangerous offenders.
States have demonstrated the prison reform can work. In the current issue of National Affairs, Lars Trautman and Arthur Rizer provide a helpful survey of a red-state policy revolution. States such as Texas, Georgia and Louisiana have taken a series of measures to divert addicts and people with mental-health problems away from incarceration, to limit mandatory minimums and to make wider and better use of parole.
The theory is simple. America’s vast experiment in routine incarceration — which has quadrupled the American incarceration rate since 1972 — had some effect in reducing contact between dangerous offenders and potential victims. But recidivism rates are dismal. And millions of relatively non-dangerous people have been swept up into a justice system that puts them in intimate contact with dangerous offenders, exposes them to rape and violence, deprives their families of emotional and financial support, and sends them back into communities without skills and stamped with a felony stigma.
Prison and sentencing reforms are designed to provide a broader range of penalties and treatment options to courts, along with greater discretion in employing them. This means that the violent criminals get treated differently from nonviolent criminals, who get treated differently from addicts, who get treated differently from the mentally disabled, who get treated differently from parole violators — instead of sweeping them all into prison beds.
“This renaissance has been led in large part by deep-red Texas,” write Trautman and Rizer, “which, by instituting a series of ‘smart on crime’ initiatives in the last decade, accomplished a feat previously believed to be impossible: the simultaneous reduction of its crime, recidivism and incarceration rates.” While the crime rate index fell by 20 percent nationally from 2007 to 2014, it fell by 26 percent in Texas. The state, meanwhile, closed eight prisons.
Liberals look at mass incarceration and see structural racism. Libertarians see the denial of civil liberties. Fiscal conservatives see wasted resources. Religious activists see inhumane conditions and damaged lives.
All these convictions converge at one point: We should treat offenders as humans, with different stories and different needs, instead of casting them all into the same pit of despair.