In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos Read Free Book Online Page B

five hundred jury trials. Something has to give, so the system does its best to clear its caseload. In the seventy-five largest counties, about two-thirds of defendants accept a guilty plea, and most of the rest have the charges against them dropped. The small remainder are “diverted” (into drug treatment, for instance) or have “exceptional” outcomes (such as the suspect’s death).
    Nationwide, three-quarters of those who plead guilty to felony charges are given time behind bars. But with time served and a median sentence length of a year, simply saying you’re guilty can allow you to walk free. If you refuse to accept a guilty plea—you might be innocent—you stay behind bars to wait your day in court. In a further Orwellian twist, some suspects spend more time in jail awaiting trial than the maximum possible time they could receive even if found guilty. Such can be life if you’re poor and innocent and stubborn.
    Of course it’s not that everybody in jail is an innocent victim. People usually have some behavioral problems before they go to jail, but these problems
just get worse behind bars. In jail people naturally fulfill the role expected of them. Consider Philip Zimbardo’s notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Two groups of college students were randomly assigned to play the role of either prisoners or guards in a make-believe prison experiment (it was pretty realistic in that students were “arrested” on the street and the prison was a refitted basement in the psychology department building). Both groups fell all too readily into their arbitrarily assigned roles: Students who were objectively similar just a few days earlier began acting like guards and prisoners. After only six days, the experiment had to be called off because “guards” were abusing “inmates,” and some inmates were beginning to rebel, and others started to crack psychologically.
    Almost as horrifying as what goes on in modern jails and how so many people wind up there is what happens after they’re released. Whereas the process that sends so many Americans to prison is fundamentally defective, getting out of prison is equally problematic, albeit in different ways. Coming home after prison is called “reentry,” and like every other stage of the criminal justice system, it fails. Just take the simple standard of making people not commit
crime: Of the more than seven hundred thousand prisoners released each year, two-thirds are rearrested within three years, and half end up back in prison. Why? Maybe they’re bad eggs. But even good eggs can do stupid things when they’re without money, a stable home, antipsychotic medication, common sense, or the ability to find a job. Whatever circumstances led somebody to commit a crime probably haven’t changed by the time they’re freed. A released prisoner hangs out with the same friends in the same neighborhood and without the same job he never had. Or maybe a prisoner is a badass who enjoys adrenaline and the thrill of the crime.
    Part of the problem is that not only do prisons not “cure” crime, they’re truly criminogenic: Prisons cause crime. When released, people who go to prison are more likely to commit a crime than similar criminals who don’t go to prison. This should be no surprise considering what happens when you group criminals together with nothing to do and all the time in the world. People make associations, form bonds, learn illegal skills, and reinforce antisocial norms.
    Furthermore, to point out the obvious, criminals often come from neighborhoods with more
crime. But what may not be obvious is the direction of the relationship between the two. It is not just that high-crime neighborhoods increase incarceration; high-incarceration neighborhoods also increase crime. Prisons and the war on drugs have turned entire neighborhoods into self-sufficient criminal creators.