The jury’s still out on prisons. Should they be easier to endure or tougher to take? In studies on recidivism— the tendency of ex-cons to return to crime and return to prison— most come down on the side of easier, but while it might sound callous, some say the answer is, tougher.
I once spent a day inside a maximum security penitentiary in Minnesota, doing a story about a convict who had killed a man in a drug deal and was serving a life sentence. This place was the epitome of prison reform. They taught job skills, they offered therapy sessions, they worked on substance abuse, they gave inmates a chance to earn a degree, and on top of that, a prisoner could decorate his cell to the max. It was still an 8x6 box with a bunk, a sink, and a toilet, but if an inmate was so inclined, he could add a radio, a phonograph, and a picture or poster to cover every inch of concrete. Hardly the apex of “easy street,” but hardly the essence of “hard time” either.
The question is, do prison policies like these prepare inmates for life on the outside, or from the standpoint of reoffending, immunize them against the awfulness of life on the inside?
The answer evidently is, some of both.
In Colorado, where I live, almost half of those who serve time and get out end up going back. Nationwide, according to a study in 30 states by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the Department of Justice, roughly the same proportion of inmates released in those states— almost 45%— were arrested at least once during their first year after release. Almost 35% were arrested in their third year of freedom, another 25% by their ninth year. Taking repeat offenders into account, that’s more than four out of every five who apparently weren’t deterred— not enough, anyway— by the prospect of more time behind bars.
There are two schools of thought about what this means and what to do about it.
One says, if prison life is too severe, it hardens convicts, leaving them angry and unequipped for life on the outside. Make survival easier inside their cells and survival will be easier outside too.
The other says, prison’s too soft. Make “hard time” really mean hard time— not chopping rocks but maybe not like the pen in Minnesota either. Just make it hard enough that nobody in their right mind would ever do anything that might send them back.
Yet so many do just that.
There are too many variables to easily understand why.
The first variable is, not all who commit a crime and risk incarceration are in their right minds, because the risk itself is not rational. Second, the inherent flows of prison life can beget a toleration for violence, if not a taste for it, which can make violent behavior after an inmate is released more likely. Third, in some cases, the plain predictability of prison life has become the only life they know. Fourth, not every ex-con can get a decent job on the outside, or even a decent break. Fifth, job-training, education, rehabilitation, social interaction, and mental health programs— cornerstones of prison reform— vary from state to state and prison to prison but typically they are underfunded. And sixth, hanging over everything else, there’s stigma. If you’ve been behind bars, a segment of society is just shut off to you. In some cases, forever.
The Charles Koch Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes prison reform, states on its website, “Something must change if we are to achieve an effective justice system that protects and enhances safety while respecting human dignity.” But there’s the conflict. How do you do both? Can you protect and enhance public safety— meaning not just incarcerate criminals but dissuade them from repeating— while doing more inside prison walls to respect human dignity?
After what I’ve seen, from the permissive pen in Minnesota to Death Row in Huntsville, Texas, I’m not sure.
That’s why the outcome of another story I covered back in the mid-1970s— a story that helped shape my own views about how prison ought to be feared— seems instructive: the execution at the Utah State Prison of a man who killed a motel clerk during a cheap robbery on one night, a gas station clerk on another. His name was Gary Gilmore.
The execution was notable because it was the first in the U.S. after more than a half-decade-long nationwide moratorium ordered by the United States Supreme Court to try to remove racial bias from sentencing for capital crimes (which didn’t work). But it also was notable because unlike the vast majority of men on Death Rows across the country, Gary Gilmore didn’t fight to stay alive. To the contrary, I was in the chambers of the Utah Supreme Court in Salt Lake City when Gilmore appeared in shackles and cuffs and personally pleaded with the justices to rebuff efforts by the ACLU and the NAACP— the movements that in those days went to bat for condemned killers— to save his life. Gilmore welcomed execution. He was 36 years old, and having been a troublemaker since he was a kid, he’d already spent half his life behind bars. He said he’d rather die than spend another day longer in confinement. The court concurred. A firing squad gave him his wish.
I remember thinking at the time, I get that. The single day I’d spent in the Minnesota prison already had strengthened my dread about suffering through a single week behind bars, let alone a year, let alone a decade, let alone a lifetime. It would be frightful. It would be torture. It would feel like the “cruel and unusual punishment” that the Constitution forbids. Think about what you’ve done just in the past year— even with the pandemic— then think about what you’d have missed if you’d spent that year in jail instead.
Every sentence is an eternity.
Yet Gilmore— like another murderer just last week in Mississippi who abandoned his appeals and was put to death— was the exception to the rule. Most on Death Row fight for eternity over extinction.
The inmate in Minnesota, the drug dealer with the life sentence, told me that he had come to terms with his fate, so he was taking advantage of every liberty inside the walls and making the best of the grim small world he felt he would never leave. But what if things did change and he did get out? Would he look back on those years with such horror that he would never commit a crime again?
The evidence is mixed.
Since most convicted criminals will some day be released, the basic elements of prison reform are crucial, for us if not for the convicts themselves. But would it help if that were combined with fewer frills to make recidivism less likely? The jury’s still out.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
"Too Soft," balanced in the best of journalistic traditions, nods to competing goals of prison - to punish the guilty and deter the tempted at well as to reform criminals. But prison policies should also recognize that innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes. The Manhattan DA is exonerating two men imprisoned for decades for the murder of Malcolm X. Other examples of mistaken convictions are easy to find. (For starters,
google The Innocence Project.) Judicial mistakes argue for killing (ahem) capital punishment and, IMO, for limiting the harshness of prison.
There’s no “one size fits all” when the subject is crime, punishment, remorse or rehabilitation. Human beings are too variable. The prospect of prison deters you and me, but fails to faze many others. Perhaps an escalating severity of incarceration would help, but then we would end up running gulags whose main purpose was to subject people to misery for lack of any better idea of what to do. And that would be an undesirable reflection on the type of society we would have become.