Questions and My Answers

We’re not about to become the kind of society that sends a 12-year-old kid to Devil’s Island for stealing a candy bar. Of course, someone can say that’s not where you draw the line. So where do you draw it? Someone who has committed burglary for the second time at age 25? Unless we adopt the Devil’s Island model, incarceration is expensive. If that 25-year-old dies after only 25 years in prison, we’ve still spent over a half million dollars to keep him or her locked up.

We already have more of our citizens behind bars that any other nation, one out of every hundred. The cost is enormous and growing. Yet we have a higher crime rate than any of the other major advanced nations. There are other costs, too: Spouses who become single parents, children left without support, additional welfare costs. So in a way it just compounds the problem.

In the long run, getting smart about crime will work a lot better than getting tough, which is what politicians always promise to do.

Because it’s a good investment. Locking the person up for life is enormously expensive, but significantly reducing the likelihood that he or she will continue in criminal activities is a bargain.

When you’ve turned an offender into a non offender, you’ve reduced crime. Even if all you do is make enough of a change in the person that he or she will not commit as many crimes as frequently, you’ve still reduced the crime problem. That’s certainly a consideration for non-violent crimes. Ideally we’d have something in between a completely laissez faire attitude toward the criminal’s continued criminal activity and the knee jerk "lock ‘em up and throw away the key" for the slightest offense. The feds’ ACE program is doing something like that. Paroled offenders are monitored very closely. When they begin to fall back into old ways, they’re confronted about their behavior, they go before a judge, they lose part of their freedom and perhaps go back to a halfway house, until they’ve earned another chance.

Sounds like a lot of trouble, but not nearly as much trouble as it is to keep the person locked up for years and years.

Does every offender who had been through any kind of rehabilitation program become a non-offender for the rest of his or her life? Of course not! But that’s the criterion held out by those who say it doesn’t work. We don’t stop treating cancer because our treatments are not going to cure everyone! I’m happy to see that, at least among serious criminologists, we’ve graduated from that simplistic "does it or doesn’t it" to ask instead what kinds of rehabilitation work, to what degree, in which populations, under what circumstances. Some programs have reduced recidivism by as much as 50% from expected levels. Somewhere around thirty percent is more typical. As we learn more, experiment more, we should see those percentages increase.

There is a relatively small subset of criminals, the true, hard-core psychopaths, who just aren’t put together like the rest of us. Some of them are glib, charming, successfully manipulative, and naive decision makers often buy into their pretenses. Steve Stanko and Jack Abbott come to mind. But the vast majority of offenders are capable of change.　

Emphatically no, but obviously some are.

By dangerous, if we mean likely to kill or seriously harm another human, well, that should be our major concern. There are ways to assess dangerousness. Saying someone is dangerous doesn’t mean that we know that individual will act out violently. It only means that we’ve judged him or her as being substantially more likely to act out violently than the average of his or her peers. If we keep anyone who might, possibly, under some condition, harm one of us at some time in the future, then every human being on earth would need to be kept in rubber rooms. When competent examiners have determined that an individual is dangerous, we have to explore reasonable means of reducing that danger. For some people, there may be no way except extremely tight incarceration. For others, it may mean freedom contingent on avoiding drugs or alcohol, or contingent on taking certain medications.

Anger management and behavior modification therapy can be very effective in some individuals.

We never run out of money to build prisons, but programs like this are among the first to suffer budget cuts. There was a time in Illinois when, to save money, we drastically cut the number of probation officers on the job. If I remember correctly, it was a huge cut, like 50%. Surprise! Crime went up!

I think of myself as a very proud American, but I know that as a society we have our flaws. Being penny wise and pound foolish is one of them. Let’s save that dollar today and not worry about how many more dollars it will cost us next year. Nowhere is that a more dangerous flaw than in criminal justice.　

No. Not because I don’t think some people deserve it, but because it’s just not effective, nor is it cost efficient. We need to have many safeguards in place, but even if we were to cut the appeals process in half, it still would cost more to execute a person than to incarcerate him or her for life.

Wrongful executions are horrible, and we know they happen. While the death penalty may cut recidivism to zero, it’s also irrevocable. How many people have been on death row, and then been exonerated by new evidence? Fear of the death penalty can motivate innocent defendants to plead guilty, and I know for a fact that the threat of the death penalty has often been used by policd to extract false confessions.

All of the other major advanced nations except Japan, I believe, have eliminated the death penalty, and the sky hasn’t fallen in those countries.

For some individuals, it’s important. Religion can help give a person a sense of "groundedness," a term we shrinks like a lot. For many, there’s great value in having a spiritual leader for emotional support and advice, broadening one’s perspective on morality and the purpose of life; these are all good.

But I don’t think it’s a must. Some offenders get their acts together pretty well without becoming especially religious. I think we make two major mistakes when we cross rehabilitation with religion. One is to give people the message that if they believe exactly as someone tells them to believe, life can work out, otherwise it can’t. That’s the cheapest kind of proselytizing, in my opinion. The other is to make people believe that if they have enough faith, they’ll never face hardships, never be tempted. We all face hardships, we’re all tempted at times, and we need to be prepared for it.

Earlier intervention with young offenders, including counseling parents. We don’t want the kid to laugh off an arrest, and we don’t want the parents brutalizing him or her to make a point. We should not gradually desensitize children to crime and its consequences as we do now.

Police officers and correctional personnel should be models of pro-social attitudes and behavior. Serious mistreatment of detainees should be a federal crime.

Get prosecutors to understand that the objective is justice, not conviction rate. Make police work a better career for good officers and get rid of the bad ones. Convince them that any conviction, true or false, at any cost, is an unacceptable attitude. We want bad people to pay for their badness and, if possible, become less bad in the process, and we want innocent people’s freedom to be protected.

Better pre-sentence evaluations. Involve behavioral scientists. Make the sentence fit the crime and the individual.

Take violent crime more seriously. I don’t mean hand out twenty years or more for everything, don’t make it so easy to plea bargain attempted murder down to a minor charge with a three year sentence. Don’t treat politicians who commit crimes in office with kid gloves, and don’t make it so easy for the rich and influential to get off with wrist slaps. At the same time, don’t hand down viciously long sentences for simple property crimes.

There’s a better way to live, partner, and I don’t mean never having fun. I mean living a rewarding, meaningful life, at peace with yourself and society. It can be done, but it’s really up to you. Learn to understand that person in the mirror, and don’t be afraid to give him or her a kick in the ass when it’s needed.

Remember that you’re going to have bad days; we all do. Just don’t make that decision in a fraction of a second that’s going to hurt you or someone else, and maybe ruin the rest of your life. Read "My Plea to Convicted Felons" on this site.

It can be done. I know because I’ve done it. It’s not easy. But it’s worth it, many times over.

And, oh, yeah, buy my book. I’ve never received a single letter or email or phone call telling me that it wasn’t worth the cost.