history

Discussion Chapter 2: Some people believe the history of corrections shows a continuous movement toward more-humane treatment of convicted people as society in general has progressed. Do you agree? Why or why not?

Discussion Chapter 3: What lessons can today’s correctional professionals learn from the historical punishment practices covered in this chapter? Which practices should we not reinstate? Which practices should we consider adopting?

1)

WITH THE SECOND-HIGHEST INCARCERATION RATE IN THE UNITED STATES, Oklahoma has been at the forefront of the nation’s “tough-on-crime” agenda. The state’s elevated incarceration rate is now 78 percent higher than the national average and is projected to grow another 25 percent in the coming decade. Oklahoma already spends half a billion dollars annually on corrections, and the projected growth will more than double the state’s yearly operating budget for prisons and cost more than $1.2 billion in new construction, on top of that. The state is now changing course. Seeking a Better Return on Investment, a 21-member, bipartisan and multi-sector select group, was appointed by Governor Mary Fallin to “develop comprehensive criminal justice and corrections reform policy recommendations designed to alleviate prison overcrowding and reduce Oklahoma’s incarceration rate while improving public safety.”1 Oklahoma is not alone in wanting a more cost-effective corrections system. Political leaders all over the country, once the loudest voices for ever-tougher penal policies, are suddenly instead looking for ways to control the cost of the corrections system. One census of prison-related reforms found that 46 of the states have passed legislation designed to reduce the number of people going to or returning to prison and jail.2 This pattern is true in traditionally conservative states, such as Texas, which has actually closed three prisons,3 to more-liberal states such as Michigan, which reduced the prison population by 12 percent and closed more than 20 prisons.4 During 2015 almost half the states in the United States had actual reductions in the number of people in prison.5 Since 2010, in fact, more than half the states have reduced both their imprisonment rates and their crime rates.6 These changes come after nearly four decades of uninterrupted prison growth (see “The Great Experiment in Social Control” on pages 6–7). The scope of America’s longterm commitment to a big corrections system has been described as one of the greatest policy experiments in modern history. In 1973 the prison incarceration rate was 96 per 100,000 Americans. For 38 consecutive years after that, the number of people in prison increased—during periods when crime went up, but also during periods when crime Almost two-thirds of the members of the current U.S. population, including most of the readers of this book, were born after 1971. For them it has been entirely normal to see yearly increases in the number of Americans in prison, in jail, and under correctional supervision. This group of citizens has seen corrections grow every year—in good economic times and bad, during periods of rising crime and of dropping crime. This growth trend began with the “baby boom” generation: When Americans born in the two decades after World War II hit their twenties and thirties, the peak crime-prone age, they clogged the criminal justice system. The large and growing correctional populations that seem so normal have not always been so. From 1900 until about 1970, U.S. prison populations were quite stable, hovering between 90 and 120 per 100,000 citizens. After more than 35 years of steady growth, the rate of incarceration is now five times as high as it was in 1973. In 2007 the correctional population reached its highest point in U.S. history—by most accounts the largest correctional population in the world, with more people in prison than China, which has four times more citizens. This period of U.S. history could be called the “great experiment in social control,” for it has defined a generation of Americans who have witnessed the greatest expansion in government control ever undertaken by a democratic state. Researchers have tried to explain the sources of this growth. Some of it stems from increases in crime, but most of this crime growth occurred during the first half of the “experiment.” Some is because of increased effectiveness at apprehending, arresting, and convicting criminally involved people. But this aspect of the “experiment” is minor compared with changes in punishment policy. In the United States the chances of a person convicted of a felony getting a prison sentence instead of probation have increased steadily for several decades, to the point where the chance of getting a probation sentence is now a fraction of what it used to be. Therefore, more people are going to prison, and they are serving longer terms as well. Further, the strictness of postrelease supervision has also increased so that more people on probation than before are being sent back to prison because of a failure to abide by strictly enforced rules. This triple whammy—less probation, longer prison terms, and stricter postsentencing supervision—has fueled a continuing increase in correctional populations, especially prison populations, even when crime rates are dropping. Some scholars have tried to explain the unprecedented punitiveness of the late-twentieth-century U.S. policy (see “For Further Reading” on page 28). They discuss the importance of U.S. politics and culture, and they expressly point to the effects of two decades of the “war on drugs.” This is certainly a part of the explanation, but nationally only 16 percent of people in prison are there for a drug crime.7 Yet why this punitiveness occurred is far less interesting than what its results have been. Over the coming years, researchers, scholars, and intellectuals will begin to try to understand what we have learned from this great experiment. The effects of this experiment in social control fall into three broad categories: its effects on crime, on society, and on the pursuit of justice. First, and most important, how has the growth of corrections affected rates of crime? Because so many factors affect crime, we cannot easily distinguish the effects of a growing corrections system from those from other factors, such as the economy or times of war. Researchers who have tried to do so have reached divergent conclusions, but even the most conservative scholars of the penal system now seem to agree that further growth will have little impact on crime.8 Others note that because the crime rate today is about the same as it was in the early 1970s, when the penal system began to grow, the corrections system has not likely had a large effect on crime.9 Second, there is a growing worry that a large corrections system—especially a large prison system—damages families and communities, and increases racial inequality. For example, almost three million children have a parent in prison or in jail, including more than 10% of African American children.10 How do these experiences affect their chances in life? And what does it mean that more than one in four male African Americans will end up in prison? Third, how does a large penal system affect the pursuit of justice? Do people feel more confidence in their justice system? Is it right to have people who break the law end up punished the way that America punishes them? In this great experiment in social control, have we become a more just society? One theme in this book is that things are not as simple as they look. New laws and policies seldom achieve exactly what they were intended to do, and they often have unintended consequences. In this text we explore the most important issues in penology, from the effectiveness of rehabilitation to the impact of the death penalty, with the knowledge that each has more than one side. We begin with a seemingly simple question: What is the purpose of corrections? In exploring the answer to this question, you will discover a pattern that recurs throughout the book. Any important correctional issue is complicated and controversial. The more you learn about a given issue, the FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL POLICY: The Great Experiment in Social Control Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 7 declined; during good economic times and bad; during times of war and times of peace. (See “Myths in Corrections.”) By 2010, the U.S. prison incarceration rate had grown to exceed 500 per 100,000 Americans—more than a fivefold increase—and many people thought that this generation-long trend had become a more or less permanent feature of U.S. penal policy. During this time, correctional budgets grew by over 600 percent. The United States now has almost 3,000 people on death row11 and another 206,000 serving life sentences, nearly a third of them ineligible for any parole.12 Counting prisons and jails, almost 2.3 million citizens are incarcerated, making the total incarceration rate more than 920 per 100,000 citizens, a stunning 1 percent of all adults.13 When all forms of corrections are taken into account—including probation, parole, and community corrections—nearly 3 percent of all adults are under some form of correctional control.14 The extensive growth of the correctional population since 1980 is shown in Figure 1.1. High U.S. Crime Rates THE MYTH: The United States has such a large prison system, compared with the prison systems of other countries, because it has much more crime. THE REALITY: Based on surveys of citizens conducted at the height of the U.S. prison population, the rates of burglary and robbery in Australia, England, and Canada are all higher than in the United States. When it comes to crimes reported to the police, U.S. rates of burglary and robbery have been falling faster than those in Australia, England, and Canada, and fall in between the highest and lowest of those countries. The U.S. incarceration rate is at least four times higher than any of those countries. Source: David P. Farrington, Patrick A. Langan, Michael Tonry, and Darrick Jolliffe, “Introduction,” Cross-National Studies in Crime and Justice (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004). MYTHS in Corrections prison An institution for the incarceration of people convicted of crimes, usually felonies. jail A facility authorized to hold pretrial detainees and sentenced misdemeanants for periods longer than 48 hours. Most jails are administered by county governments; sometimes they are part of the state government. more you will see layers of truth, so your first findings will be bolstered by evidence and then challenged by further investigation and deeper knowledge. In the end, we think you will see that there are few easy answers but plenty of intense questions. Near the beginning of each chapter we present questions for inquiry that each chapter will explore. We hope that these will help focus your exploration of corrections and serve as a study guide, along with the summary at the end of each chapter. FIGURE 1.1 Correctional Populations in the United States, 1980–2015 Although the increase in prison population receives the most publicity, a greater proportion of correctional growth has occurred in probation and parole. Sources: Latest data available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics correctional surveys, www.ojp.usdoj.gov: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Annual Probation Survey, Annual Parole Survey, Annual Survey of Jails, Census of Jail Inmates, and National Prisoner Statistics Program, 2000 and 2005–2015. 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 Year 1980 1996 1998 2002 2000 2004 2006 2010 2012 2014 2008 Number of sentenced offenders (millions) 1 2 3 4 5 Probation Prison Parole Jail Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 8 PART 1 Correctional Context Some say that when prison populations grow, crime rates decline because prisons prevent crime. But between 1973 and the early 1990s, we saw both imprisonment growth and increases in crime. Most observers concluded that when more people commit crime, more people end up behind bars. This suggests that as crime declines, so will correctional caseloads. But studies show that, aside from the 1970s, there has been little relationship between the nation’s crime rate and the size of its prison population. Since 1990, for example, the swelling prison population seems to be entirely caused by tougher criminal justice policies rather than changes in crime rates.15 In 2010 the U.S. government announced that for the first time in more than 30 years, the corrections system, including prisons, held fewer people than the year before.16 By 2015, the prison incarceration rate had fallen to 480 per 100,000, a 5 percent reduction from the peak a few years earlier.17 The number of people in local jails had also dropped about 1 percent each year since 2007.18 For the first time in more than a generation, then, it seems that the long-term pattern of correctional growth may be changing. (See “If Crime Starts to Rise, Then What?”) And by any measure, the U.S. corrections system has seen a sustained period of remarkable, steady growth for more than a generation. There are many indications that the corrections system is undergoing historic changes. After nearly four decades of correctional growth in all its sectors—jails, prisons, and the community—the trend line is edging down. There is a political consensus on the left and the right that we have too many people behind bars. A growing movement supports reentry programs to help people succeed after they have been to prison, and policy makers have been expanding treatment alternatives to prison for people convicted of drug crimes. The impetus for this change comes from several sources. State and local governments are straining to deal with the fiscal realities of corrections costs. A growing literature has questioned the effectiveness of prison, and growing public attention to the problems that people face in reentry has softened attitudes about people with criminal records. Public polls show that the number of people who think the justice system is “not tough enough” has been declining for more than a decade and that this is now a minority view. In some ways, the most important trend is that crime has been dropping for more than two decades and is now the lowest it has been in a generation—about what it was in the late 1960s. The sustained drop in crime rates has meant that fear of crime lost its usual place at or near the top of the list of public concerns, having been replaced by other factors such as the economy and terrorism. As fear of crime waned, the prospects for major reform in the justice system improved. Some people now believe this long-term pattern is changing. Nationally, murder rates rose more than 10 percent in 2016, although most of this increase was concentrated in a few large cities. Nevertheless, misleading claims about a new crime wave in America during the 2016 presidential election have driven a new public unease about safety, and a strong majority of Americans now falsely believe that crime is up over the last ten years. Perhaps it is no surprise that the most recent opinion poll shows concern about crime to be rising again, and is today at a 15-year high. Will the national mood that seems to have supported so much correctional reform suddenly change? Possibly. Social scientists point out that the last couple of years may be a “blip” in what has been a 25-year, sustained drop in crime, especially violent crime. They emphasize that the big story is how much safer we are now than a generation ago. But people are starting to get worried again, despite this long-term trend. What will happen to correctional policy? Sources: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Preliminary 2015 Crime Statistics (Washington, DC: Author, 2016). Gallup, “Americans’ Views Shift on Toughness of Justice System,” October 20, 2016; Gallup, “In US, Concern About Crime Climbs to a 15-Year High,” April 6, 2016; Matthew Freidman, Ames C. Grawert, and James Cullen, Crime in 2016: A Preliminary Analysis (New York: Brennen Center, 2016); Ryan J. O’Reilly and Atiel Edwards-Levy, “Most Americans (Incorrectly) Believe Crime Is Up. That’s Great News for Donald Trump,” Huffington Post Politics, August 8, 2016. FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL POLICY: If Crime Starts to Rise, Then What? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 9 Yet things are changing, as a new liberal–conservative consensus emerges. A conservative coalition led by former Congressman Newt Gingrich recently produced a series of recommendations about criminal justice reform called Right on Crime. 19 A few months earlier, a more-liberal coalition of 40 organizations had released its report, called Smart on Crime. 20 These two groups could be expected to differ on justice priorities, but their reports reflected strong consistencies. Both groups think that most people who are convicted of nonviolent crimes need not end up in prison. Both groups see a need for expanded treatment programs and strong community-based sentences as options for judges.21 This new consensus centers on a growing idea that the penal system, especially prisons, has grown too much. Some believe that “mass incarceration” has become a problem in its own right, but concerns about burgeoning probation caseloads and high jail counts have arisen as well. Both liberals and conservatives rightfully worry that the expansion of corrections has affected some groups more than others. African Americans are five times more likely to be in prison than whites; in some states, 5 percent of all black men are in prison.22 Nearly 12 percent of all African American men 20–40 years old—the age of most fathers—are now locked up. One in six male African Americans has been to prison.23 Both liberals and conservatives also share a concern that the cost of corrections, nearly $80 billion per year, is out of line. Prison budgets—by far the most expensive portion of the penal system—grow even when monies for education and other services lag.24 Probation caseloads and daily jail populations have also grown, and they cost money, too. With growing public concern about the quality of schools and health care, people of all political persuasions are tempted to ask if so much money is needed for corrections. They are especially leery about continuing to invest in what many political leaders, especially conservatives, see as a system that is not as effective as it ought to be.25 Corrections, then, is a topic for public debate as never before. A generation ago, most people knew very little about corrections. Prisons were alien “big houses,” infused with mystery and located in remote places. The average American had no direct knowledge of “the joint” and no way of learning what it was like. Most people did not even know what probation and parole were, much less have an opinion about their worth. However, more than 6.7 million Americans are now in the corrections system. This number includes one-third of all African Americans who have dropped out of high school; in fact, 70 percent of this group will go to prison during their lifetime.26 Add to these numbers the impact on fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and husbands, wives, and children, and you have an idea of how pervasive corrections is today—especially for poor Americans and people of color. Further, crime stories dominate our news media. Read any local newspaper or watch any local nightly newscast, and you will encounter a crime story that raises questions about corrections: Should the person have been released? Is the sentence severe ▲ One out of every 43 Americans is under some form of correctional control. Most of them live among us in the community. JeffG/Alamy Stock Photo Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 10 PART 1 Correctional Context enough? Should laws for this type of crime be tougher? In short, corrections now maintains a profound place, not only in the public eye, but also in the public experience. But are the images we form—based on media reports and our own experiences—accurate? Do they tell us all we need to know about corrections? The coming years will be an exciting period for people interested in corrections. A growing consensus, crossing the political divide, places us on the verge of a new era in correctional policy, characterized by a search for innovative strategies to deal with crime that are more effective and less costly—financially and socially—than the policies that have dominated the landscape for almost 40 years. This is a time when those who study corrections can help shape a new generation of policies and practices. The demand for correctional professionals will continue to grow, but openness to new ideas will be greater than ever before. People who study corrections want to learn more about the problems that rivet attention. They want to see beyond the three-minute news story, to understand what is happening to people caught in the system. And they suspect that what seems so simple from the viewpoint of a politician arguing for a new law, or from the perspective of a news reporter sharing the latest crime story, may in fact be far more complex for the people involved. The Purpose of Corrections It is 11:00 a.m. in New York City. For several hours, a five-man crew has been picking up trash in a park in the Bronx. Across town on Rikers Island, the view down a corridor of jail cells shows hands gesturing through the bars as people converse, play cards, share food—the hands of people doing time. About a thousand miles to the south, almost 400 people sit in isolated cells on Florida’s death row. In the same state a woman on probation reports to a community control officer. On her ankle she wears an electronic monitoring device that tells the officer if she leaves her ▲ Nearly two million children have a parent in prison. What message does this fact send to the younger generation? AP Images/Rich Pedroncelli Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 11 home at night. On the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, sunburned Texans in stained work clothes tend crops. Almost due north in Kansas, a grievance committee in a maximum-security prison reviews complaints of guard harassment. Out on the West Coast, in San Francisco, a young man on his way to work checks in with his parole officer and drops off a urine sample. All these activities are part of corrections. And all the central actors are under correctional authority. Punishing people who break society’s rules is an unfortunate but necessary part of social life. From the earliest accounts of humankind, punishment has been used as one means of social control, of compelling people to behave according to the norms and rules of society. Parents chastise their children when they disobey family rules, groups ostracize individuals who deviate from expected group norms, colleges and universities expel students who cheat, and governments impose sanctions on those who break the law. Of the various ways that societies and their members try to control behavior, criminal punishment is the most formal, for crime is perhaps the most serious type of behavior over which a society must gain control. In addition to protecting society, corrections helps define the limits of behavior so that everyone in the community understands what is permissible. The nineteenth-century sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that crime is normal and that punishment performs the important function of spotlighting societal rules and values. When a law is broken, citizens express outrage. The deviant thus focuses group feeling. As people unite against the law violator, they feel a sense of mutuality or community. Punishing those who violate the law makes people more alert to shared interests and values. Three basic concepts of Western criminal law—offense, guilt, and punishment—define the purpose and procedures of criminal justice. In the United States, Congress and state legislatures define what conduct is considered criminal. The police, prosecutors, and courts determine the guilt of a person charged with a criminal offense. The postconviction process then focuses on what should be done with the guilty person. The central purpose of corrections is to carry out the criminal sentence. The term corrections usually refers to any action applied to people after they have been convicted and implies that the action is “corrective,” or meant to change them according to society’s needs. Corrections also includes actions applied to people who have been accused—but not yet convicted—of criminal offenses. Such people are often waiting for action on their cases and are under supervision— sitting in jail, undergoing drug or alcohol treatment, or living in the community on bail. When most Americans think of corrections, they think of prisons and jails. This belief is strengthened by legislators and the media, which focus much attention on incarceration and little on community corrections. As Figure 1.2 shows, however, more than two-thirds of all people under correctional supervision are living in the community on probation or parole. EMILE DURKHEIM (1858–1917) Important French scholar, known as the “Father of Sociology,” who argued that criminally involved people and their punishment are functional in society, helping define norms and demonstrating to the public the nature of societal expectations for conformity. BIOGRAPHY Probation 56.21% Prison 22.65% Jails 10.80% Parole 12.91% FIGURE 1.2 Percentage of People in Each Category of Correctional Supervision Sources: Latest data available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics correctional surveys, www.ojp.usdoj.gov: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Annual Probation Survey, Annual Parole Survey, Annual Survey of Jails, Census of Jail Inmates, and National Prisoner Statistics Program, 2000 and 2005–2015. corrections The variety of programs, services, facilities, and organizations responsible for the management of individuals who have been accused or convicted of criminal offenses. social control Actions and practices, of individuals and institutions, designed to induce conformity with the rules and norms of society. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 12 PART 1 Correctional Context Corrections thus encompasses all the legal responses of society to some prohibited behavior: the variety of programs, services, facilities, and organizations responsible for managing people accused or convicted of criminal offenses. When criminal justice researchers, officials, and practitioners speak of corrections, they may be referring to any number of programs, processes, and agencies. Correctional activities are performed by public and private organizations; involve federal, state, and local governments; and occur in a variety of community and closed settings. We can speak of corrections as a department of the government, a subfield of the academic discipline of criminal justice, an approach to the treatment of those who have broken the law, and a part of the criminal justice system. Corrections is all these things and more. A Systems Framework for Studying Corrections Because it reflects social values, corrections is as complex and challenging as the society in which we live today. Corrections is a legal intervention to deter, to rehabilitate, to incapacitate, or simply to punish or achieve retribution. Having a framework will help you sort out the complex, multidimensional nature of corrections. In this book we use the concept of the corrections system as a framework for study. A system is a complex whole consisting of interdependent parts whose operations are directed toward common goals and are influenced by the environment in which they function. For example, interstate highways make up a transportation system. The various components of criminal justice—police, prosecutors, courts, corrections—also function as a system. Goals Corrections is a complicated web of disparate processes that, ideally, serve the goals of fair punishment and community protection. These twin objectives not only define the purpose of corrections but also serve as criteria by which we evaluate correctional work. Correctional activities make sense when they seem to punish someone fairly or offer some sense of protection. The thought of an unfair or unsafe correctional practice distresses most people. When these two functions of punishment and protection do not correspond, corrections faces goal conflict. For example, people may believe that it is fair to release people on parole once they have served their sentences, but they may also fear any possible threats that the person poses to the community. Further, such goal conflicts can cause problems in the way the system operates. system A complex whole consisting of interdependent parts whose operations are directed toward common goals and are influenced by the environment in which they function. In 2015 the number of people in jail—as opposed to prison— decreased nationally after three years of fluctuation and is now the smallest total in more than a decade. This continues a national trend of reducing jail incarceration numbers, even after accounting for the additional people in jail in California, where the Public Safety Realignment Act resulted in large numbers of people moving from the state prison system to the county corrections system (see “The Big Three in Corrections” on pages 17–19). As the nation’s jail populations continue to drop, there will be a natural tendency for prison populations to also decline, as the flow into prison from jail wanes. FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL POLICY: The Interconnectedness of Jail and Prison Population Counts Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 13 Interconnectedness Corrections can be viewed as a series of processes: sentencing, classification, supervision, programming, and revocation, to name but a few. crimes or expose scandals in administration. As a result, corrections systems and their environments tend to overrespond to correctional failure but remain less aware of success. Complexity As systems grow and mature, they tend to become more complex. Thirty years ago, the “three Ps”—probation, prisons, and parole—dominated correctional practice. Today, all kinds of activities come under the heading of corrections, from pretrial drug treatment to electronically monitored home confinement, from work centers, where people can earn money for restitution, to private, nonprofit residential treatment programs. The complexity of the corrections system is illustrated by the variety of public and private agencies that compose the corrections system of Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, as Table 1.1 shows. Note that correctional clients are supervised by various service agencies operating at different levels of government (state, county, municipal) and in different branches of government (executive and judicial). Department of Parole Supervision Department of Corrections Warden Sheriff’s office Jail administrator Pretrial detention Incarceration Parole release Parole supervision Judiciary Judge Sentence Parole board Parole revocation Resentence Parole officer Community Corrections, Inc., a nonprofit organization Department of Probation Probation officer Sheriff’s office Jail administrator Probation Drug treatment Community service Judiciary Judge Sentence Contract PSI Case 1: Two years of probation, drug treatment, and 50 hours of community service. Pretrial detention Case 2: Two years of incarceration to be followed by community supervision on parole. FIGURE 1.3 Interconnectedness of Correctional Agencies in Implementing Sentences Note the number and variety of agencies that deal with these two cases. Would you expect these agencies to cooperate effectively with one another? Why or why not? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 15 The Corrections System Today The U.S. corrections system today employs more than 700,000 administrators, psychologists, officers, counselors, social workers, and others. The federal government, the 50 states, more than 3,000 counties, and uncounted municipalities and public and private organizations administer corrections at an average annual cost of more than $81 billion, according to one recent estimate.27 Corrections consists of many subunits, each with its own functions and responsibilities. These subunits—probation offices, halfway houses, prisons, and others—vary in size, goals, clientele, and organizational structure. Some are administered in institutions, others in the community. Some are government agencies; others are private organizations contracted by government to provide specific services to correctional clients. A probation office is organized differently from a halfway house or a prison, yet all three are part of the corrections system and pursue the goals of corrections. However, there are important differences among subunits of the same general type. For example, the organization of a five-person probation office working closely with one judge in a rural setting differs from that of a more bureaucratized 100-person probation office in a large metropolitan system. Such organizational variety may either help or hinder the system of justice. Federalism, a system of government in which power and responsibility are divided between a national government and state governments, operates in the United States. All levels of government—national, state, county, and municipal—are involved in one or more aspects of federalism A system of government in which power and responsibilities are divided between a national government and state governments. TABLE 1.1 The Distribution of Correctional Responsibilities in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania Note the various correctional functions performed at different levels of government by different agencies. What correctional agencies does your community have? Correctional Function Level and Branch of Government Responsible Agency Adult Corrections Pretrial detention Municipal / executive Department of Human Services Probation supervision County / courts Court of Common Pleas Halfway houses Municipal / executive Department of Human Services Houses of corrections Municipal / executive Department of Human Services County prisons Municipal / executive Department of Human Services State prisons State / executive Department of Corrections County parole County / executive Court of Common Pleas State parole State / executive Board of Probation and Parole Juvenile Corrections Detention Municipal / executive Department of Public Welfare Probation supervision County / courts Court of Common Pleas Dependent / neglect State / executive Department of Human Services Training schools State / executive Department of Public Welfare Private placements Private Many agencies Juvenile aftercare State/executive Department of Public Welfare Federal Corrections Probation / parole Federal / courts U.S. courts Incarceration Federal / executive U.S. Bureau of Prisons Sources: Taken from the annual reports of the responsible agencies. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 16 PART 1 Correctional Context the corrections system. The national government operates a full range of correctional organizations to handle people convicted of breaking federal laws; likewise, state and local governments provide corrections for people who have broken their laws. However, most criminal justice and correctional activity takes place at the state level. Less than 3 percent of individuals on probation and parole, and 9 percent of those in prison, are under federal correctional supervision.28 (See “The Federal Corrections System Dials Back on Its Agenda of Reform.”) Despite the similarity of behaviors that are labeled criminal, important differences appear from state to state among specific definitions of offenses, types and severity of sanctions, and procedures governing the establishment of guilt and subsequent treatment. In addition, many variations in how corrections is formally organized appear at the state and local levels. The corrections systems in California, Florida, and Texas handle almost one-third of all people in state prisons and about one-fourth of all those who are under correctional control in the United States, but each state has developed different organizational configurations to provide corrections (see “The Big Three in Corrections”). The federal corrections system is larger than any of the state systems, and it handles all violations of federal law. Community corrections, including pretrial services, probation, and parole, are provided by the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services, which is a part of the U.S. court system. Institutional corrections is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a part of the U.S. Department of Justice. There are 92 federal probation offices serving district courts; the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has 110 institutions and 25 residential reentry facilities. Unlike the situation with state corrections systems, until very recently there has been little pressure to stem the growth of the federal corrections system. Today there are 128,400 people under the supervision of U.S. probation officers, an increase of 10 percent over the last four years. People on parole represent less than 10 percent of the total number supervised by probation. There are 209,600 people incarcerated in the federal system, and since 1990 the federal prison system has grown more rapidly than almost any of the 50 state systems. Just under 20 percent of those who are confined in federal prisons are housed in private facilities or local jails under contract with the federal system. Concerned about this growth, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced in 2013 the first significant reform of the federal justice system since the establishment of sentencing guidelines in 1984: “We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate—not merely to convict, warehouse and forget.” Under these guidelines, federal prosecutors asked for lower penalties for people convicted of drug crimes, enabling judges to impose less severe sentences. The number of people in federal prisons dropped nearly 10 percent. Under President Trump, with Jeff Sessions as attorney general, this has changed. When he was a U.S. senator from Alabama, Sessions opposed many of the changes that Holder put into play. In his first major policy announcement as the new attorney general, Sessions directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most-severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of drugrelated crimes. Overturning his predecessor’s policy directives signals a return to more of a “get-tough” ethic in the federal justice system. Sources: Dannielle Kaeble and Lauren E. Glaze, Correctional Populations in the United States, 2015 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016); Sari Horwitz and Matt Zapostosky, “Sessions Issues Sweeping New Criminal Charging Policy,” Washington Post, May 12, 2017. FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL PRACTICE: The Federal Corrections System Dials Back on Its Agenda of Reform ▲ Since Jeff Sessions became the U.S. Attorney General, some federal criminal justice reform proposals have been put on hold. AP Images/Alex Brandon Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 17 Three states from three different regions in the United States dominate the corrections scene: California, Texas, and Florida. They account for 30 percent of all people in state prisons and one-fourth of those under any form of correctional control (see Table 1 for a breakdown of the key numbers). TABLE 1 The Big Three by the Numbers Prison Probation Parole California 129,593 285,681 63,919 Florida 94,481 227,540 5,140 Texas 149,501 388,101 100,699 Sources: Bureau of Justice Statistics, most recent reports for each state. CALIFORNIA California used to have the largest state prison system in the country, by far. No longer. The state has undertaken a historically unprecedented policy designed to reduce dramatically the number of people incarcerated in the state’s prison system. In the process, California has dropped its prison count by more than one-fourth since the peak in 2007, a reduction of almost 46,000 people—more than the entire state prison populations of all but seven states. The California story is not only an exemplar in what is possible from a prison-reduction standpoint, but it also offers a lesson in the public-policy consequences of a change of this magnitude. The system is still large, housing about one in every ten people in state prisons, but the state has gone from an incarceration rate well above the national average to one of the lowest rates in the West (329 people in prison per 100,000 adult residents, as compared to the national average of 402). The California adult corrections system is administered by the Adult Authority, and juvenile institutions are administered by the Youth Authority. Both the Adult Authority and the Youth Authority are part of the state government’s executive branch. Adult and juvenile probation services are provided by the executive branch at the county level and administered by a chief probation officer. For many years, a portion of the county probation costs was subsidized by the state, but the size of these subsidies started declining in the 1980s. Local taxes pay for jails and probation services, but these taxes have been capped for more than a decade. Local corrections capacity became overloaded when caseloads grew without increases in funding. State correctional facilities were no better off, overcrowded at more than 180 percent capacity. Californians seemed to want to be tough on law violators but didn’t want to pay for the repercussions. In 2006, with every aspect of the corrections system desperately overcrowded, operating with daily chaos, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” Yet his proposed reforms faced intractable political resistance, especially from law enforcement. So in 2009 the federal courts stepped in and declared the California system unconstitutional, citing chronic overcrowding, woeful health care, and routine violence. The courts ordered newly installed Governor Jerry Brown to reduce the California prison population by at least 40,000, a requirement affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court (Brown v. Plata). In response, the legislature enacted the California Public Safety Realignment Act in 2011, which devised a new system of sentencing and correctional policies designed to strengthen local correctional capacity and divert a large number of people from the prison system. Realignment has changed California’s correctional numbers. The prison population has dropped by more than 20 percent since 2011. But probation, parole, and local jail counts have also decreased, and the system’s overall numbers are down 43 percent since Schwarzenegger’s original declaration of emergency. Critics of realignment argue that it has made the public less safe, having put some 18,000 people on the streets who would otherwise have been in prison or jail. These fears have fueled by a small, statewide increase in crime in 2016 as well as a handful of heavily publicized new crimes committed by people released from custody because of realignment. Even so, several careful studies show that violent crime has not been affected by realignment and that the only change seems to be a small (2 percent or so) increase in auto thefts stemming from the changes. Overall, crime is down since realignment took effect, and Californians appear to support it. Momentum for cutting down on prisons is so strong that in 2014 Californians overwhelmingly passed Proposition 47, which reduced a list of nonserious felonies to misdemeanors so that people found guilty of them cannot be sent to prison. The fact that felony arrests dropped by more than 50,000 (almost 30 percent) in 2016 foretells continuing reductions in the number of Californians who end up behind bars. TEXAS Texas supplanted California with the nation’s largest prison system in 2012. Not only is the Texas prison system the biggest; everything about Texas criminal justice is “big.” The rate of Texans under correctional control is higher than that of any other state in the Union except Georgia. Nearly one in nine of the nation’s people on probation lives in Texas. But the story in Texas is changing, and Texas is among the FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL PRACTICE: The Big Three in Corrections (continued) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 18 PART 1 Correctional Context vanguard of states that seek to reduce the number of people in their prisons. All adult corrections in Texas are housed under the Department of Criminal Justice, which is supervised by a nine-person board appointed by the governor. This department administers corrections through three separate divisions: institutions, parole supervision, and probation. In addition, the parole board reports to the Board of Criminal Justice. The Institutional Division manages all state custodial facilities and monitors the local jails. The Texas Youth Commission handles all juvenile institutions and aftercare. Organized on a county basis, adult probation and juvenile probation are run separately by chief probation officers locally appointed by the county judiciary. Standards for both probation functions are established and monitored by state authority. Adult probation is monitored by the Department of Criminal Justice; juvenile probation is monitored by the Juvenile Probation Commission. Because Texas has more than 200 counties, coordinating the work of these commissions is extremely complicated. The Texas imprisonment rate was roughly stable during the 1980s. Then, because of a round of punitive sentencing reforms, the Texas incarceration rate doubled between 1990 and 1996, leading the nation. During this time, Texas corrections operated under something of a siege mentality. After losing a series of lawsuits, Texas prisons had a tight population cap, forcing the rest of the system to absorb growing numbers. But decision-making fragmentation made it nearly impossible to develop a coordinated response to the prison overcrowding problem. A federal judge eventually threatened to fine the state more than $500,000 per day if it failed to comply with court-ordered standards. In 2010, when Texas’s prison population peaked, the Texas Department of Corrections floated a plan to add 17,000 more prison beds at the cost of almost $1 billion. That led conservatives around the state to take the lead in a broad agenda of criminal justice reform. Since then, the Texas prison population has declined each year, and is now down about 5 percent from the 2010 peak—a number that many Texans are proud of but is roughly the national average drop for that same period. For juvenile justice, though, the numbers are almost astonishing: a 76 percent reduction in confinement in the last decade. Texas has now closed four adult prisons and almost all of its juvenile prisons. Reforms continue to be on the table in Texas, growing from a coalition that includes the “right-on-crime” conservatives and the ACLU liberals. Recent public opinion surveys show strong support for rehabilitation instead of punishments and nonprison alternatives for people convicted of drug crimes and other nonserious felonies. A bipartisan “Cut50” campaign advocates for reducing Texas prison numbers by half. The campaign will try to reduce penalties for low-level drug crimes, and there is talk of raising the age of juveniles from 17 to 18. As oil revenues continue to decline, pressure to constrain the costs of corrections remains high. There is strong public support for reform, which has been helped by substantial drops in Texas crime rates. Texas is “big,” not just in size but also in ideas. FLORIDA Florida’s age demographics make it a bellwether state, meaning the age profile of Florida’s residents looks like where the nation is headed: a large number of retirees and a large number of young people. In terms of imprisonment, Florida is certainly following the broader national trend. Since the peak year of 2010, Florida’s prison population has declined about 3 percent, as is true for many states. Yet there are two differences for Florida. First, Florida makes prison a priority in sentencing more than other states do. It ranks ninth in prison incarceration rates, but in total correctional population, including probation, parole, and jail, Florida is well below the national average. Second, Florida policy makers have been latecomers to the national debate on how to reduce incarceration. The state of Florida administers all institutional and community-based correctional services regionally, and regional directors have considerable autonomy. The five regional administrators for adult corrections report to the secretary of the Department of Corrections and manage all institutional and field services. Juvenile corrections is housed within the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services and operates in 11 districts. Thus, Florida unifies corrections under the executive branch, with separate adult and juvenile functions. Parole supervision was all but abolished in 1984, when Florida enacted its determinate-sentencing system. Florida’s incarceration rate grew steadily between 1980 and 2010, more than doubling. To stem the growth, Florida administrators created the Community Control Project, providing close supervision (often with electronic monitoring) to divert people from prison. That may be one of the reasons why Florida’s prison admissions have been dropping for almost two decades. Yet prison populations have stayed stubbornly high because, without parole, people are serving much longer prison terms than before. Florida Governor Rick Scott was elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility. Fiscal conservatives in Florida have now started to confront the expensive implications of their burgeoning prison system. The Charles Koch Institute, a conservative think tank, has been publicizing recent polls in Florida that show strong support for prison reform: Threequarters of the respondents believe that the prison system is too expensive; two-thirds think that too many nonviolent CORRECTIONAL PRACTICE: The Big Three in Corrections (continued ) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 19 people are behind bars. The realization that most Floridians are ready for significant changes in the way the justice system works has created momentum for reform. There has been something of a moratorium on new get-tough legislation that would add to the prison population, and in 2016 the legislature removed aggravated assault from the list of crimes subject to the state’s mandatory 10/20-life sentence statute. In 2017 the Senate passed a bill that would eliminate mandatory prison sentences for people convicted of nonviolent crimes. Sources: California: Most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics; U.S. Department of Justice; Public Policy Institute of California; California’s Historic Corrections Reforms (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2016); Jody Sundt, Emily J. Salisbury, and Mark G. Harmon, “Is Downsizing Prisons Dangerous? The Effect of California’s Realignment Act on Public Safety,” Criminology & Public Policy, 15 (no. 2, 2016): 315–41; Brown v. Plata, 563 US 2011. Texas: Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/TX.html, 2016; Scott Henson, “Raising the Bars: What’s Next for Texas Criminal Justice Reform? The Observer, www.texasobserver.org/raising-the-bars-criminal-justice-reform, March 21, 2016; Angela Thielo, Frances T. Cullen, Derek M. Cohen, and Cecilia Chouhy, “Rehabilitation in a Red State: Support for Correctional Reform in Texas,” Criminology & Public Policy, 15 (no. 1, 2016): 137–71. Florida: Charles Koch Institute, New Poll: Strong Majority of Floridians Agree the Time for Criminal Justice Reform Is Now, www.charleskochinstitute.org /majority-floridians-agree-criminal-justice-reform-now, September 19, 2016; Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html, 2016; Mary Ellen Klas, “In Major Tallahassee Reversal, Mandatory Sentences Called a Waste of Taxpayer Money,” Miami Herald, February 21, 2017. The extent to which the different levels of government are involved in corrections varies by state. The scope of the states’ criminal laws is much broader than that of federal criminal laws. Almost 200,000 adults are under federal correctional supervision in more than 100 federal prisons.29 The last official count of U.S. prisons listed 110 federal prisons and about 1,000 state prisons. Jails are operated mainly by local governments, but in six states they are integrated with the state prison system. As noted in Figure 1.4 on the next page, criminal justice costs are borne by each level of government, with well over 90 percent of correctional costs falling on state and local governments. In most states the agencies of community corrections—probation and intermediate sanctions—are run by the county government and are usually part of the judicial branch. However, in some jurisdictions the executive branch runs them, and in several states this part of corrections is run by statewide organizations. That the United States is a representative democracy complicates corrections. Officials are elected, legislatures determine the objectives of the criminal law system and appropriate the ▲ Correctional policies and practices are affected by a number of outside forces. Supreme Court decisions can impose major changes on corrections, for example, and those changes take place immediately. Andrew Mangum/The New York Times/Redux Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 20 PART 1 Correctional Context resources to carry out those objectives, and political parties channel public opinion to officeholders on such issues as law and order. Over time the goals of correctional policies have shifted. For example, between 1940 and 1970, corrections was oriented toward liberal rehabilitative policies; since about 1970, conservative, get-tough crime control policies have influenced corrections. Questions of crime and justice are thus inescapably public questions, subject to all the pressures and vagaries of the political process. Clearly, corrections encompasses a major commitment on the part of U.S. society to deal with people convicted of criminal law violations. The increase in the number of people under supervision in the past decade has caused a major expansion of correctional facilities, staff, and budgets; some might say that corrections is now a big business. Key Issues in Corrections Like all other government services, corrections is buffeted by frequently shifting social and political forces that greatly complicate administration. These forces are also part of what make corrections so interesting to examine. In this section we describe some of the controversies, issues, and themes that arise in the study of corrections. These are divided into three main areas: managing the correctional organization, working with people, and upholding social values. Managing the Correctional Organization The ways in which different correctional organizations are managed depend on various factors, including goals, funding, bureaucracy, and interagency coordination. Goals The theory inherent in the term corrections, the assumption that people who have broken the law can be “corrected,” faces much dispute. For example, some people believe that most of them can never be rehabilitated, that only social maturation can convince most people to abide by the law. Others argue that the penal system should not be concerned with the future behavior of people who have committed a crime, that the only appropriate response to wrongdoing is punishment. Yet from the end of World War II until the 1970s, the corrective function was so widely accepted that treatment and reform were virtually the only issues in criminal justice deemed worthy of serious attention. Corrections has constantly faced the challenge of deciding which goals to emphasize. Conflict over goals stems precisely from the shifting forces that directly influence corrections. For example, political ideology often colors the analysis and development of correctional policy. Liberals believe that corrections should follow one path; conservatives prefer another. Goals set by conflicting interests do not usually mesh. In response to conflicting political forces, correctional leaders offer conflicting (or at least divergent) justifications for a given policy in order to maintain an appearance of consensus. For Processes in one part of the corrections system affect, in both large and small ways, processes in the rest of the system. For example, when a local jail changes its policies on eligibility for work release, this change will affect the probation caseload. When a parole agency implements new drugscreening practices, the increased number of violators uncovered by the new policy will affect jails and prisons within the system. When writers fail to check their facts for a presentence investigation report, poorly reasoned correctional assignments may result. These processes all affect one another because people pass through corrections in a kind of assembly line with return loops (see “The Interconnectness of Jail and Prison Population Counts”). After a person is convicted, a selection process determines which ones go where, and why. This sifting process is itself uncertain and often hard to understand. Most, but not all, people convicted of a violent crime are sent to prison. Most, but not all, people who violate probation or parole rules receive a second chance. Most, but not all, people who are caught committing crimes while supervised by correctional authorities will receive a greater punishment than people who were not under supervision during the crime. Figure 1.3 shows examples of interconnections among correctional agencies as they deal with people who have been given different sentences. Environment As they process people through the system, correctional agencies must deal with outside forces such as public opinion, fiscal constraints, and the law. Thus, sometimes a given correctional agency will take actions that do not seem best suited to achieving fairness or public protection. At times, correctional agencies may seem to work at odds with one another or with other aspects of the criminal justice process. Corrections has a reciprocal relationship with its environment. That is, correctional practices affect the community, and community values and expectations in turn affect corrections. For example, if the prison system provides inadequate drug treatment, people return to the community with the same drug problems they had when they were locked up. When citizens subsequently lose confidence in their corrections system, they tend not to spend tax dollars on its programs. Feedback Systems learn, grow, and improve according to the feedback they receive about their effectiveness. When a system’s work is well received by its environment, the system organizes itself to continue functioning this way. When feedback is less positive, the system adapts to improve its processes. Although feedback is crucial for corrections, this system has trouble obtaining useful feedback. Success in corrections is best indicated by absence, such as no new crimes or no prison riots—that is, something that might have occurred but did not. Recognizing these absences is difficult at best. By contrast, when corrections fails, everybody knows: The media report new ▲ Corrections links with other criminal justice agencies. The police, the prosecution, and the judiciary all play roles with regard to the clients of corrections. What are some of the problems that develop out of these necessary links? instance, a program of private-industry employment for people in prison can be commended to liberals as rehabilitative training, to free-enterprise advocates as expansion of the private sector, and to conservatives as a get-tough policy designed to make people put in prison pay the costs of their incarceration. Although this tactic helps preserve support for the prison’s industrial operations, it also creates managerial problems for correctional leaders because when the program is implemented, the goals of treatment, profit, and punishment may well conflict. Further, correctional leaders who state precise objectives risk alienating various important groups or constituencies. Thus, they tend to frame goals as vague generalities, such as “to protect” or “to rehabilitate.” The effects of this vagueness extend well beyond public relations; often it is difficult for correctional staff members to make goal-oriented choices because they are unsure of what the leaders want. This conflicted situation has led some observers to argue that corrections does not work to achieve an overriding goal but rather seeks to balance stated and unstated goals so that no single goal is sacrificed. Funding At all political levels, corrections is only one of many services operated by government and paid for by tax revenues. Thus, corrections must vie for funding not only with other criminal justice agencies but also with agencies supporting education, transportation, social welfare, and so on (see “For Critical Thinking”). Per capita spending on all criminal justice activities ranges from less than $100 in West Virginia to more than $400 in Alaska and New York. Understandably, corrections does not always receive the funding it needs; people may want garbage collected regularly more than they want quality correctional work performed. Recall, too, that corrections is largely invisible until a problem occurs, such as when a person on parole commits a heinous crime or a prison riot breaks out. An even greater difficulty stems from the perceived undesirability of those corrected; it is not easy to win larger budgets to help people who have broken the law. FOR CRITICAL THINKING For many people, the huge cost of corrections, especially prison, is the main reason that it seems like the time has come to reduce the corrections system. But is money alone a sufficient justification for this view? After all, the corrections system is an important public investment through which we achieve justice and promote public safety. 1. Is it fair to let financial pressures determine how much we are willing to spend to promote justice and public safety? 2. Do we need to consider other issues to determine whether the U.S. corrections system is too large? 3. What might some of those reasons be? Are they more important than money? ▲ Corrections operates under a system of values, and these values can vary from one corrections system to another. How is policy affected by having different values guide different corrections systems? Andy Cross/Getty Images Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 22 PART 1 Correctional Context Conflict among the branches and levels of government also creates problems for corrections. Local governments are often responsible for correctional programs for people convicted of minor crimes; state governments handle those who will be longer term because of their moreserious crimes. Often the two levels vie for operating funds, and each seeks to avoid responsibility for people supervised by the other. Given this fragmentation, correctional services and programs may overlap. Officials of the executive branch often complain that legislatures enact correctional codes and prescribe operational responsibilities without providing sufficient funds to carry them out. Both branches complain that court rulings set unfair constraints on their ability to handle assigned caseloads. In developing and implementing policies, correctional agents must consider not only the sociopolitical environment but also the government setting in which corrections functions. One result of funding squabbles is dispute over organizational “turf.” Most probation offices are attached to the judiciary and funded by county governments. Do they then fall within the domain of corrections, or do they belong to the judiciary? Should the sheriff be in charge of transporting people from jail to prison, or should the prison administrators be responsible? To what extent should social service agencies become involved with the needs of correctional clients in a halfway house? Should parole officers or the police be responsible for tracking people down who have violated the conditions of their release? Struggles for resources also occur between corrections and related social service agencies. A department of corrections may vie with a department of mental health for funds to set up a drug rehabilitation program; both departments may view the new resources as a way to expand. Often, correctional departments take such empire-building actions to keep themselves strong and viable. Bureaucracy Michael Lipsky has provided perhaps the most vivid portrait of the problems facing correctional workers. He coined the term street-level bureaucrats to refer to the following: Public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, [including] teachers, police officers and other law enforcement personnel, social workers, judges, public lawyers and other court officers, health workers and many other public employees who grant access to government programs and provide services within them.30 Lipsky’s provocative generalizations about street-level bureaucrats apply to virtually all individuals who have face-to-face contact with people under the authority of the corrections system. They work with inadequate resources and face ever-increasing demands. Frequently, they find themselves theoretically obligated to provide higher-quality treatment for their clients than they can afford. Thus, street-level bureaucrats soon learn that “with any single client they probably could interact flexibly and responsibly. But if they did this with too many clients, their capacity to respond flexibly would disappear.”31 For example, probation officers may feel obliged to find jobs for their clients. If they took time to do so, however, they could not provide other services. An officer may genuinely desire to work hard for those who show promise, but not for others. Officers facing such conflicts may become alienated from their clients because they cannot satisfy their clients’ needs: Maintaining a working relationship proves too frustrating. Limited resources force administrators of service bureaucracies to carefully monitor the way workers apply their time and energies. Bureaucracies that process people develop categories for their clients, seeking to use personnel or agency resources in the best way and to succeed with some clients, even though they cannot succeed with all. Lipsky concludes that delivering street-level policy through bureaucracy presents an inherent contradiction. One person delivering service to another suggests human interaction, caring, and responsibility. But delivering service through a bureaucracy suggests detached, inflexible treatment based on limited resources. Conflicting, ambiguous goals, combined with difficulties in measuring work performance, may reduce effectiveness and commitment to the work. Thus, the bureaucratic model guarantees that services are delivered only up to a point and that goals are never fully achieved. Is Lipsky’s conclusion too pessimistic, or just realistic? Certainly, correctional workers and their clients face formidable obstacles. Workers must make daily decisions under conditions of technical uncertainty and sporadic negative feedback; clients must comply both with legal street-level bureaucrats Public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their work, granting access to government programs and providing services within them. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 23 mandates and with less explicit parameters established by the needs of the correctional organization. Yet bureaucratic worker–client relationships offer benefits as well. As their time and tasks grow more structured, workers have less discretion and thus less capacity to abuse their positions. Further, limited organizational resources force agencies to clarify their goals and to direct services toward those people who most need staff time. Given the extensive power of correctional agencies, conditions in bureaucracies may restrain abuse of state power. Interagency Coordination Managing correctional agencies is further complicated by the fact that most corrections systems comprise several loosely related organizations that are themselves bureaucracies. Thus, decision making is dispersed—no one person can implement the full range of correctional practices. For example, the sheriff who runs the jail and the probation officer who runs the pretrial release program are both affected by jail crowding and delays in sentencing hearings. Even so, they may resist working together because each is busily protecting an area of managerial control. Furthermore, line workers in corrections, those in direct contact with the system’s clients, seldom influence organizational policies, even though they must implement those policies daily. Corrections itself cannot determine the type and number of its clients. Others in the criminal justice system, primarily judges, do that, and correctional officials cannot halt or regulate the flow. Thus, the efforts of correctional workers are sometimes sporadic, uncoordinated, or inconsistent merely because various bureaucracies are loosely interconnected. Within the corrections system a great deal of policy is formally interconnected. In some states as many as half or more of all people who go to prison do so because they have violated a requirement of probation or parole; in other states these rule violators are less frequently sent to prison. In other words, the enforcement policies of the supervising agencies help determine prison intake. In most systems, however, prison authorities have little control over policies for enforcing probation rules. Similarly, a probation officer’s caseload is determined by the number of people on probation and the length of their probation terms: Even though officers have a finite amount of time for supervision, they generally have little or no control over their caseloads. As people flow through the system after being convicted of a crime—from probation to revocation to prison to work release to parole—one agency determines the workload of the next. These informal interconnections create an uneasy tension. Agency directors understandably may take steps to protect their piece of the system from encroachment by the rest of it. Each correctional unit commonly insulates itself from the pressures faced by the other units because the others often produce unwanted caseload increases; for example, crowded jail conditions may encourage judges to put more people on probation. This isolation makes it more likely that the other units will run into problems resulting from a lack of cooperation and that these problems will haunt all the units when the corrections system as a whole is criticized. Working with People “People work” is central to corrections because the raw material of the system consists of people—those who work in the system and those who are under the system’s authority. In doing their work, correctional staff must deal with uncertain technologies, engage in exchange relationships with their clients, and follow uncertain correctional strategies. Professional Versus Nonprofessional Staff The term staff in the corrections system refers to probation officers, correctional officers, counselors, and others responsible for the daily management and supervision of people under correctional control. Correctional staff includes both professional and nonprofessional employees. For example, psychologists, counselors, and administrators usually hold at least one college degree. They view themselves as members of various professions, with all the rights that adhere to such callings. They Irfan Khan/Getty Images “People work” is central to corrections. Staff must work closely with clients, use new technologies, engage in exchange relationships, and follow uncertain strategies. ▼ Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 24 PART 1 Correctional Context believe they should be able to work without supervision and to make decisions without always consulting rulebooks or guidelines. These professional employees work closely with nonprofessional staff, such as jail or prison correctional officers. The nonprofessional staff members frequently have only a high school education, and they function under close, often paramilitary (military-style) supervision and enforce rules with physical means when necessary. The different perspectives of these two groups and the ways they communicate with each other have caused problems—for example, conflicts over the best ways to deal with people who have broken the law and distrust of each other’s motives and expertise—in some types of correctional organizations. Uncertain Technologies The term technology refers to methods of applying scientific knowledge to practical purposes in a particular field. Correctional technologies are not as sophisticated as those of, say, engineering, but their subjects—human beings—are far more complex. Methods of dealing effectively with people who are being “corrected” are highly uncertain. Although knowledge of human behavior has developed significantly during the past century, the validity of the various approaches of treatment—such as group therapy, behavior modification, and anger management—remains in doubt. (“Thinking Outside the Box: Doing What Works” shows one way to deal with uncertain technologies.) Thus, corrections is expected to implement programs of questionable value. Correctional organizations face serious problems related to human behavior: Not all those who are released from prison adjust successfully to free society; not all mental health referrals result in emotional adjustment; not all people on probation prove trustworthy. Correctional decisions are prone to error. In fact, correctional organizations may approach the technical problem of human ignorance about humans by seeking to reduce types of error rather than to eliminate error altogether. Further, any organization develops routines just to keep it operating. Like most people, workers in correctional organizations want regular and predictable responsibilities. They do not want to venture into uncharted seas where they may make an uninformed decision and then be penalized for it. Uncertainty declines when people reduce operations to routines—patterns that repeat and thus become familiar. Recognizing these routines is essential for understanding corrections. Exchange A key facet of corrections is the degree of interdependence between staff and the people they deal with. The unarmed, outnumbered correctional officer assigned to a prison or jail has surprisingly little raw power with which to exact cooperative behavior. Similarly, a technology A method of applying scientific knowledge to practical purposes in a particular field. THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX DOING WHAT WORKS For much of its history, the field of corrections has based its practices on what might be called ideas of justice— carefully considered hypotheses about what a good corrections system ought to be like. Quite often, these ideas were promoted because their advocates claimed they would be more effective—that they would produce better citizens or deter more crime. But these ideas were seldom put to an empirical test. Generally speaking, whenever traditional correctional strategies have been evaluated, they have been found wanting, even counterproductive. Some of our most cherished ideas simply do not work in practice. Today, there is an ever-growing evidence base of programs and strategies that have proven effective upon careful evaluation. Descriptions of these approaches are sprinkled throughout this book. Although there is still a great deal to be learned about correctional effectiveness, the truth is we already know a lot about what we should be doing. That does not mean these empirical lessons are always reflected in policy—policy makers seem often to base their choices on ideas of justice rather than evidence. This would never happen in other fields. For example, could you imagine a doctor basing his or her methods on what should work in an ideal world, rather than what does work in practice? What if correctional policy and practice had to be based on evidence of “what works”? What would happen if correctional leaders had to justify their practices by pointing to specific evidence that strategies either have worked in the past or should work based on what we know from studies? Source: National Institute of Justice, Crime Solutions.gov: Reliable Solutions Real Results, www.crimesolutions.gov, 2017. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 25 probation officer can do little with a client who resists the officer’s influence. Meanwhile, the person in the prison cell depends on the work of the correctional officer, and the person on parole often feels powerless under supervision. Thus, staff and the people they are responsible for are interdependent: To achieve personal goals, each depends on the other. The officer needs cooperation to convince superiors that the officer is performing properly; the person who is in prison needs the officer’s recommendation for favorable termination of parole. The interdependence of people in corrections makes the concept of exchange important to understanding their daily world. Exchange occurs when two parties trade promises or concessions that make each person’s work easier or more predictable. For example, a person on probation cooperates by reporting regularly and attending an alcohol treatment program; in return, the officer is more likely to overlook incidental, minor violations of probation. Each party’s situation is made easier by the voluntary decisions of the other. Because exchange relations are quite important, they are often subject to informal enforcement. For instance, a someone who is rowdy is removed from his cell and placed in solitary until he “settles down” and recognizes officials’ authority. A juvenile on probation is arrested and “detained” (locked up) for the weekend while awaiting a hearing on her truancy from school, even though officials have no intention of revoking her probationary status. Conversely, a guard who is hostile or condescending finds it takes much longer to return people to their cells for the morning count or to quiet down those who are noisy. Subtle and not-so-subtle pressures unceasingly reinforce the need for keepers and the kept to stay aware of each other’s needs. In sum, correctional transactions almost uniformly involve some aspect of worker–client contact and interaction. Because staff members and those they deal with depend on each other to achieve their goals, each person can influence evaluations made by the other. This process must be managed through screening and processing routines, staff training and evaluation programs, and so forth. (See “What Does the Great Experiment in Social Control Cost?”) Uncertainty About Correctional Strategies Throughout the chapters to come we explore an important theme: that correctional workers and managers cannot predict with certainty what effect their choices will have on the system. How does the correctional official exchange A mutual transfer of resources based on decisions regarding the costs and benefits of alternative actions. It has been estimated that the annual budgets of the state and federal correctional agencies total $80.7 billion. For elected officials, the cost of the corrections system is an economic hindrance to the ability to fund other public priorities. For example, in 2014, 11 states spent more on their corrections systems than they did on higher education. Trying to drive down correctional costs is a major motivating factor for many of today’s chief executives and legislators. As big as that $80.7 billion figure is, recent analysts have argued that the heavy U.S. reliance on incarceration to deal with crime carries a host of “hidden” costs—that is, expenditures that show up in other public and private budgets, but not in the corrections budget. They say that a proper accounting of the total costs would include law enforcement and judicial systems, which spent another $92.2 billion annually. But even if the costs of the police and the courts are taken out of the picture, individuals and their families who end up in the corrections system incur significant personal costs: $4.5 billion in civil asset forfeiture, $1.4 billion in court fees, and $2.9 billion in family cash support for people when they are in jail. While it is often harder to put a dollar figure on the human costs of the U.S. prison system, new research has tried to identify some of the ways that it costs society to have so many people behind bars. These problems include damage to children, families, and communities when individual and collective economic capacity is obstructed. All of these effects are costly for society, even if a state’s budget does not reflect them. Overall, many leading thinkers have begun to agree that there will be significant economic advantages if the U.S. prison system needs to be scaled back. Sources: William Spelman, “Crime, Cash, and Limited Options: Explaining the Prison Boom,” Criminology and Public Policy 8 (no. 1, February 2009): 29–78; Vera Institute of Justice, The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers (New York: Author, 2012); Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, Following the Money of Mass Incarceration (Washington, DC: Prison Policy Initiative, 2017); The White House, Economic Perspectives on Incarceration and the Criminal Justice System (Washington, DC: Author, 2016). FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL POLICY: What Does the Great Experiment in Social Control Cost? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 26 PART 1 Correctional Context organize staff, choose programs, and manage people in them when the consequences of such actions are so ambiguous? Given this uncertainty, organizational theorists say that the correctional environment is unstable and that, as a result, one of management’s main concerns is avoiding negative feedback from the community—the courts, political leaders, the public, and so forth. Because the effectiveness of correctional strategies is so uncertain, organizations often place greater emphasis on secondary technologies in which they have more confidence—the design of a prison’s security apparatus, a computer-based tracking system for probation, and so on. But the core work of corrections concerns the interactions of people—staff and people on probation—which will always remain hard to predict and control, no matter what the technology. There are two points of interest here. First, people in the corrections system are obviously handled in a variety of ways. Who determines what happens to them, and how they make this determination, is a key issue in this book. Second, and even more central, corrections gets its “business” not only from the courts but also from itself. Policies and practices determine how strictly the rules will be enforced, how dire the consequences will be when they are broken, and how much latitude that staff will have in assigning people to programs. See “Do the Right Thing” for more. Upholding Social Values All these problems combine to make the field of corrections controversial, and therefore engrossing for those who study it. Yet as compelling as these problems may be, they are only a sidelight to the central appeal of the field of corrections. The questions that corrections raises concerning social control are fundamental to defining society and its values. Seemingly every aspect of the field brings up issues centering on deeply held values about social relations. For example, can the number of people in prisons and jails be reduced without endangering the public? (For one answer to this question, see “What Happened in New York, and What Does It Mean for the United States?”) Should corrections be more concerned with punishing people for crimes or with providing programs to help them overcome the problems in their lives that contribute to crime? Is placing surveillance devices in people’s homes a good idea or an invasion of privacy? Questions of interest to researchers, students, and citizens hardly end here. Crucial public and private controversies lurk at every turn. In your own studies and throughout your life, you will find you cannot answer the questions inherent in these controversies without referring to your own values and those of society. People who undertake careers in corrections often do so because they find the field an excellent place to express their most cherished values. Probation and parole officers frequently report that their original decision to work in these jobs stemmed from their desire to help people. Correctional officers often report that the aspect of their job they like best is working with people who are in trouble and want to improve their lives. Administrators report that they value the challenge of building effective policies and helping staff perform their jobs better. The field of corrections, then, helps all these individuals to be fully involved with public service and social values. Corrections is interesting to them in part because it deals with a core conflict of values in our society—freedom versus social control—and it does so in ways that require people to work together. DO THE RIGHT THING For Governor Wilma James, the most difficult years of the state’s fiscal crisis now seem to be over. Her state’s Department of Revenue informed her that tax revenue, down recently by as much as 4 percent of the overall budget because of the struggling economy, will now be stable or even up a percent or two. When the crisis was at its height, she saved some money by moving people who were considered low risk into community programs. The move was successful, saving money with no significant impact on overall crime. A few instances of those who had been convicted of serious crimes made public headlines, but the political backlash was almost nonexistent. Some of her staff have argued that the new financial situation means she should return to the earlier policies that led to larger prison populations. But the commissioner of corrections says the program works well enough and could even be expanded, further reducing the cost of the prison system. WRITING ASSIGNMENT: Write an essay on reducing prison populations. Is this a wise thing to do? Why or why not? How would you approach doing this as a state-level official? What is the best way to reduce the costs of corrections? Is it a short-term problem or a long-term one? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 1 The Corrections System 27 SUMMARY 1 Describe the range of purposes served by the corrections system. Corrections is a means of social control. It holds people accused of crimes; carries out criminal sentences imposed by courts, including both confinement and community supervision; and provides services for rehabilitation. 2 Define the systems framework and explain why it is useful. A system is a complex whole consisting of interdependent parts whose operations are directed toward common goals and influenced by the environment in which they function. It is a useful concept because it helps us understand how the various aspects of corrections can affect the others. 3 Name the various components of the corrections system today and describe their functions. Corrections consists of many subunits. There are both federal and state corrections systems. Institutional corrections include prisons and jails, and they confine people who have been sentenced by the courts (or, in the case of jails, people who are awaiting trial). Community corrections supervises people who are either awaiting trial or have been sentenced by the court but are living in the community. There are also private organizations that provide various services to people under correctional authority. Important differences exist among subunits of the same general type. There used to be a “Big Four” in corrections (see The “Big Three in Corrections,” pages 17–19), with New York having one of the nation’s largest prison systems. In fact, in 1999 New York ranked third in prison population, ahead of Florida. But since then, the Florida prison population has increased by more than 40 percent, while New York has increased by almost a third. The state now ranks sixth in total number of people in prison and is in a cluster of five states that have about 50,000 people incarcerated. What happened? The simple story is that New York started sending fewer people to prison and, for many of them, required shorter stays in prison. The story actually centers on what has happened in the state’s urban behemoth: New York City. Twenty years ago, New York City was the main source of people for prison in New York, sending just over 47,000 people to the state prison system while the rest of the state combined sent about 23,000. Today, prison admissions from outside the city have risen by almost a third, to about 30,000, while New York City prison admissions are down by just over 50 percent, to 23,000. That shift more than explains New York’s drop from the “Big Four,” but what explains the big change? In New York City, police are arresting far fewer people for drug crimes—a two-thirds drop since 1994. Drug cases now make up barely over 10 percent of the prison population. The drop in violent crime over that same period has translated into a 40 percent drop in felony arrests for violence, and judges send a lower portion of people convicted of felonies to prison. The result: a New York City jail and prison incarceration rate that is today half what it was in 1996. The New York City story is an answer to the question “What would happen if prison populations were cut by 50 percent?” For people who worry about public safety, the experience in New York City is instructive. Since 2000, when the city began arresting fewer people and sending fewer of those arrested to state prison, its crime rate has dropped by almost 50 percent. There is no question that New York City is a unique place. But its history of correctional policy is not unique. Its highest number of prison residents, in 1999, was largely the result of mandatory prison terms for people convicted of drug offenses and long sentences for people who sold drugs and those who were convicted of violent crimes. That is, in many ways, the national story. Could other places reduce their imprisonment rates by 50 percent, like New York City? Some places have already achieved substantial reductions from the peak year of their prison population: New Jersey (31.4 percent) and Rhode Island (25.5 percent) stand out among the dozen states with double-digit reductions. One study has estimated that almost 40 percent of people in U.S. prisons are locked up with little or no public safety benefit. Sources: Judith A. Greene and Vincent Schiraldi, Better by Half: The New York City Story of Winning Large-Scale Decarceration While Increasing Pubic Safety (Cambridge, MA: Kennedy School of Public Policy, 2016); Jim Parsons, Qing Wei, Christian Henrichson, and Jennifer Trone, End of an Era? The Impact of Drug Law Reform in New York City (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2015); James Austin and

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A YOUNG MAN DRESSED IN A KHAKI SHIRT SITS QUIETLY AT HIS WORKSTATION, carefully guiding camouflage fabric through a sewing machine. For hours each day, he works making uniforms for the United States armed forces. In fact, he is part of a large corporation that not only makes uniforms for the military, but also other items, such as body armor, that soldiers rely on to help keep them safe. However, this young man is not an employee of a traditional defense contractor, nor are his wages anywhere close to the federal minimum. He is one of 12,000 individuals incarcerated in the federal system who is working for Federal Prison Industries (FPI), a government-owned corporation. FPI is made up of 83 different “factories with fences,” which pay their employees between 23 cents and $1.15 per hour. These work opportunities are purported to aid in the reentry process. As former Attorney General Eric Holder once noted, “The bottom line is that Federal Prison Industries is an integral part of our efforts to keep Americans safe.”1 America gave the world its first penitentiary, an institution created to reform people convicted of committing crimes within an environment designed to focus their full attention on their moral rehabilitation. An important element in early American prisons was labor done by the people imprisoned there. To the Quakers in Pennsylvania, solitary work was viewed as necessary for reforming wayward men. New York prison officials saw labor by those imprisoned not only as a way to reform inhabitants but also as a way to finance prison operations. The use of the penitentiary reflected a major shift in correctional practice away from the brutal public punishments that had once occurred with some regularity. Ideas about both human nature and the purpose of punishment had changed dramatically as well. Although the work of Cesare Beccaria and others affected penal policies throughout much of the Western world, American correctional institutions and practices have developed in decidedly American ways by responding to social and political pressures within the United States. LEARNING OBJECTIVES After reading this chapter, you should be able to . . . 1 Describe “The Great Law” of Pennsylvania and note its importance. 2 Compare and contrast the basic assumptions of the penitentiary systems of Pennsylvania and New York. 3 Discuss the elements of the Cincinnati Declaration. 4 Identify the reforms advocated by the Progressives. 5 Discuss the assumptions of the medical model regarding the nature of criminal behavior and its correction. 6 Illustrate how the community model reflected the social and political values of the 1960s and 1970s. 7 Describe the forces and events that led to the present crime control model. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 48 PART 1 Correctional Context This chapter surveys the historical changes in correctional thought and practices in the United States. We focus on seven periods: the colonial period, the arrival of the penitentiary, the reformatory movement, the Progressive movement, the medical model, the community model, and the crime control model. As each period is discussed, we emphasize the ways in which correctional goals reflected ideas current at the time. The Colonial Period During the colonial period most Americans lived under laws and practices transferred from England and adapted to local conditions. In New England the Puritans maintained a strict society, governed by religious principles, well into the middle of the eighteenth century, and they rigorously punished violations of religious laws. As in England, banishment, corporal punishment, the pillory, and death were the common penalties. In 1682, with the arrival of William Penn, Pennsylvania adopted “The Great Law,” which was based on humane Quaker principles and emphasized hard labor in a house of correction as punishment for most crimes. Death was reserved for premeditated murder. The Great Law survived until 1718, when it was replaced by the Anglican Code, which was already in force in other colonies. The latter code listed 13 capital offenses, with larceny the only felony not punishable by death. Whipping, branding, mutilation, and other corporal punishments were prescribed for other offenses, as were fines. Enforcement of this code continued throughout the colonies until the Revolution. Unlike England, with its crowded hulks, jails, and houses of correction, the colonies seldom used institutions for confinement.2 Instead, banishment, fines, death, and the other punishments just mentioned were the norm. As David Rothman writes, the death penalty was common: The New York Supreme Court in the pre–Revolutionary era regularly sentenced criminals to death, with slightly more than twenty percent of all its penalties capital ones. When magistrates believed that the fundamental security of the city was in danger, as in the case of a slave revolt in 1741, the court responded with great severity (burning to death thirteen of the rebellion’s leaders and hanging nineteen others). Even in less critical times the court had frequent recourse to the scaffold for those convicted of pickpocketing, burglary, robbery, counterfeiting, horse stealing, and grand larceny as well as murder.3 WILLIAM PENN (1644–1718) English Quaker who arrived in Philadelphia in 1682. Succeeded in getting Pennsylvania to adopt “The Great Law,” which emphasized hard labor in a house of correction as punishment for most crimes. BIOGRAPHY Until the 1800s, Americans followed the European practice of relying upon punishments that were physically brutal, such as flogging and branding.▲ Bettmann/Getty Images Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 49 Jails held people awaiting court action or unable to pay their debts. Only rarely were convicted individuals jailed for their whole sentences; the stocks, whipping post, or gallows were the places for punishment. Punishments were public spectacles because “rubbing the noses of offenders in the community context was an essential part of the process of ripping and healing, which criminal justice was supposed to embody.” 4 In keeping with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, little thought was given to reforming criminally involved individuals; such people were considered naturally depraved.5 The Arrival of the Penitentiary Until the beginning of the 1800s, America remained sparsely populated and predominantly rural. In 1790 the entire population numbered less than four million, and no city had more than 50,000 inhabitants. By 1830 the rural population had more than doubled, and the urban population had more than tripled. Growth was accompanied by rapid social and economic changes that affected all aspects of life. Colonial life had been oriented toward the local community: Everyone knew everyone else, neighbors helped one another as needed, and the local clergy and the elite maintained social control. In the nineteenth century, however, social problems could no longer be handled with the help of neighbors. In an increasingly heterogeneous urban and industrial society, responsibility for the poor, insane, and criminal became the province of the state and its institutions. With the Revolution, the ideas of the Enlightenment gained currency (see Chapter 2), and a new concept of criminal punishment came to the fore. This correctional philosophy, based on the ideas of Beccaria, Bentham, and Howard, coincided with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, which took an optimistic view of human nature and a belief in each person’s perfectibility.6 Social progress was thought possible through reforms to match the dictates of “pure reason.” Emphasis also shifted from the assumption that deviance was part of human nature to a view that crime was caused by forces in the environment. The punitive colonial penal system based on retribution was thus held to be incompatible with the idea of human perfectibility. Reformers argued that if Americans were to become committed to the humane and optimistic ideal of human improvability, they had to remove barbarism and vindictiveness from penal codes and make reformation of the criminally involved the primary goal of punishment. Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the new republic worked to liberalize the harsh penal codes of the colonial period. Pennsylvania led the way with new legislation that sought “ ‘ to reclaim rather than destroy,’ ‘to correct and reform the offenders,’ rather than simply to mark or eliminate them.” 7 Several states, including Connecticut (1773), Massachusetts (1785), New York (1796), and Pennsylvania (1786), added incarceration with hard labor as an alternative to such public punishments as whippings and the stocks. Incarceration, in the tradition of the English workhouse, developed in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. The penitentiary, as conceptualized by the English reformers and their American Quaker allies, first appeared in 1790, when part of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail was converted to allow separate confinement. The penitentiary differed markedly from the prison, house of correction, and jail. It was conceived as a place where convicted individuals could be isolated from the bad influences of society and from one another so that, while engaged in productive labor, they could reflect on their past misdeeds, repent, and be reformed. As the word penitentiary indicates, reformers hoped that while people were being punished, they would become penitent, see the error of their ways, and wish to place themselves on the right path. They could then reenter the community as useful citizens. The American penitentiary attracted the world’s attention, and the concept was incorporated at Millbank and Pentonville in England and in various other locales in Europe. By 1830, foreign observers were coming to America to see this innovation in penology; France sent Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Auguste de Beaumont, England sent William Crawford, and Prussia sent Nicholas Julius. By the middle of the century, the U.S. penitentiary in its various forms— especially the Pennsylvania and New York systems—had become world famous. penitentiary An institution intended to isolate individuals convicted of a crime from society and from one another so that they could reflect on their past misdeeds, repent, and thus undergo reformation. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 50 PART 1 Correctional Context The Pennsylvania System As in England, U.S. Quakers set about to implement their humanistic and religious ideas in the new nation; in Philadelphia their efforts came to fruition. For Quakers, penance and silent contemplation could allow one to move from the state of sin toward perfection. The penitentiary thus provided a place where individuals, left on their own, could be reformed. Quakers were among the Philadelphia elite who in 1787 formed the reformist Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisoners. Under the Quaker leadership of Benjamin Rush and others, including Benjamin Franklin, the society urged that capital and corporal punishment be replaced with incarceration. Members of the Society had communicated with John Howard, and their ideals in many ways reflected his. In 1790 the Society was instrumental in passing legislation almost identical to England’s Penitentiary Act of 1779. The 1790 law specified that an institution was to be established in which “solitary confinement to hard labour and a total abstinence from spirituous liquors will prove the most effectual means of reforming these unhappy creatures.” 8 To implement the new legislation, the existing three-story Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia was expanded in 1790 to include a “Penitentiary House” for the solitary confinement of “hardened and atrocious offenders.” The plain stone building housed eight cells on each floor and had an attached yard. Each cell was dark and small—only 6 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 9 feet high. From a small grated window high on the outside wall, captives “could perceive neither heaven nor earth.” Those held captive were classified by offense: Individuals deemed too dangerous were placed in solitary confinement without labor; the others worked together in shops during the day under a strict rule of silence and were confined separately at night.9 The Walnut Street Jail soon became unmanageable, with crowding a major issue. At one point, upwards of 40 people were housed together in cells measuring 18 square feet.10 The legislature approved construction of additional institutions for the state: Western Penitentiary on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and Eastern State Penitentiary in Cherry Hill, near Philadelphia. The opening of Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829 marked the full development of the penitentiary system based on separate confinement. Eastern was designed by John Haviland, an English immigrant and an acquaintance of John Howard. The newly constructed facility was described at the time as “the most imposing in the United States.” 11 Cell blocks extended from a central hub like the spokes of a wheel. Individual cells measured 12 by 8 by 10 feet and had an attached 18-foot-long exercise yard. Cells were furnished with a fold-up metal bedstead, a simple toilet, a wooden stool, a workbench, and eating utensils. Light came from an 8-inch window in the ceiling; the window could be blocked to plunge the cell into darkness as a disciplinary measure. The inhabitants did not see peers; in fact, their only human contact was the occasional visit of a clergyman or prison official.12 Solitary labor, Bible reading, and reflection on their own behavior were viewed as the keys to providing the imprisoned with the opportunity to repent. In the years between Walnut Street and Eastern, other states had adopted aspects of the Pennsylvania system. Separate confinement was introduced by Maryland in 1809, by Massachusetts in 1811, by New Jersey in 1820, and by Maine in 1823, but Eastern was the fullest expression of the concept of rehabilitation through separate confinement. As described by Robert Vaux, one of the original reformers, the Pennsylvania system was based on the following principles: 1. People would not be treated vengefully but should be convinced that through hard and selective forms of suffering they could change their lives. 2. Solitary confinement would prevent further corruption inside prison. 3. In isolation, individuals would reflect on their transgressions and repent. 4. Solitary confinement would be punishment because humans are by nature social beings. 5. Solitary confinement would be economical because people would not need long periods of time to repent; therefore, fewer keepers would be needed, and the costs of clothing would be lower.13 The Pennsylvania system of separate confinement soon became controversial. Within five years of its opening, Eastern endured the first of several investigations carried out over the years BENJAMIN RUSH (1745–1813) Physician, patriot, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and social reformer, Rush advocated the penitentiary as a replacement for capital and corporal punishment. BIOGRAPHY separate confinement A penitentiary system developed in Pennsylvania in which each convicted individual was held in isolation from other people, with all activities, including craft work, carried on in the cells. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 51 by a judicially appointed board of inspectors. The reports revealed that the goal of separate confinement was not fully observed, that physical punishments were used to maintain discipline, and that some convicted individuals suffered mental breakdowns because of the isolation. Eastern was also the target of allegations much more scandalous than merely not following established separate confinement protocol: A report published in 1835 claimed that prison officials regularly used convicted individuals as servants, that widespread theft of prison property (especially food) occurred, and that there were “wild parties and illicit sexual relationships involving staff and possibly inmates.” 14 Separate confinement declined by the 1860s, when crowding required doubling up in each cell, yet it was not abolished in Pennsylvania until 1913.15 The New York (Auburn) System Faced with overcrowded facilities such as Newgate Prison, in 1816 the New York legislature authorized a new state prison in Auburn. Influenced by the reported success of the separate confinement of some people in the Walnut Street Jail, the New York building commission decided to erect a portion of the new facility on that model and to authorize an experiment to test its effectiveness. The concept proved a failure—sickness, insanity, and suicide increased markedly. The practice was discontinued in 1824, and the governor pardoned those then held in solitary. In 1821 Elam Lynds was installed as warden at Auburn. Instead of duplicating the complete isolation practiced in Pennsylvania, Lynds worked out a new congregate system whereby inhabitants were held in isolation at night but congregated in workshops during the day. Individuals were forbidden to talk or even to exchange glances while on the job or at meals. Lynds was convinced that convicted individuals were incorrigible and that industrial efficiency should be the overriding purpose of the prison. He instituted a reign of discipline and obedience that included the lockstep and the wearing of prison stripes. Furthermore, he considered it “impossible to govern a large prison without a whip. Those who know human nature from books only may say the contrary.”16 ELAM LYNDS (1784–1855) A former army officer, Lynds was appointed warden of the newly opened Auburn prison in 1821. He developed the congregate system and a regimen of strict discipline. Prison inhabitants were known only by their number, wore striped clothing, and moved in lockstep. In 1825 he was commissioned to oversee construction at Ossining (Sing Sing), New York. BIOGRAPHY ▲ Located outside Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary became the model of the Pennsylvania system of “separate confinement.” The building was designed to ensure that each inhabitant remained separated from all human contact so that he could reflect on his misdeeds. The Eastern Penitentiary, Philadelphia, printed by Wild & Chevalier, c. 1838 (litho), Wild, John Caspar (c. 1804–46)/Library Company of Philadelphia, PA, USA/Library Company of Philadelphia/Bridgeman Images congregate system A penitentiary system developed in Auburn, New York, in which prison inhabitants were held in isolation at night but worked with others during the day under a rule of silence. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 52 PART 1 Correctional Context Whereas people held in the Pennsylvania penitentiaries worked in their cells, those in New York were employed in workshops both as therapy and as a way to finance the institution. Labor for profit through a contract labor system became an essential part of Auburn and other northeastern penitentiaries. Through this system of “free” labor, the state negotiated contracts with manufacturers, which then delivered raw materials to the prison for conversion into finished goods. By the 1840s, Auburn was producing footwear, barrels, carpets, carpentry tools, harnesses, furniture, and clothing. During this period, convicted individuals also built the new prison at Ossining-on-the-Hudson (Sing Sing). Wardens that adopted the New York (often called Auburn) system seemed to be more concerned with instilling good work habits and thus preventing recidivism (relapse into crime) than with rehabilitating people. Debating the Systems Throughout this era the preferred structure of prison systems was hotly debated. Advocates of both the Pennsylvania and the New York plans argued on public platforms and in the nation’s periodicals over the best methods of punishment (see Table 3.1). Underlying the debates were questions about disciplining citizens in a democracy and maintaining conformity to social norms in a society that emphasized individualism. Participants included some of the leading figures of the time. As each state considered new penal construction, it joined the debate. What divided the two camps was the way in which reformation was to be brought about. Proponents of the New York system maintained that prison residents first had to be “broken” and then socialized by means of a rigid discipline of congregate but silent labor. Advocates of Pennsylvania’s separate system rejected such harshness and, following Howard, renounced physical punishments and any other form of human degradation. The New Yorkers countered that contract labor system A system under which the labor of convicted individuals was sold on a contractual basis to private employers that provided the machinery and raw materials with which prison residents made salable products in the institution. Early prisons emphasized a congregate system of discipline, obedience, and work. The aim was to teach convicted individuals to submit to authority. ▲ Museum of the City of New York/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 53 their system cost less, efficiently tapped an available labor source, and developed individuals who would eventually be able to return to the community with the discipline necessary for the industrial age. The Pennsylvanians responded that New York had sacrificed the principal goal of the penitentiary (reformation) to the accessory goal (cost-effectiveness) and contended that exploiting individuals convicted of committing crimes through large-scale industry failed to promote the work ethic and only embittered them. The Pennsylvania model looked back to an earlier, crafts-oriented, religious society, whereas the New York model looked forward to the emerging industrial age. John Conley argues that the Pennsylvania model lost out because it embraced an outdated labor system. In contrast, the New York system was consistent with the new demands and challenges of factory production, which “would provide the state with a means of exploiting the labor of inmates to defray the expenses of the institution and possibly earn a profit for the state.”17 In this sense Auburn served as forerunner of the industrial prison that would dominate until the rise of organized labor in the twentieth century (see “For Critical Thinking”). In addition to clarifying some hazy issues in the writings of Bentham and Howard, this debate contributed to decisions in several states and in Europe about the design and management of penitentiaries. Most European visitors favored the Pennsylvania model, and the First International Prison Congress, held in 1846 in Germany, endorsed it by a large majority. The separate confinement system was soon incorporated in correctional facilities in Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland. Initially, many American states—New York in 1797, Massachusetts in 1805, and New Jersey in 1836—built penitentiaries with at least a portion devoted to separate confinement, but within a few years of opening they had all shifted to the New York style. By 1840, hard labor organized under the contract system achieved dominance in northeastern penitentiaries.18 As prison populations increased, the Pennsylvania system proved too expensive. In addition, the public became concerned by reports that some convicted individuals were going insane because they could not endure long-term solitary confinement. Designs for penitentiary construction during the nineteenth century almost entirely followed the New York model (see Figure 3.1). Yet not until the end of that century did Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the penitentiary, finally convert to the congregate system. In 1971 Eastern State Penitentiary closed. (See “From Eastern State to Pelican Bay: The Pendulum Swings” on the next page) TABLE 3.1 Comparison of Pennsylvania and New York (Auburn) Prison Systems Goal Implementation Method Activity Pennsylvania (Separate System) Redemption through the well-ordered routine of the prison Isolation, penance, contemplation, labor, silence Individuals are kept in their cells for eating, sleeping, and working. Bible reading, working on crafts in cell New York (Auburn) (Congregate System) Redemption through the well-ordered routine of the prison Strict discipline, obedience, labor, silence Individuals sleep in their cells but come together to eat and work. Working together in shops making goods to be sold by the state FOR CRITICAL THINKING We opened this chapter by discussing Federal Prison Industries (FPI). This program employs incarcerated individuals who work many different jobs, using different types of tools and machinery. Having prison residents perform work has been common ever since the first U.S. penitentiary opened. However, the way in which convicted individuals perform work has changed over the years. 1. Recall that the separate confinement system in Pennsylvania had people involved in “productive labor” alone in their cells. Could the FPI’s garment factory coordinate its confined labor force using the separate confinement system? Explain your answer. 2. In the New York system, prison inhabitants were employed in workshops but were forbidden to talk to one another. To enforce this rule, Warden Elam Lynds advocated using a whip. Would a rule of silence help FPI employees work more efficiently? Because the use of a whip would not be tolerated today, how would you enforce such a rule? What would Elam Lynds think of FPI? 3. How are the people incarcerated in today’s prisons different from those who were once confined in the Pennsylvania and New York systems during the early 1800s? How might these differences influence prison work programs? Could a work program be effective for all prison inhabitants regardless of the historical time period? What would such a work program look like? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 54 PART 1 Correctional Context City Prison Year built Walnut Street Jail Newgate Prison Virginia Penitentiary Massachusetts State Prison Vermont State Prison Georgia Penitentiary Auburn State Prison Maine State Prison Sing Sing Western Penitentiary Connecticut State Prison Eastern Penitentiary Ohio Penitentiary State Prison State Prison State Prison State Prison State Prison State Prison 1790 1797 1800 1805 1809 1817 1819 1823 1825 1826 1827 1829 1830 1831 1833 1835 1836 1838 1841 1. Philadelphia, PA 2. New York City, NY 3. Richmond, VA 4. Charlestown, MA 5. Windsor, VT 6. Milledgeville, GA 7. Auburn, NY 8. Thomaston, ME 9. Ossining, NY 10. Pittsburgh, PA 11. Wethersfield, CT 12. Cherry Hill, PA 13. Columbus, OH 14. Nashville, TN 15. Alton, IL 16. Baton Rouge, LA 17. Trenton, NJ 18. Jackson, MI 19. Wetumpka, AL LA AL GA VA TN IL OH PA MI NJ CT VT ME NY MA Separate Confinement 1 6 16 18 15 10 12 13 19 14 3 7 2 9 11 17 8 5 4 Congregate Confinement FIGURE 3.1 Early Prisons in the United States Source: Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Eastern State Penitentiary holds the distinction of being the first correctional institution in the world based on the system of separate confinement. When it opened in 1829, men were held in their own cell for the duration of their sentence. Food was passed through a slot in the cell door, there was a small window to let in light, and each man could use the exercise yard attached to the cell. There was no opportunity for human contact except for occasional visits from the chaplain or prison officials. The purpose of these arrangements was to allow the prison inhabitant time to reflect on his misdeeds and, through penitence, correct his life without the distractions of other convicted individuals or the outside world. Not surprisingly, many people held under these conditions of solitary confinement went mad. In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court condemned the Pennsylvania system, noting that a considerable number of convicted individuals became insane, others committed suicide, and still others survived the ordeal but were not reformed. By the twentieth century, long-term solitary confinement was considered cruel and ineffective. When the United States experienced a rise in crime in the 1970s, the punishment pendulum swung away from the rehabilitation emphasis of the 1950s toward a much more punitive approach with longer sentences of incarceration. Beginning in the 1980s, solitary confinement roared back into correctional practice. During the 1990s, a number of states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons built “super-max” prisons to hold the most disruptive, violent, and incorrigible individuals. Unlike Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the super-max prison is designed not to transform the person but to contain his behavior. California’s Pelican Bay institution and the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, are examples of prisons designed to hold the “worst of the worst.” As with Eastern State Penitentiary, individuals in super-max facilities spend up to 23 hours a day in their 8-by-10-foot concrete cells, in silence and with little human contact. They are shackled whenever they are taken out of their cells—during recreation, showers, and weekend visits (conducted through security glass). Many of the super-max facilities have had to add mental health units to deal with those whose minds deteriorate under the conditions of isolation first used at Eastern and now continued at super-max institutions. Are there differences between Pennsylvania’s separate confinement policy and today’s super-max prisons? Should we expect this new approach to succeed where the similar policies of the 1830s failed? FOCUS ON CORRECTIONAL POLICY: From Eastern State to Pelican Bay: The Pendulum Swings Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 55 The Development of Prisons in the South and the West Historical accounts of American corrections tend to emphasize the nineteenth-century reforms that took place in the populous states of the Northeast. Scholars often neglect penal developments in the South and the West. Prisons, some following the Pennsylvania model, were built in four southern states—Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia—by 1817. Later prisons, such as the ones built in Jackson, Mississippi (1842), and Huntsville, Texas (1848), followed the New York model. But further expansion ended with the Civil War. With the exception of San Quentin (1852), the sparse population of the West did not lend itself to construction of many prisons until later in the nineteenth century. Southern Penology Following the end of the Civil War, southern lawmakers enacted “Black Codes,” which were laws designed to control newly freed African Americans. Such codes established curfews for blacks and made it a crime for them to own a gun or use offensive language around white women.19 Freed slaves and their descendants were also subject to vagrancy laws that required all individuals to give proof of employment at a moment’s notice. Unemployment among all southern men following the Civil War was extremely high, but it was primarily black men who were subjected to the enforcement of vagrancy laws. Once arrested, these men enjoyed almost no rights afforded to arrestees today, such as legal representation.20 Any conviction, regardless of the crime committed, resulted in harsh punishments. Because of the devastation of the war and depression in the agriculturally based economy, funds to construct new prisons were scarce. At the same time, southerners faced the task of rebuilding their communities and economy. Given these challenges, a large labor force made up of convicted individuals, and the states’ need for revenue, southern states saw the development of the lease system. Under this system, imprisoned individuals (most of whom were African American) were leased to large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and local farmers. Those doing the leasing agreed to pay off these men’s fines and fees.21 Originating in Massachusetts in 1798, the leasing of convicted individuals to private entities took hold in the South first in Kentucky (1825) and later in other states. Businesses in need of workers could negotiate with the state for the labor and care of these people. This was particularly true in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi.22 In 1866 Alabama turned over the state prison to a contractor that used the labor of inhabitants to build a railroad through the heart of the state’s mineral region.23 Texas leased the residents of Huntsville Penitentiary to a firm that used them as laborers on railroad construction, wood milling, and cotton picking.24 As Edgardo Rotman notes, the entities who leased black individuals serving time in prison, “having no ownership interest in them, exploited them even worse than slaves.” 25 Diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia regularly sickened and killed large numbers of these people. Accidents and homicides resulted in the deaths of others. As such, death rates soared. Convicted individuals were usually buried in shallow graves around work sites.26 (See “Do the Right Thing”) The South’s agrarian economy and the great number of imprisoned African Americans also provided the basis for state-run plantations that grew crops to feed the prison population and to sell on the market. lease system A system under which people who were convicted of crimes were leased to contractors who provided these individuals with food and clothing in exchange for their labor. In southern states they worked in mines, lumber camps, and factories, and on farms as field laborers. DO THE RIGHT THING It is 1887. As a legislator, you must vote on a bill to extend or end the contract allowing the Natchez Coal and Mining Company to lease convicted individuals from the state of Mississippi. You know that the contract brings money into the state treasury and relieves the prison system by housing, feeding, and guarding the more than 800 men who are leased to the mining company. But you also know that the working conditions are horrendous and that the death rate is high. Tales of guards beating the men have become a major issue in the state, and journalists have uncovered corruption in the decision to award the contract to the company. WRITING ASSIGNMENT: Should you vote to extend the leasing contract? What facts might influence you to vote one way or the other? Write a letter to your constituents explaining your position. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 56 PART 1 Correctional Context Large-scale penal farms developed mainly in the latter half of the century, particularly in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Upset by the failure of authorities to collect profits from the lessees, the people of Mississippi adopted a constitutional provision to end all contracts by 1895. Prison officials then purchased the 15,000-acre Parchman Farm, which served for many at the time as a model for southern penology.27 In many southern states, penal farms remain a major part of corrections. Western Penology Settlement in the West did not take off until the California Gold Rush of 1849; only during the latter half of the nineteenth century did most western states enter the Union. Except in California, the prison ideologies of the East did not greatly influence penology in the West. Prior to statehood, people were held in territorial facilities or in federal military posts and prisons. Until Congress passed the Anti-Contract Law of 1887, which restricted the employment of people convicted of federal crimes, leasing programs were used extensively in California, Montana, Oregon, and Wyoming. In their eagerness to become states, some of the last of the territories included anticontract provisions in their new state constitutions.28 In 1850 California became the first western state to be admitted to the Union. The old Spanish jails had become inadequate during the Gold Rush, and, “following frontier traditions,” the care of convicted people was placed in the hands of a lessee. In 1852 the lessee chose Point San Quentin, a spit of land surrounded by water on three sides. Using the newly acquired labor force, the lessee built two prison buildings. In 1858, when San Quentin became overcrowded and reports of deaths, escapes, and the brutal discipline of the guards came to public attention, the state took over the facility.29 The Oregon territory erected a log prison structure in the 1850s, but with rumors of official corruption, it was soon leased to a private company. On joining the Union in 1859, the state discontinued the lease system. In 1866 the legislature decided to build a prison in Salem on the New York plan, which was completed in 1877. Yet, with labor difficulties and an economic depression in the 1890s, responsibility for the prison was again turned over to a lessee in 1895.30 Following the Civil War, southern states leased their prisoners to private entrepreneurs to be used as field hands, railroad builders, loggers, and miners. ▲ AP Images Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 57 The Reformatory Movement The ways in which reforms are implemented often do not match the high ideals of social activists. Legislators and governors may be willing to support the espoused goals of change, but putting the ideals into practice requires leadership, money, public support, and innovative administrators. Thus, soon after a given innovation, correctional facilities become overcrowded, discipline wanes, programs are abandoned, and charges of official misconduct erupt. The subsequent investigation typically recommends changes that may or may not be implemented—and the cycle continues. By the mid-1800s, reformers had become disillusioned with the penitentiary. Neither the New York nor the Pennsylvania systems nor any of their imitators had achieved rehabilitation or deterrence. This failure was seen as resulting from poor administration rather than from weakness of the basic concept. Within 40 years of being built, penitentiaries had become overcrowded, understaffed, and minimally financed. Discipline was lax, brutality was common, and administrators were viewed as corrupt. For example, in 1870 investigators at Sing Sing discovered that “dealers were publicly supplying prisoners with almost anything they could pay for” and that the imprisoned men were “playing all sorts of games, reading, scheming, trafficking.”31 This reality was a far cry from the vision of John Howard and Benjamin Rush. In 1865 the New York Prison Association commissioned Enoch Cobb Wines and Theodore Dwight to undertake a nationwide survey of prisons. After visiting 18 prisons and houses of correction, they published their Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada in 1867. Not one of the prisons they visited viewed reformation of those held there as a primary goal or deployed resources to further reformation. Inadequacies in the physical plants, lack of staff training, and poor administrative practices were in evidence. However, the researchers were most upset by the extent to which corporal punishment was used for discipline. The report emphasized that prisons should prepare residents for release by allowing them to “advance toward freedom by moving through progressively liberal stages of discipline.” 32 Across the Atlantic, a controversy arose that directly influenced U.S. corrections. In England, Alexander Maconochie urged the mark system of graduated terms of confinement. Penalties would be graded according to the severity of the crime, and people would be released from incarceration according to their performance. A certain number of marks would be given at sentencing, and the imprisoned individuals could reduce the number by voluntary labor, participation in educational and religious programs, and good behavior. Maconochie thus argued for sentences of indeterminate length and a system of rewards. Through these incentives, individuals would be reformed so that they could return to society. Maconochie’s ideas were not implemented in England. However, in Ireland in 1854 Sir Walter Crofton adopted practices similar to the mark system that came to be known as the Irish or intermediate system. Convicted individuals spent a period in solitary confinement and then were sent to public work prisons where they could earn positive marks (rather than removing initial marks against them). When they had enough marks, they were transferred to the intermediate stage, or what today might be called a halfway house. The final test was a ticket-of-leave, a conditional release that was the precursor of the modern parole system.33 Again, theory and practice bridged the continents as Maconochie’s and Crofton’s ideas traveled across the Atlantic. Cincinnati, 1870 By 1870 a new generation of American penal reformers had arisen. Among them were Gaylord Hubbell, warden of Sing Sing, who had observed the Irish system in operation; Enoch C. Wines, secretary of the New York Prison Association; Franklin Sanborn, secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities; and Zebulon Brockway, head of Detroit’s Michigan House of Correction. Like the Quakers, these penologists were motivated by humanitarian concerns, but they also understood how prisons operated. The National Prison Association (NPA, predecessor of the American Correctional Association) and its 1870 meeting in Cincinnati embodied the new spirit of reform. In its famous Declaration of Principles, the association advocated a new design for penology: that prison mark system A system in which prison residents are assessed a certain number of marks, based on the severity of their crime, at the time of sentencing. Individuals could reduce their term and gain release by reducing marks through labor, good behavior, and educational achievement. ENOCH COBB WINES (1806–1879) A guiding force of U.S. corrections starting in 1862, when he became the secretary of the New York Prison Association and served in this role until his death. Organizer of the National Prison Association in 1870 and a major contributor to the Cincinnati Declaration of Principles. BIOGRAPHY Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 58 PART 1 Correctional Context operations should stem from a philosophy of changing convicted individuals, with reformation rewarded by release. Sentences of indeterminate length would replace fixed sentences, and proof of reformation, rather than mere lapse of time, would be a requirement for release. Classification on the basis of character and improvement would encourage the reformation program. Penitentiary practices that had evolved during the first half of the nineteenth century—fixed sentences, lockstep, rules of silence, and isolation—were now seen as debasing and humiliating. Given the leadership roles of clergy in the National Prison Association, it is not surprising that, like the activists who had promoted the penitentiary in the 1830s, those gathered at Cincinnati still saw crime as a sort of moral disease that could be treated by efforts at moral regeneration. Like the Quakers before them, the 1870 reformers looked to institutional life as the way to effective rehabilitation. Individuals convicted of committing crimes would be made into welladjusted citizens, but the process would take place behind walls. The Cincinnati Declaration could thus in good faith insist that “reformation is a work of time; and a benevolent regard to the good of the criminal himself, as well as to the protection of society, requires that his sentence be long enough for the reformatory process to take effect.” 34 Elmira Reformatory The first reformatory took shape in 1876 at Elmira, New York, when Zebulon Brockway was appointed superintendent. Brockway believed that diagnosis and treatment were the keys to reform and rehabilitation. He questioned each new resident to explore the social, biological, psychological, and “root causes” of his deviance. An individualized work-and-education treatment program was then prescribed. Residents adhered to a rigid schedule of work during the day, followed by courses in academic, vocational, and moral subjects during the evening. Individuals who did well achieved early release.35 Designed for males between the ages of 16 and 30 who had been convicted of their first felony offense, the approach at Elmira incorporated a mark system of classification, indeterminate sentences, and parole. Once the courts had committed an individual to Elmira, the administrators could determine the release date; the only restriction was that the time served could not exceed the maximum prescribed by law for the particular offense. The indeterminate sentence was linked to a three-grade system of classification. Each person entered the institution at grade 2, and if the individual earned nine marks a month for six months by working hard, completing school assignments, and causing no problems, he could be moved up to grade 1, which was necessary for release. If he failed to cooperate and violated rules of conduct, thus showing poor self-control and an indifference to progress, he would be demoted to grade 3. Only after three months of satisfactory behavior could he reembark on the path toward eventual release.36 In sum, this system placed “the prisoner’s fate, as far as possible, in his own hands.” 37 Elmira’s proclaimed success at reforming young men convicted of felonies was widely heralded, and over the next several ZEBULON BROCKWAY (1827–1920) Reformer who began his career in penology as a clerk in Connecticut’s Wethersfield Prison at age 21. In 1854, while superintendent of the Monroe County Penitentiary in Rochester, New York, he began to experiment with ideas on making prisons more rehabilitative. He put his theories to work as the superintendent of Elmira State Reformatory, New York, in 1876, retiring from that institution in 1900. BIOGRAPHY reformatory An institution for young individuals convicted of crimes that emphasized training, a mark system of classification, indeterminate sentences, and parole ullstein bild/Getty Images ▲ The reformatory movement emphasized education and training. On the basis of their conduct and achievement, individuals moved toward their release. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 59 decades its program was emulated in 20 states. Brockway’s annual reports claimed that 81 percent of individuals released from Elmira underwent “probable reformation.” An article in the Journal of the American Social Science Association, “How Far May We Abolish Prisons?” echoed this optimism. The author’s answer to the title question was “to the degree that we put men into reformatories like Elmira, for it reforms more than 80 percent of those who are sent there.” 38 Brockway even weathered an investigation into charges of brutality at Elmira, which revealed that the whip and solitary confinement were used there regularly. However, in 1900 he was forced to resign in the face of mounting criticism of his administration. By 1900 the reformatory movement had spread throughout much of the nation, yet at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, it was already declining. In most institutions the architecture, the attitudes of the guards, and the emphasis on discipline differed little from past orientations. Too often, the educational and rehabilitative efforts took a back seat to the traditional emphasis on punishment. Even Brockway admitted that it was difficult to distinguish between inhabitants whose attitudes had changed and those who merely lived by prison rules. Displaying good behavior became the way to win parole, but this did not mean that the prison residents had truly changed. Lasting Reforms Although the ideals of Wines, Brockway, and the other leaders of the reformatory movement were not realized, these men made several major contributions to U.S. corrections. The indeterminate sentence, classification, rehabilitative programs, and parole were first developed at Elmira. The Cincinnati Declaration of Principles set goals that inspired prison reformers well into the twentieth century. More changes were still to come, however: In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States entered a period of significant social change. The nation faced problems arising from two demographic changes: the gradual shift of the population from the countryside to the cities and the influx of immigrants. The stage was set for progressive reforms. The Rise of the Progressives The first two decades of the 1900s, called the Age of Reform, set the dominant tone for U.S. social thought and political action until the 1960s.39 Industrialization, urbanization, technological change, and scientific advancements had revolutionized the American landscape. A group known as the Progressives attacked the excesses of this emergent society, especially those of big business, and placed their faith in state action to deal with the social problems of slums, adulterated food, dangerous occupational conditions, vice, and crime. The Progressives, most of whom came from upper-status backgrounds, were optimistic about the possibility of solving the problems of modern society. Focusing in particular on conditions in cities, which had large immigrant populations, they believed that civic-minded people could apply the findings of science to social problems, including penology, in ways that would benefit all. Specifically, they believed that society could rehabilitate the criminally involved through individualized treatment. Individualized Treatment and the Positivist School The scholar David Rothman epitomized the Progressive programs in two words: conscience and convenience. Progressive reforms were promoted by benevolent and philanthropic men and women who sought to understand and cure crime through a case-by-case approach. They believed that the reformers of the penitentiary era were wrong in assuming that all deviants were “victims of social disorder” and “could all be rehabilitated with a single program, the wellordered routine” of the prison.40 The Progressives thought it necessary to know the life history of each convicted individual and then devise a treatment program specific to that individual. This meant that correctional administrators would need the discretion to diagnose each person, prescribe treatment, and Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 60 PART 1 Correctional Context schedule release to the community. From this orientation, the phrase “treatment according to the needs of the offender” came into vogue, in contrast to “punishment according to the severity of the crime,” which had been the hallmark of Beccaria and the reformers of the early 1800s. Rothman argues that because discretion was required for the day-to-day practice of the new penology, correctional administrators responded favorably to it. The new discretionary authority made it easier for administrators to carry out their daily assignments. He also notes that those Progressives committed to incarceration were instrumental in promoting probation and parole, but supporters of the penitentiary used the requirement of discretion to expand the size of the prison population. The Progressives had faith that the state would carry out their reforms judicially. In the same way that they looked to government programs to secure social justice, they assumed that the agents of the state would help individuals convicted of committing crimes. As Rothman notes, In criminal justice, the issue was not how to protect the offender from the arbitrariness of the state, but how to bring the state more effectively to the aid of the offender. The state was not a behemoth to be chained and fettered, but an agent capable of fulfilling an ambitious program. Thus, a policy that called for the state’s exercise of discretionary authority in finely tuned responses was, at its core, Progressive.41 As members of the positivist school, the Progressives looked to social, economic, biological, and psychological rather than religious or moral explanations for the causes of crime, and they applied modern scientific methods to determine the best treatment therapies. Recall that the classical school of Beccaria and Bentham had emphasized a legal approach to the problem, focusing on the act rather than the person. In contrast, the scientific positivist school shifted the focus from the criminal act to the individual. By the beginning of the twentieth century, advances in the biological and social sciences provided the framework for the reforms proposed by the Progressives. Although the positivist school comprised several theoretical perspectives, most of its practitioners shared three basic assumptions: 1. Criminal behavior is not the result of free will but stems from factors over which the individual has no control: biological characteristics, psychological maladjustments, and sociological conditions. 2. Criminally involved people can be treated so that they can lead crime-free lives. 3. Treatment must center on the individual and the individual’s problem. Progressive Reforms Armed with their views about the nature of criminal behavior and the need for state action to reform criminally involved individuals, the Progressives fought for changes in correctional methods. They pursued two main strategies: (1) improving conditions in social environments that seemed to be breeding grounds for crime and (2) rehabilitating individuals. Because they saw crime as primarily an urban problem, concentrated especially among the immigrant lower class, the Progressives sought through political action to bring about changes that would improve ghetto conditions: better public health, landlord–tenant laws, public housing, playgrounds, settlement houses, and education. However, because they also believed that criminal behavior varied among individuals, a case-by-case approach was required.42 By the 1920s, portions of the Progressives’ program were gaining wide acceptance, including probation, indeterminate sentences, and parole. These elements had been proposed at the 1870 Cincinnati meeting, but the Progressives and their allies in corrections implemented them throughout the country: 43 1. Probation. This alternative to incarceration was consistent with the Progressive scheme because it recognized individual differences and allowed convicted individuals to be treated in the community under supervision. 2. Indeterminate Sentences. Although the sentences were called “indeterminate,” state legislatures nearly always set a minimum and maximum term within which the correctional process of rehabilitation could operate. Fixed sentences were retained for lesser offenses, positivist school An approach to criminology and other social sciences based on the assumptions that human behavior is a product of biological, economic, psychological, and social factors and that the scientific method can be applied to ascertain the causes of individual behavior. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 61 but during this period more than three-quarters of convicted individuals whose maximum terms exceeded five years were serving indeterminate sentences. 3. Parole. Although the idea of parole release had been developed in Ireland and Australia in the 1850s—and Zebulon Brockway had instituted it at Elmira in 1876—not until the mid1920s did it really catch on in the United States. Like probation, parole expanded greatly during the Progressive period. By the mid-1920s, well over 80 percent of people convicted of felonies in the major industrialized states left prison via parole.44 Although the reforms of the Progressives were much criticized, probation, indeterminate sentences, and parole remain dominant elements of corrections to this day. Perhaps, as Rothman suggests, this is because these options provide authority to criminal justice officials and affirm the vitality of the rehabilitative idea.45 However, these three crucial reforms provided the structure for yet another change in corrections. The Rise of the Medical Model Even before psychiatry began to influence U.S. society, the idea that criminally involved people were mentally ill was popular in correctional circles. At the 1870 Cincinnati congress, one speaker described a typical specimen as a man who has suffered under a disease evinced by the perpetration of a crime, and who may reasonably be held to be under the dominion of such disease until his conduct has afforded very strong presumption not only that he is free from its immediate influence, but that the chances of its recurrence have become exceedingly remote.46 Certainly, much Progressive reform was based on the idea that people could be rehabilitated through treatment, but not until the 1930s were serious attempts made to implement what became known as the medical model of corrections. Under the banner of the newly prestigious social and behavioral sciences, the emphasis of corrections shifted to treating the criminally involved as people whose social, psychological, or biological deficiencies had caused them to engage in illegal activity. One early proponent of the medical model was Howard Gill, who became the superintendent of Massachusetts’s Norfolk State Prison Colony in 1927. Gill tried to create a “community” of prison inhabitants within secured walls. He helped design Norfolk in the style of a college campus, staffed not only with guards but also with professionals who provided treatment programs: educators, psychiatrists, and social workers. Residents wore ordinary clothing, not prison garb, and participated with staff on advisory councils dealing with matters of community governance. During the Great Depression, Gill’s policies came under increasing fire. An escape by four individuals triggered a backlash that led to his removal in 1934. Gill continued his progressive reform work through several prison-related posts in the federal government until he entered academia in 1947.47 The concept of rehabilitation as the primary purpose of incarceration took on national legitimacy in 1929, when Congress authorized the new Federal Bureau of Prisons to develop institutions that would ensure the proper classification, care, and treatment of convicted individuals. Sanford Bates, the first director of the bureau, had served as the president of the American Correctional Association and promoted the new medical model. The 1950s came to be known as the Era of Treatment as many states, particularly California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, fell in line with programs designed to reform people. Most other states, as well as political leaders everywhere, adopted at least the rhetoric of rehabilitation, changing statutes to specify that treatment was the goal of their corrections system and that punishment was an outdated concept. Prisons were thus to become something like mental hospitals, rehabilitating and testing people for readiness to reenter society. In many states, however, the medical model was adopted in name only: Departments of prisons became departments of corrections, but the budgets for treatment programs remained about the same. Because the essential structural elements of parole, probation, and the indeterminate sentence were already in place in most states, incorporating medical model A model of corrections based on the assumption that criminal behavior is caused by social, psychological, or biological deficiencies that require treatment. HOWARD GILL (1890–1989) A prison reformer in the Progressive tradition, Gill designed Massachusetts’s Norfolk State Prison Colony to be a model prison community. Norfolk provided individual treatment programs and included convicted individuals on an advisory council to deal with community governance. BIOGRAPHY SANFORD BATES (1884–1972) The first director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Bates advocated prison reform throughout his career. After becoming the president of the American Correctional Association in 1926, he also played an important role in the development of programs in New Jersey and New York. BIOGRAPHY Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 62 PART 1 Correctional Context the medical model required only adding classification systems to diagnose convicted individuals, as well as treatment programs to reform them. Initially, the number of psychiatrists and therapeutic treatment programs in corrections was limited, but both increased sharply after World War II. Group therapy, behavior modification, shock therapy, individual counseling, psychotherapy, guided group interaction, and many other approaches all became part of the “new penology.” Competing schools of psychological thought debated the usefulness of these techniques, many of which were adopted or discarded before their worth had been evaluated.48 However, the administrative needs of the institution often superseded the treatment needs of the individual: Prison residents tended to be assigned to the facilities, jobs, and programs that had openings rather than to those that would provide the prescribed treatment. California adopted the medical model more thoroughly than did any other state. In 1944 the administration of Governor Earl Warren authorized the construction of specialized prisons and the California Adult Authority. Individuals convicted of felony offenses received indeterminate sentences, the lengths of which were determined by the nine members of the Authority; these nine had almost complete power to classify, distribute, and treat imprisoned individuals, and ultimately to determine their release. California developed a full range of treatment programs, including psychotherapy and group therapy. By the 1970s, many California prisons were in turmoil, the value of treatment programs had come into question, and disparities in the release decisions of the Adult Authority had begun to be questioned. Later, California was one of the first states to move toward determinate sentencing and away from the medical model.49 Maryland’s Patuxent Institution, which opened in 1955, is probably the best example of a prison built according to the principles of the medical model. Patuxent was founded to treat adults given indeterminate sentences and judged to be “defective delinquents.” Its administrators had broad authority to control intake, to experiment with a treatment milieu, and to decide when to release “patients.” Throughout the period of incarceration, a patient was diagnosed and treated through a variety of programs and therapies. Critics of treatment programs in U.S. prisons pointed out that even during the 1950s, when the medical model reached its zenith, only 5 percent of state correctional budgets were allocated for rehabilitation. Although states adopted the rhetoric of the medical model, custody remained the overriding goal of institutions. Some argued that it was impossible to develop the rapport with prison inhabitants that was needed to cure their personality difficulties; others asserted that custody always took precedence over treatment in the daily running of prisons (see “For Critical Thinking”). From Medical Model to Community Model As we have seen, social and political values greatly influence correctional thought and practices. During the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. society experienced the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, and resistance to the Vietnam War. Americans also challenged government institutions dealing with education, mental health, juvenile delinquency, and adult corrections. In 1967 the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice reported the following: FOR CRITICAL THINKING The medical model assumes that people commit crimes because of personal shortcomings, such as social, psychological, or biological deficiencies. Driven by this approach, prisons throughout the United States implemented a variety of prison programs beginning in the 1930s. Work programs remained throughout this time period. 1. What personal deficiencies could be addressed by Federal Prison Industries (FPI), discussed at the beginning of this chapter? What other types of rehabilitation programs might prove effective if coupled with factory work of this type? Explain your answer. 2. Suppose that you are advocating on behalf of FPI to lawmakers who are skeptical of its effectiveness. What would you say to them to change their minds? 3. Classification systems to diagnose and treat convicted individuals emerged along with the medical model. However, critics have noted that the treatment needs of prison residents were usually secondary to the administrative needs. If you were a federal prison warden, what would you do to help ensure that FPI met both the needs of the incarcerated individuals under your ward and the needs of the prison? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 63 Crime and delinquency are symptoms of failures and disorganization of the community. . . . The task of corrections, therefore, includes building or rebuilding social ties, obtaining employment and education, securing in the larger senses a place for the offender in the routine functioning of society.50 This analysis was consistent with the views of community corrections advocates, who felt that the goal of the criminal justice system should be the reintegration of convicted individuals into the community. The prison riot and hostage taking at New York State’s Attica Correctional Facility aided the move toward community corrections. On the morning of September 13, 1971, after four days of negotiations, a helicopter began dropping CS gas (an incapacitating agent) on those milling around in the prison yard. After the gas came a rain of bullets from state police guns, which hit 128 men and killed 29 prison inhabitants and 10 hostages. With the exception of the massacres of Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, it was the “bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.” 51 For many, the hostilities at Attica showed prisons to be counterproductive and unjust. They urged officials to make decarceration through community corrections the goal and pressed for greater use of alternatives to incarceration, such as probation, halfway houses, and community service. Community corrections called for a radical departure from the medical model’s emphasis on treatment in prison. Instead, prisons were to be avoided because they were artificial institutions that interfered with the individual’s ability to develop a crime-free lifestyle. Proponents argued that corrections should turn away from psychological treatment in favor of programs that would increase opportunities to become successful citizens. Probation would be the sentence of choice for people convicted of nonviolent crime so that they could engage in vocational and educational programs that increased their chances of adjusting to society. For the small portion of convicted individuals who had to be incarcerated, time in prison would be only a short interval until release on parole. To further the goal of reintegration, correctional workers would serve as advocates for individuals as they dealt with government agencies, providing employment counseling, medical treatment, and financial assistance. The reintegration idea prevailed in corrections only until the late 1970s, when it gave way to a new punitiveness in criminal justice in conjunction with the rebirth of the determinate sentence. Similar to advocates of previous reforms, supporters of reintegration claim that the idea was never adequately tested. Nevertheless, community corrections remains a significant idea and practice in the recent history of corrections. community corrections A model of corrections based on the assumption that reintegrating the convicted individual into the community should be the goal of the criminal justice system. AP Images ▲ The prison riot at Attica in 1971 was a watershed moment in correctional history. Prison reformers thought it signaled a new era for better treatment of prison inhabitants, but what actually ensued was a 40-year increase in the size of the U.S. prison population. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 64 PART 1 Correctional Context The Crime Control Model: The Pendulum Swings Again Beginning in the late 1960s, the public became concerned about rising crime rates. At the same time, studies uncovered concerns about the worth of treatment programs as well as the Progressive assumption that state officials would exercise discretion in a positive way. Critics of rehabilitation attacked the indeterminate sentence and parole, urging that treatment be available on a voluntary basis but that it not be tied to release. In addition, proponents of increased crime control called for longer sentences, especially for people who had made a career out of crime and individuals who had been convicted of violent offenses. The Decline of Rehabilitation According to critics of rehabilitation, its reportedly high recidivism rates prove its ineffectiveness. Probably the most influential analysis of research data from treatment programs was undertaken by Robert Martinson for the New York State Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders. He surveyed 231 English-language studies of rehabilitation programs in corrections systems. They included such standard rehabilitative programs as educational and vocational training, individual counseling, group counseling, milieu therapy, medical treatment (plastic surgery, drugs), parole, and supervision. Martinson summarized his findings by saying, “With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” 52 Critics of the rehabilitation model have also challenged as unwarranted the amount of discretion given to correctional decision makers to tailor the criminal sanction to the needs of each individual. In particular, they have argued that the discretion given to parole boards to release people is misplaced because board decisions are more often based on the whims of individual members than on the scientific criteria espoused by the medical model. The Emergence of Crime Control As the political climate changed in the 1970s and 1980s, and with the crime rate at historic levels, legislators, judges, and officials responded with a renewed emphasis on a crime control model of corrections. By 1980, the problem of crime and how to deal with convicted individuals had become an intense political issue. The critique of the rehabilitation model led to changes in the sentencing structures of more than half of the states and to the abolition of parole release in many. The new determinate sentencing laws were designed to incarcerate people for longer periods. In conjunction with other forms of punishment, the thrust of the 1980s centered on crime control through incarceration and risk containment. The punitive ethos of the 1980s and 1990s appeared in the emphasis on dealing more strictly with those convicted of violent crimes, drug dealers, and people who had made a career out of crime. It was also reflected in the trend toward intensive supervision of individuals on probation, the detention without bail of accused people thought to present a danger to the community, reinstitution of the death penalty in 37 states, and the requirement that judges impose mandatory penalties for people convicted of certain offenses or who have extensive criminal records. By the end of the century, the effect of these “get-tough” crime control model of corrections A model of corrections based on the assumption that criminal behavior can be controlled by more use of incarceration and other forms of strict supervision. ▲ Under the crime control model, prisons would be designed as place of punishment, not rehabilitation, and solitary confinement would be used to enforce the punishment. AP Images/Ted S. Warren Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 CHAPTER 3 The History of Corrections in America 65 policies showed in the record numbers of convicted individuals, the longer sentences being served, and the size of the probation population. Some observers point to these policies as the reason why the crime rate has begun to fall. Others ask whether the crime control policies have really made a difference, given demographic and other changes in the United States. Table 3.2, which traces the history of correctional thought and practices in the United States, highlights the continual shifts in focus. Where Are We Today? The time may be ripe for another look at correctional policy. The optimism that once suffused corrections has waned. For the first time in decades, the financial and human costs of the retributive crime control policies of the 1990s are now being scrutinized. States are now facing the fact that incarceration is expensive. Are the costs of incarceration and surveillance justified? Has crime been reduced because of correctional policies? Are we safer today than before? What does the experience of contemporary crime control policies indicate about the future of corrections in the United States? TABLE 3.2 The History of Corrections in America Note the extent to which correctional policies have shifted from one era to the next and how they have been influenced by various societal factors. Colonial (1600s–1790s) Penitentiary (1790s–1870s) Reformatory (1870s–1890s) Progressive (1890s–1930s) Medical (1930s–1960s) Community (1960s–1970s) Crime Control (1970s–Present) Features Anglican Code Capital and corporal punishment, fines Separate confinement Reform of individual Power of isolation and labor Penance Disciplined routine Punishment according to severity of crime Indeterminate sentences Parole Classification by degree of individual reform Rehabilitative programs Separate treatment for juveniles Individual case approach Administrative discretion Broader probation and parole Juvenile courts Rehabilitation as primary focus of incarceration Psychological testing and classification Various types of treatment programs and institutions Reintegration into community Avoidance of incarceration Vocational and educational programs Determinate sentences Mandatory sentences Sentencing guidelines Risk management Philosophical Basis Religious law Doctrine of predestination Enlightenment Declaration of Independence Human perfectability and powers of reason Religious penitence Power of reformation Focus on the act Healing power of suffering NPA Declaration of Principles Crime as moral disease Criminally involved people as “victims of social disorder” The Age of Reform Positivist school Punishment according to needs of individuals Focus on the individual Crime as an urban, immigrant ghetto problem Biomedical science Psychiatry and psychology Social work practice Crime as signal of personal “distress” or “failure” Civil rights movement Critique of prisons Small is better Crime control Rising crime rates Political shift to the right New punitive agenda Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 66 PART 1 Correctional Context SUMMARY 1 Describe “The Great Law” of Pennsylvania and note its importance. With the arrival in 1682 of William Penn, Pennsylvania adopted “The Great Law,” which was based on Quaker principles and emphasized hard labor in a house of correction as punishment for most crimes. Death was reserved for premeditated murder. 2 Compare and contrast the basic assumptions of the penitentiary systems of Pennsylvania and New York. The penitentiary ideal, first incorporated in Pennsylvania, emphasized the concept of separate confinement. Residents were held in isolation, spending their time at craft work and considering their transgressions. In the New York congregate system, prison inhabitants were held in isolation but worked together during the day under a rule of silence. 3 Discuss the elements of the Cincinnati Declaration. A Declaration of Principles was adopted at the 1870 meeting of the National Prison Association, held in Cincinnati. The declaration stated that prisons should be organized to encourage reformation, rewarding it with release. It advocated indeterminate sentences and the classification of imprisoned people based on character and improvement. The reformers viewed the penitentiary practices of the nineteenth century as debasing, humiliating, and destructive. 4 Identify the reforms advocated by the Progressives. The Progressives looked to social, economic, biological, and psychological rather than religious or moral explanations for the causes of crime. They advocated the development of probation, indeterminate sentences, treatment programs, and parole. 5 Discuss the assumptions of the medical model regarding the nature of criminal behavior and its correction. Beginning in the 1930s, reformers put forward the medical model of corrections, which viewed criminal behavior as caused by psychological or biological deficiencies. They held that corrections should diagnose and treat these deficiencies using a variety of programs and therapies. When “well,” the individual should be released. 6 Illustrate how the community model reflected the social and political values of the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1960s and 1970s, dissatisfaction with the medical model led to the development of community corrections. Influenced by the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the war on poverty, reformers held that prisons were to be avoided because they were artificial institutions that interfered with the individual’s ability to develop a crime-free lifestyle. People should instead receive opportunities for success in the community, and corrections should emphasize the rebuilding of an individual’s ties to the community. 7 Describe the forces and events that led to the present crime control model. The rise of crime in the late 1960s and questions about the effectiveness of rehabilitative programs brought pressure to shift to a crime control model of corrections, with greater use of incarceration and other forms of strict supervision. KEY TERMS community corrections ( p. 63) congregate system ( p. 51) contract labor system ( p. 52) crime control model of corrections ( p. 64) lease system ( p. 55) mark system ( p. 57) medical model ( p. 61) penitentiary ( p. 49) positivist school ( p. 60) reformatory ( p. 58) separate confinement ( p. 50) FOR DISCUSSION 1. Why do you think the penitentiary first caught on in Pennsylvania and New York? How would you explain the increase in the number of penitentiaries throughout the United States after Eastern State Penitentiary and Auburn Prison began operating? 2. When Americans think of punishment, they usually first think of prisons. What other ways of punishing convicted individuals might the general public find acceptable? 3. How do you think that people convicted of committing crime will be punished in the United States in the future? What established punishments will still be around, and what kinds of new sanctions might emerge? 4. What lessons can today’s correctional professionals learn from the historical punishment practices covered in this chapter?