What is prison for?
Even if you've never visited a prisonvoluntarily or otherwiseyou're likely to have an image of what prison is. You might have an image of bars, watchtowers, guards and clanging gates. Inmates, too, are stereotyped: tattooed, pumping iron, and razor-wire dangerous; a great mass of the bad, the mad and the risky to know.
When you work in prisons, you get a chance to meet people up close, to meet the person beneath the mask, so to speak. You also get the opportunity to ask the basic questions but in a more informed wayquestions like, What is prison for? Are we making the best use of our time, money and ingenuity? What good can come of this?
Within its overarching mission of protecting and preserving a just society, prison is meant to serve five functions: to contain; to punish; to deter potential offenders; to rehabilitate; and to implement community restitution. Since the 1970s, America has added its own, sixth function: to make a profit; the amount of subsidized cheap labor now being exploited in American prisons challenges the reputation of Soviet gulags.
The rehabilitative function of prisons is the least understood and usually the first to go when prisons are overcrowded and budgets are tight. In the U.S., with far and away the highest rates of incarceration in the world (more than six times the per capita rate of Canada and three times the rate of Mexico, for example), the focus is on warehousing and containing inmates and, in private prisons, making a profit from them.
Prison resources are so stretched by the sheer volume of humanity they encounter that rehabilitation programs and creative approaches to restitution for victims and for communities fall by the wayside. For the majority of inmates, prison is a lonely, dangerous place that usually makes people worse. And there is increasing concern about the traumatic effects on other individuals, families, children and communities when you lock up whole sections of the population. The havoc wrought by America's wasteful overuse of prison is not just shocking, it's insane, and it undermines our national strengthnot to mention our financial resources. As a society, we can do so much better.
Prison practices internationally vary a lot. In the U.K., where I live and work, prisons are at capacity but can still afford the "luxury" of rehabilitation programsalthough these are under constant threat of erosion and cancellation. The statistics aren't great, and there are still major concerns that prison may be a university of crime. But much positive work is being done, and rehabilitation is still seen as a central goal.
We need to understand how we got here and to find a way out. While prison is often necessary for violent and sexual offenders, dealing with drug offenses and nonviolent offenses without using prison is an important place to start. When nonviolent criminals are offered community-based interventions, this often serves as a much more cost-effectiveand overall effectiveway to give a sanction/punishment and also insist that the offender make restitution to the community. It can also involve attending rehabilitation programs such as drug-treatment, work-skills and behavioral-treatment programs. Then the costliest interventions, and the most resources, can be focused on the people who need them most and who pose the greatest risk to society. And how costly is costly? The average price for keeping a prisoner inside an American jail is $31,000 per year, and in some states it is double that amount. What if you could get a better result for half the amount if you worked smarter?
As long as more people behind bars equals more votes and more profit for private corporations, we will continue down this insane route. Or maybe we will choose a different path and tell our elected officials that we want our criminal justice systems to be smart and changing systems, not just human warehouses, forced-labor camps and universities of crime.
So, where do we need to start? My sense, after working in the criminal justice field for 25 years, is to suggest, as with so many human problems, that we start with ourselves. When each of us acknowledges our own human complexity, the struggles we face internally and with others, when we can learn to accept that we share a common humanitystrengths, hopes, flaws and allwith all "criminals," then we may be less tempted to see offenders as carrying all the bad elements of the human psyche, those aspects of the self that we would prefer to deny. The opportunity to reflect brings the opportunity to change one's mind, to see new possibilities and to change direction.
The reality is that you could lock up half the human population and you would still have crime. Our criminal justice system needs to draw from research and modernize, learning what works and what doesn't.
Clark Baim is from Chicago and now lives and works in the U.K. as a psychotherapist in prisons, probation settings and private practice. His most recent book, co-written with Tony Morrison, is Attachment-Based Practice With Adults: Understanding Strategies and Promoting Positive Change, published in Brighton, England, by Pavilion Publishers. He is the brother of Windy City Times Publisher Tracy Baim.