ENGL 101 LACC Incarceration Does Not Reduce Crime Discussion

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1. According to the article (attached), what are most prisoners incarcerated for? 
2.Which demographic groups make up the majority of prisoners? Provide some key statistics to support this answer.              
3. When it comes to budgets, which other state services have to compete with prisons for resources? 
4.What is the relationship between incarceration rates and local crime rates? Do you find the authors’ logic at that point in the discussion convincing?  Why/not?
5.What trends do the authors of the article note when comparing New York and California?
6.What is the correlation between violent crime rates and media coverage of crime?Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your
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Incarceration Does Not Reduce Crime
Authors: John Irwin, Jason Ziedenberg and Vincent Schiraldi
Editor: Jennifer L. Skancke
Date: 2005
From: Alternatives to Prisons
Publisher: Greenhaven Press
Series: At Issue
Document Type: Viewpoint essay
Length: 3,389 words
Content Level: (Level 5)
Lexile Measure: 1360L
Full Text:
Article Commentary
John Irwin, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, “America’s One Million Nonviolent Prisoners,” Social Justice, vol. 27, 2000, pp.
135–47. Copyright © 2000 by Social Justice. Reproduced by permission.
John Irwin is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Vincent Schiraldi is the founder
and executive director of the Center on Juvenile Crime and Justice as well as the Justice Policy Institute. Jason Ziedenberg is the
senior policy analyst for the Justice Policy Institute.
The imprisonment of over 1 million nonviolent offenders has led to a prison population explosion in the United States. Prisons are
overcrowded as a result of the mandatory sentencing laws put into effect in the early 1990s, which have sent a large number of
nonviolent first-time drug offenders to prison. However, despite claims that putting more people in prison reduces crime, studies
show that there is no correlation between higher incarceration rates and reduced crime. Moreover, the experience of prison often
causes harm to inmates, and many respond to their incarceration experience by committing more crimes when released from prison.
Mandatory sentencing laws should be repealed so that nonviolent offenders are not incarcerated for lengthy periods of time, and
alternatives to prison should be developed.
Over the past two decades, no area of state government expenditures has increased as rapidly as prisons and jails. Justice
Department data released on March 15, 1999, show that the number of prisoners in America has more than tripled over the last two
decades from 500,000 to 1.8 million, with states like California and Texas experiencing eightfold prison population increases during
that time. America’s overall prison population now exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
What is most disturbing about the prison population explosion is that the people being sent to prison are not the Ted Bundies, Charlie
Mansons, and Timothy McVeighs—or even less sensationalized robbers, rapists, and murderers—that the public imagines them to
be. Most are defendants who have been found guilty of nonviolent and not particularly serious crimes that do not involve any features
that agitate high levels of concern in the minds of the public. Too often, they are imprisoned under harsh mandatory sentencing
schemes that were ostensibly aimed at the worst of the worse.
As this analysis will show, the very opposite has been true over the past 20 years. Most of the growth in America’s prisons since 1978
is accounted for by nonviolent offenders and 1998 is the first year in which America’s prisons and jails incarcerated more than one
million nonviolent offenders.
The cost of incarcerating over one million nonviolent offenders is staggering. The growth in prison and jail populations has produced
a mushrooming in prison and jail budgets. In 1978, the combined budgets for prisons and jails amounted to five billion dollars. By
1997, that figure had grown to $31 billion. States around the country are now spending more to build prisons than they do on
colleges, and the combined prison and jail budgets for 1.2 million nonviolent prisoners exceeded the entire federal welfare budget for
8.5 million poor people last year….
One million nonviolent prisoners
The percentage of violent offenders held in the state prison system has actually declined from 57% in 1978 to 47% in 1997. However,
the prison and jail population has tripled over that period, from roughly 500,000 in 1978, to 1.8 million by 1998. According to data
collected by the United States Justice Department, from 1978 to 1996, the number of violent offenders entering our nation’s prisons
doubled (from 43,733 to 98,672 inmates), the number of nonviolent offenders tripled (from 83,721 to 261,796 inmates), and the
number of drug offenders increased sevenfold (from 14,241 to 114,071 inmates). As such, 77% of the growth in intake to America’s
state and federal prisons between 1978 and 1996 was accounted for by nonviolent offenders.
According to Department of Justice data, 52.7% of state prison inmates, 73.7% of jail inmates, and 87.6% of federal inmates were
imprisoned for offenses that involved neither harm, nor the threat of harm, to a victim. Assuming these relative percentages held true
for 1998, it can be estimated that by the end of that year, there were 440,088 nonviolent jail inmates, 639,280 nonviolent state prison
inmates, and 106,090 nonviolent federal prisoners locked up in America, for a total of 1,185,458 nonviolent prisoners. The combined
impact of the growth of prison and jail populations in general—and the accelerated growth of the nonviolent segment of the
incarcerated population in particular—has given 1998 the dubious distinction of being the first full year in which more than one million
nonviolent prisoners were held in America’s jails and prisons for the entire year.
Over one million people have been warehoused for nonviolent, often petty crimes, due to our inability to—or our choice not to—sort
out America’s lingering social problems from those that threaten us with real harm. The prison system looms so large on our political
horizon that it is often difficult for Americans to conceive of its size and scale, or to comprehend how out of kilter it is with the rest of
the industrialized world. Consider the following:
Our nonviolent prison population, alone, is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.
The European Union, a political entity of 370 million, has a prison population, including violent and nonviolent offenders, of
roughly 300,000. This is one-third the number of prisoners that America, a country of 274 million, has chosen to incarcerate
just for nonviolent offenses.
The 1,185,458 nonviolent offenders we currently lock up represents five times the number of people held in India’s entire
prison system, even though it is a country with roughly four times our population.
As we incarcerated more and more people for nonviolent offenses, African Americans and Latinos comprised a growing percentage
of those we chose to imprison. In the 1930s, 75% of the people entering state and federal prison were white (roughly reflecting the
demographics of the nation). Today, minority communities represent 70% of all new admissions, and more than half of all Americans
behind bars.
At yearend in 1996, there were 193 white American prison inmates per 100,000 whites, 688 Hispanic prison inmates per 100,000
Hispanics, and 1,571 African American prison inmates per 100,000 African Americans. This means that blacks are now imprisoned at
eight times the rate of whites and Latinos are imprisoned at three and one-half times the rate of whites. Increasing incarceration rates
for African Americans have been driven largely by increases in drug sentencing over the past two decades.
Ironically, women represent both the fastest growing and least violent segment of prison and jail populations. Women made up three
percent (12,927) of state prisoners in 1978, a figure that grew to 6.3% (79,624) by 1997. Only 27.6% of male jail inmates are violent
offenders, and an even smaller 14.9% of female jail inmates are in for violent offenses. Sixty-four percent of male jail inmates have
not been arrested for an act of violence on their current or any prior offense. That is true for 83.1% of female jail inmates.
The financial costs
The cost of incarcerating over one million nonviolent offenders is nothing short of staggering. At a time when our political leaders
celebrate the end of big government, prisons, jails, and the services that go into them constitute one of the largest and fastest
growing parts of the public sector.
According to the Criminal Justice Institute, it cost $20,224.65 to incarcerate one jail inmate for one year in 1997. Assuming
the costs did not rise between 1997 and 1998, this would mean that the cost of jailing the 440,088 nonviolent jail prisoners
was $8.9 billion.
State inmates cost an average of $19,801.25 to incarcerate per year. That means that, in 1998, it cost $12.7 billion to lock up
639,280 nonviolent state prisoners.
Federal prisoners cost an average of $23,476.80 per year to imprison. The tab for incarcerating 106,090 nonviolent federal
prisoners in 1998 comes to $2.5 billion.
In 1998, American taxpayers spent a total of $24 billion to incarcerate over one million nonviolent offenders, many of whom
had either never been locked up before or who had committed no prior acts of violence.
These figures should be considered conservative because they do not include facility construction costs, which in 1997 amounted to
an additional $3.4 billion for the 50 states. Further, according to several estimates, there are hidden costs of operating prisons and
jails, such as health care and other contracted services, and debt services on prison bonds that probably drive the average annual
cost of imprisonment up closer to $40,000.
Even without these hidden costs, the amount we spend to incarcerate America’s nonviolent offenders is so large that it is difficult to
find other government expenditures with which to compare it. The $24 billion figure is almost 50% larger than the entire $16.6 billion
the federal government currently spends on a welfare program that serves 8.5 million people. We are spending six times more to
incarcerate 1.2 million nonviolent offenders [in 2000] than the federal government will spend on child care for 1.25 million children.
While states and counties have lavished money on their prison and jail systems, they have consistently failed to provide adequate
funds for educational, health and mental health, and social programs that could have reduced the need for jails and prisons in the first
place, thereby feeding the cycle of imprisonment.
One useful way to analyze the scale of prison expenditures is to compare it to what we are currently spending on universities. Prisons
and universities generally occupy the portion of a state’s budget that is neither mandated by federal requirements, nor driven by
population (like K-12 education or Medicare). Because they dominate a state’s discretionary funds, prisons and universities must fight
it out for the non-mandated portion of the budget.
More important, however, prisons and universities often target the same audience—young adults. As such, the fiscal trade-offs
between these two sectors serve as a barometer of sorts, helping to gauge where we are going as a country and what our priorities
are. In a series of studies about the shift in funding that has taken place between higher education and corrections, the Justice Policy
Institute found:
States around the country spent more on building prisons than on colleges in 1995 for the first time. That year, there was
nearly a dollar-for-dollar trade-off between corrections and higher education, with university construction funds decreasing by
$954 million (to $2.5 billion), while corrections funding increased by $926 million (to $2.6 billion). Around the country, from
1987 to 1995, state expenditures for prisons increased by 30%, while expenditures for universities decreased by 19%.
During the 1990s, the prison budget of New York State grew by $761 million, while its budget for higher education dropped by
$615 million.
From 1984 to 1994, California’s prison system realized a 209% increase in funding, compared to a 15% increase in state
university funding. California built 21 prisons during that time, and only one state university. There are four times as many
African American men in California prisons as in its university system.
During the 1990s, Maryland’s prison budget increased by $147 million, while its university budget decreased by $29 million.
Nine out of 10 new inmates added to the prison system during this period were African American.
The budget for Florida’s corrections department increased by $450 million between 1992 and 1994 alone. That is a greater
increase than Florida’s university system received in the previous 10 years.
The District of Columbia literally has more inmates in its prisons than students in its university system.
The dubious crime-control benefits of mass incarceration
Many argue that this growth in imprisonment is a small price to pay for public safety. They say that criminal behavior, no matter how
small, must meet with a swift and severe response, lest it grow out of hand. Conservatives such as William Bennett, criminologist
John DiIulio, and politicians across the country point to drops in crime over the past five or so years as proof that getting tough on the
violent and nonviolent alike has reaped substantial dividends.
There is no doubt that the imprisonment of nearly two million people has prevented some crimes from being committed. Yet as
Michael Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, pointed out recently in The Atlantic Monthly, you
could choose another two million Americans at random and lock them up, and that would reduce the number of crimes too.
To reasonably conclude that increased incarceration promotes decreases in crime, one would need to show that a jurisdiction with
higher growth in its incarceration rate does better from a crime-control standpoint than does a jurisdiction with lower growth in its
incarceration rate. If increases in incarceration promote decreases in crime, one would expect that the jurisdictions with the highest
growth in imprisonment would do best from a crime-control standpoint. However, in the 10-year period from 1980 to 1991, in which
the nation’s prison population increased the most, 11 of the 17 states that increased their prison population the least experienced
decreases in crime. Of the 13 states that increased their prison populations the most, only seven experienced decreases in crime—a
virtual wash. In a previous study, one of the authors [John Irwin] conducted a regression analysis that compared increases in
imprisonment with changes in crime in every state in the country and found no relationship between increases in imprisonment and
reductions in crime.
Canada, a country with about as many people as the state of California, has about one-quarter as many people behind bars, and
provides a good contrast for judging the crime-control value of mass incarceration. [In 2000], with 4.3 times as many prisoners,
California had 4.6 times the homicide rate of Canada. Between 1992 and 1996, Canada increased its prison population by a modest
2,370 inmates (7%), while California’s prison population grew by 36,069 inmates (25%). Surprisingly, during that period, homicide
rates in Canada and California declined at exactly the same rate of 24% (although, with 2,916 homicide arrests in 1996, California still
has five times as many murders as Canada’s 581).
[In 2000] the Canadian murder rate has now reached its lowest level since 1969. Thus, for all the billions of dollars California has
outspent Canada on keeping people behind bars, Canada is still many times safer than a state of comparable size, and is actually
decreasing the rate at which it incarcerates its citizens.
Another way of looking at the effectiveness of mass incarceration is to examine different rates in the United States over time.
America’s prison population grew at an even greater rate in the five years before the recent drops in crime than it has [since 1995].
So, while there was a 33.6% increase in the incarceration rate from 1987 to 1992, there was a two percent increase in the nation’s
crime rate, as measured by the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. From 1992 to 1997, there was a 25% increase in the prison population,
and a 13% drop in the crime rate. The country actually did better, from a crime-control standpoint, when the prison population grew
less precipitously!
The complexities of why crime rates change, and how disconnected they are from the incarceration rate, are best typified by what
some call the New York miracle. To be sure, the steady and steep drop in crime in America’s largest city is responsible for a sizable
portion in the drop in national crime rates. Ironically, New York’s crime rate fell even though it has had one of the slowest growing
prison systems in the country over the past five years, and the New York City jail system has seen a real decline in the number of
people it has held over this period. Between 1992 and 1997, only two states experienced a slower percentage growth in their prison
population than did New York—Maryland and Maine. During that period, for example, New York State’s prison population grew from
61,736 to 70,026, while its violent crime rate fell by 38.6% and its murder rate by 54.5%.
New York State’s modest prison growth provides a solid contrast to the explosive use of incarceration in other states. For example,
during that period, California’s prison population grew by 30%, or about 270 inmates per week, compared to New York State’s more
modest 30 inmates per week. By contrast, California’s violent crime rate fell by a more modest 23%, and its murder rate fell by 28%.
Put another way, New York experienced a percentage drop in homicides that was half again as great as the percentage drop in
California’s homicide rate, despite the fact that California added nine times as many inmates per week to its prisons than New York
did.
Virtually all of these nonviolent offenders will be released from prison and will try to pick up life on the outside following their
profoundly damaging time in prison. For the most part, their chances of pursuing a merely viable, much less satisfying, conventional
life after prison are diminished by their time behind bars. The contemporary prison experience often converts them into social misfits
and there is a growing likelihood that they will return to crime and other forms of deviance upon release from incarceration. Research
by the Rand Corporation confirmed what common sense tells us about the prison experience when it found that convicted felons sent
to prison had significantly higher rates of rearrest after release than did similar offenders placed on probation. The damage done to
nonviolent offenders by their experience behind bars is at least one reason why the crime-control impact of massive incarceration is
disappointing.
Implementing change
The policy implications of imprisoning more than one million nonviolent prisoners are profound and warrant a great deal of public
discussion and debate. Over the past two decades, America has rushed headlong into the use of imprisonment as its primary crimefighting tool. In so doing, small fries have been locked up at far higher rates than have big fish, at enormous social and economic
costs, and with little benefit to show for it.
The tide must now be turned and turned abruptly. States and the federal government should abolish mandatory sentencing schemes
that send nonviolent offenders to prison for lengthy periods. New York’s mandatory sentencing system—dubbed the Rockefeller Drug
Laws—cost state taxpayers $680 million in 1998, a figure frighteningly close to the $615 million New York has cut from the annual
budget of its university system. A recent analysis by Human Rights Watch concluded that 80% of the nonviolent offenders who
received prison sentences in 1997 under the Rockefeller Laws had never been convicted of a violent felony.
Experiments such as those in Minnesota should be replicated nationwide. The change in Minnesota’s sentencing law during the
1980s drastically slowed prison growth there and reserved prison space for violent and more serious offenders, while establishing a
network of support programs for less serious offenders. Small release valves for dangerously crowded prison systems, like the highly
effective use of early release in Illinois, should spread to similarly overcrowded systems around the country. New federal funds (and
those now earmarked exclusively for prison construction) should be allocated to help states develop ways to substantially reduce the
number of nonviolent prisoners in their systems and to carefully evaluate the impact those reforms have on crime.
We are convinced that little will change unless the debate over crime and punishment can be covered more responsibly by the
media. From 1992 to 1996, while homicides throughout the country were declining by 20%, the number of murders reported on the
ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news increased by 721%. Six times as many Americans ranked crime as the number one problem in
1996 as in 1992. As long as the public, politicians, and the media focus on the demonic images of Hannibal the Cannibal, our jails
and prisons will continue to fill up with the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
At a time [2000] when crime is down, the economy is strong, and no Americans are fighting on foreign soil, we have a unique
opportunity to turn our attention to one of our most pressing domestic problems. The cycle of imprisonment has taken on a life of its
own, but it is something we created, and as such, something we can change.
Books
Thomas G. Blomberg and Stanley Cohen, eds. Punishment and Social Control. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2003.
Ulla V. Bondeson. Alternatives to Imprisonment: Intentions and Reality. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002.
Gail A. Caputo. Intermediate Sanctions in Corrections. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2004.
Todd R. Clear and Harry R. Dammer. The Offender in the Community. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003.
Angela Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories, 2003.
R.A. Duff. Punishment, Communication, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Stephen Duguid. Can Prisons Work? The Prisoner as Object and Subject in Modern Corrections. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2000.
Joel Dyer. The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
Joseph T. Hallinan. Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. New York: Random House, 2001.
Othello Harris, ed. Impacts of Incarceration on the African American Family. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003.
Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, eds. Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Peter G. Herman, ed. The American Prison System. New York: H.W. Wilson, 2001.
Joy James, ed. States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Robert Johnson. Hard Time: Understanding and Reforming the Prison. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001.
Mark Jones. Community Corrections. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2004.
Ann Chih Lin. Reform in the Making: The Implementation of Social Policy in Prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002.
John P. May, ed. Building Violence: How America’s Rush to Incarcerate Creates More Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2000.
Christian Parenti. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York: Verso, 2000.
Joan Petersilia. When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
W. Gordon West and Ruth Morris. The Case for Penal Abolition. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000.
Periodicals
Deborah Smith Bailey. “Alternatives to Incarceration,” Monitor on Psychology, July/August 2003.
Phylis Skloot Bamberger. “Specialized Courts: Not a Cure-All,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, March 2003.
Vince Beiser. “A Necessary Evil?” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2003.
Etienne Benson. “Rehabilitate or Punish?” Monitor on Psychology, July/August 2003.
Paula Tully Bryant. “Florida’s Award-Winning Nonsecure Drug Treatment Program,” Corrections Today, June 2000.
Fox Butterfield. “Women Find a New Arena for Equality: Prison,” New York Times, December 29, 2003.
Alan Elsner. “America’s Prison Habit,” Washington Post, January 24, 2004.
Julie Falk. “Fiscal Lockdown,” Dollars & Sense, July/August 2003.
C. West Huddleston. “Jail-Based Treatment and Reentry Drug Courts,” American Jails, March/April 2000.
Eli Lehrer. “Hell Behind Bars: The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” National Review, February 5, 2001.
Los Angeles Times. “Roads to Rehabilitation,” November 25, 2003.
Ed Marciniak. “Standing Room Only: What to Do About Prison Overcrowding,” Commonweal, January 25, 2002.
Ayelish McGarvey. “Reform Done Right,” American Prospect, December 2003.
Edwin Meese and Eric Holder. “Work for the Chain Gang,” Washington Times, July 23, 2002.
George Miller. “A Smart Solution to Jail Crowding,” Corrections Today, July 2000.
George Neumayr. “Crime and No Punishment,” American Spectator, July 9, 2003.
Ernerst Partridge. “The Two Faces of Justice,” Free Inquiry, Summer 2001.
Amanda Ripley. “Outside the Gates,” Time, January 21, 2002.
Kit R. Roane. “Maximum Security Inc.,” U.S. News & World Report, May 28, 2001.
Frank Rubino. “Doing Family Time,” Hope, March/April 2004.
Margaret Talbot. “Catch and Release,” Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2003.
Sanho Tree. “The War at Home,” Sojourners, May/June 2003.
Richard D. Vogel. “Capitalism and Incarceration Revisited,” Monthly Review, September 2003.
Kevin Warwick. “Intermediate Sanction Options Help Alleviate Jail Overcrowding,” American Jails, November/December 2002.
Edward Wong. “Behind Bars and on the Clock,” New York Times, June 6, 2001.
Katherine Van Wormer. “Restoring Justice,” USA Today Magazine, November 2001.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Irwin, John, et al. “Incarceration Does Not Reduce Crime.” Alternatives to Prisons, edited by Jennifer L. Skancke, Greenhaven Press,
2005. At Issue. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010349202/OVIC?u=losangeles_cc&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=8e9a3fc2. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023.
Originally published as “America’s One Million Nonviolent Prisoners,” Social Justice, vol. 27, 2000, pp. 135-147.
Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010349202

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