Do Tougher Sentences Reduce Crime?

I want to make clear on this page that, in designing a criminal justice system, I want the #1 priority to be preventing crime and ensuring the safety of all citizens.

Some people think about retributive justice, like the idea of making someone pay for their crime, or getting revenge on someone who has wronged them.  I don't like this idea.  For one, it conflicts with my religious beliefs, which you can read about here.  This idea also seems primitive and it often seems to devolve into anger, hate, and demonizing people who commit crimes.

I know people who have been to jail.  One of my friend's husbands took his own life while in jail, leaving her as a single parent.  In this case, his psychiatric medication had been withheld from him, by the prison staff.  These sorts of abuses are common in American prisons.  I think it is important to view people who commit crimes--even those who are legitimately guilty--with compassion, and work to heal them, and protect them from harming other people as well as themselves.

I tend to see people who commit crimes as people who are not necessarily bad people, but who have made bad choices.  I want them to be held accountable for their actions, but I don't want them to be made to suffer unnecessarily.

I want the justice system to keep society safe, keeping people who are at risk for harming others safely locked up, but I don't want these people to be treated harshly, and I want the justice system to help give them options and help them to grow as people so that when they are released, they have good options and make good choices.

I think this is the best way to prevent crime.

No criminal justice system is perfect, and in spite of the innocent before proven guilty concept, strongly embedded in the American justice system, there are a lot of innocent people who get convicted.  Most of these people are people who are poor and somehow disadvantaged or disliked, both because these people are more likely to be wrongly targeted, and less likely to afford a lawyer.

The Innocence Project maintains a list of people who were on death row, and were found innocent due to newly analyzed DNA evidence.  The standards for sentencing for the death penalty tend to be much stricter than for other crimes, so it is reasonable to conclude that there is a much greater portion of innocent people serving jail sentences than people scheduled to be executed.

This is disturbing...one thing to consider in strict sentencing is that, in any justice system, some innocent people are always going to be sent to jail.  If sentences are too harsh, this not only affects the people who actually committed crimes, but also the people who did not.

Putting and keeping people in jail is extremely costly.  Wikipedia has an excellent article on incarceration in the United States, and this article cites figures of an average cost per year of around $30,000 to keep someone in prison, in 2007.  This varies widely from state to state, with some averaging closer to $50,000.  This amounts to about $74 billion over the U.S.  SmartAsset also has a lengthy article on the economics of the American prison system.

But these are not the only costs to the economy.  Whenever someone is put in prison, they are taken out of their jobs, families, and communities.  Many people who are put in prison had full-time or part-time jobs prior to their incarceration, and in many cases, their job is unrelated to their offense.  Each person taken away from their job in this manner forces the employer to go through the search and hiring process to find a new candidate.

Some people think about criminals as "bad people" but this generalization is not true.  Many people convicted of crimes may have problems in one area of their life (such as drugs, domestic abuse, etc.) but may still be a valued employee.

When fathers and mothers are put in prison, it also takes a toll on their families, especially when they have children to support.  Incarceration can essentially create single-parent households, placing additional stress and burdens on the remaining parents.  In communities like inner city areas and some poor rural areas where a large portion of men are incarcerated, the lack of older male role models can make things difficult for younger men, further increasing the risk that they fall into crime.  All of these, beyond the human costs, produce further economic costs.

Here are some opinion pieces on the topic of whether or not tougher sentences reduce crime:

• Longer Sentences Do Not Deter Crime - An opinion piece by Dan Feldman, published in the New York Times.
• Longer prison terms really do cut crime - An article about sentencing for burglaries and fraud in the UK, published in The Guardian.  While these results may seem compelling, they may not apply to other types of offenses and in other countries, like the U.S.
• Tough prison terms don't reduce crime - A study by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics concluded that longer prison terms don't reduce crime--but the chance of getting caught does.  This suggests that it is more important to focus on catching crimes and convicting the people who commit them, but not on tough sentencing.

These are just a brief selection of the more useful and accessible pieces I've found that were written on the topic.  As you can see, there's no quick-and-easy answer.

Recidivism refers to the rate of people returning to jail for committing further crimes, after being let out of jail.  A large portion of recidivism comes from people being let out of jail on parole, and violating conditions of their parole.

Drug-related offenses, usually drug use, evidenced by failing a drug test, is one of the main things that lands people back in jail after they are released on parole.

There was a recent NPR program, Here and Now, which studied a very effective program Kentucky implemented that reduced recidivism (and saved the state a ton of money).  The program involved a combination of giving judges more flexibility in sentencing (allowing for lighter sentences in some drug-use-related offenses) as well as more supervision and oversight during the initial release from prison.  This is the best sort of solution, because it not only saves money but reduces crime--as there are fewer people committing repeat offenses and being sent back to prison.