SJ’s decarceration ambitions built on the myth of mass incarceration

Responding to progressives’ extreme jail-emptying plans, Johnny Khamis asserted this Feb. that giving criminals a get-out-of-jail-free card is an absurd response to mental illness and unideal prison numbers. Matt DeLisi and John Paul Wright of City Journal support this idea, refuting beliefs that the criminal justice system harshly and unfairly incarcerates too many citizens. On the contrary, the state is historically lenient on crime (e.g., via revolving-door “justice”) and unprepared to manage a high volume of it—proving jail-emptying is a serious public safety risk.

Animating these [prison confinement] reforms is a belief that the United States incarcerates too many people and that prison is ineffective or unjust. Many academics, journalists, and activists criticize incarceration as unduly harsh on lawbreakers and corrosive to inner-city communities. Such organizations as the National Research Council of the National Academies, American Society of Criminology, and Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences have assailed the “systematic” and “entrenched” racism that allegedly characterizes our criminal-justice system. For many on the left, incarceration is simply a social evil. Some on the right also back such efforts, convinced that reducing prison populations will save tax dollars or that embracing reform will yield political benefits.

But mass incarceration is an ill-defined notion that ignores what we have learned about the essential role of government in controlling crime. Incarceration, appropriately applied, represents effective public policy, worthy of investment. Compelling data show that prison incarceration in the United States is lower than should be expected. While some states and public officials tout a hard line against crime, the reality is that many serious, recidivistic criminal offenders rarely see the inside of a prison cell. When they do, most get released after serving time well short of their actual sentence. Incarceration is the proverbial revolving door. Nevertheless, the mass incarceration narrative remains potent and retains bipartisan support—but its historical and empirical foundation is weak.

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This brief summary vitiates the historical arguments of today’s reformists. If mass incarceration ever existed, it was between 1930 and 1960. As crime worsened, governments were slow to react, getting a handle on the problem only well after the crime wave had begun. By then, however, the reformers who gave us institutions of confinement had turned against them, leaving millions of seriously mentally ill people to their own devices and then waging campaigns to reduce incarceration.

Reformists decrying mass incarceration don’t just advance a tendentious history. They also overlook four key facts about the contemporary state of the U.S. criminal-justice system. Both the prevalence of behavioral disorders linked with crime and the annual offending numbers conveyed by victim reports exceed incarceration rates, suggesting that the system has failed to capture a substantial portion of criminal offenders. The system also tends to be far more lenient than activists let on. Finally, the incapacitation of criminals itself offers public-safety benefits.

This article originally appeared in City Journal. Read the whole thing here.

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