Marc Schindler
JPI Executive Director
This piece originally appeared on Open Society Foundations' blog.
Recently, I
had the privilege of spending time with three men who had served a total of over
100 years in prison after having been convicted of violent crimes. The three
included Roach Brown, whose life sentence for a murder committed during a
robbery was commuted after he served over 30 years; Stanley Mitchell, who was
released in 2013 after serving 34 years of a life sentence for being the
getaway driver in a fatal robbery; and Walter Lomax, who was exonerated and
released in 2006 after serving nearly 40 years of a life sentence for a murder
he didn’t commit.
In addition
to serving extremely long sentences following convictions for violent crimes,
what these three men have in common is that they are all doing well and all
contribute to their communities.
As we
discussed their experiences during a radio show hosted by Roach Brown, I was
again struck by the folly of America’s approach to addressing violent crime. As
the National Academy of Sciences notes in its seminal
work on the causes of prison population growth, “The change in
penal policy over the past four decades may have had a wide range of unwanted
social costs, and the magnitude of crime reduction benefits is highly
uncertain.”
As a number
of states across the country have shown, including New York, New Jersey and
California, we can have fewer people in prison and lower crime rates.
Our
discussion took place during a time when there is more support than ever on
both sides of the political aisle for criminal justice reform. But the
national conversation and policy reforms have focused almost exclusively on
reducing the incarceration of people convicted of nonviolent offenses. Yet
almost half of the people in prison have been convicted of a violent crime.
That means there is no way the U.S. will meaningfully reduce its incarceration
rate without changing how the justice system treats so-called violent crimes.
Thankfully,
there are signs policymakers may be willing to try a different approach. In the
juvenile justice system, along with declines in juvenile crime, there has been
a concerted effort to meet the needs of youth in the community through
effective and less costly alternatives to incarceration, resulting in more than
a 50 percent drop in the number of youth confined in juvenile facilities over
the past decade. We have also seen Supreme Court rulings prohibiting mandatory
life-without-parole sentences for those who commit a crime before their 18th
birthday.
From
California to New York, fewer parole decisions simply consider “the nature of
the crime,” instead taking into account how likely someone is to reoffend if
released. There has also been some chipping away at mandatory minimum sentences
for violent offenses. And when faced with spikes in violent crime, some city
leaders are rejecting approaches that simply rely on enhanced penalties and are
investing more in the communities hit hardest.
These modest
steps are encouraging, though they need to be tempered with reality. The latest
surveys show only a one percent reduction in the national prison population,
along with a slight increase in jailed populations. The United States still has
the highest incarceration rate and the largest prison population in the world.
And many of the proposals to improve how we respond to violent crime failed to
pass during congressional or state legislative sessions in 2016.
The data is
clear: America will not significantly reduce incarceration unless the justice
system changes its approach to violence. We need to ask who defines a behavior
as violent, how the justice system treats these behaviors, and whether the
approach to violent crime makes us safer.
In our new
report, Defining Violence: Reducing Incarceration by Rethinking
America’s Approach to Violence, the Justice Policy
Institute looks more closely at these issues.
It’s
important to note that behavior may be defined as a violent crime in one place
and as a nonviolent crime somewhere else, and that context matters in the way
violent and nonviolent crimes are treated by the justice system. For example,
behavior that wouldn’t otherwise be defined as a violent crime can be
classified as violent and mean a much longer term of imprisonment when a gun is
involved. So while it is true that gun violence is a serious problem in many
communities, we also know that there has been almost zero political will to
actually remove guns from our streets.
Finally, the
report examines the significant disconnect between current policies and the
evidence of what actually makes us safer. For instance, while research shows
that people convicted of some of the most serious offenses—such as homicide or
sex offenses—can have the lowest recidivism rates, this is often not taken into
consideration when considering sentence lengths.
If America
is going to truly come to grips with our addiction to incarceration, we need to
have a serious and informed conversation about how we respond to people charged
with and convicted of violent crimes. Otherwise, all of the energy and effort
to reduce incarceration will result only in marginal changes, which
unfortunately won’t move us much closer to a fair and effective justice
system.
