Can Gardens Heal

If you haven’t noticed, gardens are popping up in some unconventional places – from prison yards to retirement and veteran homes to programs for troubled youth.

Most are handy sources of fresh and local food, but increasingly they’re also an extension of therapy for people with mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; depression; and anxiety.

It’s called horticultural therapy. And some doctors, psychologists and occupational therapists are now at work to test whether building, planting, and harvesting a garden can be a therapeutic process in its own right.

Horticulture therapy dates back to Socrates, but it didn’t become a scientific pursuit until the 18^th century. That’s when Benjamin Rush, a psychiatrist and Declaration of Independence cosignatory, began documenting how gardening benefited his mentally ill patients.

Much of the science behind just how gardening affects the mind and brain still remains a mystery. What scientists do know is that gardening reduces stress and calms the nerves. It decreases cortisol, a hormone that plays a role in stress response. So what about the biological mechanism behind mental disorders? That’s a bit tougher.

Variables in the environment — such as climate, location, diet and genetics — have complicated some of the early research on horticultural therapy. So to pinpoint a causal relationship between gardening and mental rehabilitation, researchers have to use a balance of qualitative and quantitative studies, according to Elizabeth Diehl, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Therapeutic Horticulture.

A 2011 study at a juvenile rehabilitation center in southwestern Ohio with a gardening program showed that horticulture therapy helped the kids see themselves in a more positive light and helped them better manage their emotional and behavioral problems. And most of the kids said they would continue gardening after the program, according to the findings in theJournal of Therapeutic Horticulture.

One 2007 study in the journal Neurosciencefound a bacteria found in soil linked with increased serotonin production in the brain — a sign that gardening could increase serotoninlevels and improve depression.

Social scientists have also been looking at gardens built by and for the homeless, ex-convicts on probation and hospital patients. The results of early studies suggest they have a positive impact. Most people tend to not revert back to bad behavior and many make changes in their lives for the better, the studies show.

For now, that evidence seems to be enough to fuel the burgeoning field — programs like a camp for troubled teens in Hawaii, called Pacific Quest. Program staff tell The Salt they believe the garden is a beneficial tool to emotionally engage the kids.

For a few months, students — many with psychological issues from trauma, adoption, depression — band together and run a garden from the seed to the dinner plate. “They are introduced to the garden by eating the food planted by [a camper] who was in their shoes just a few months ago,” Travis Slagle, a Horticultural Therapy Association member and land supervisor for Pacific Quest, tells The Salt. “That builds their curiosity.”

Horticulture therapy offers at least one big advantage for the kids: The garden setting never changes. This gives them ample time to connect with their surroundings and feel at home.

“With the garden, you’re living in a place and learning about the community and building a community,” he says. That stable environment can help the kids let their guard down.

Students build the garden beds, plant the seeds, care for the seedlings and cook the food — all with minimal help from the staff. The teens learn how to problem solve on their own, as well. Slagle says they build rock walls for support and plant companion plants for certain veggies or fruit.

“They can see the parallel of the garden and relate it to their own lives,” he says. “It provides ways to engage in conversation and life lessons.” The kids, who meet with counselors and therapists regularly throughout the process, are learning to prepare for the moment but also to plan for the future, he says. Doing both at the same time requires maturity, and wisdom and that’s something the garden brings out, he says.

The kids take the extra passion fruit, kale, onions, carrots, beets, bananas, and pineapples to the local farmer’s market to sell. The profit is donated to a local charity. “The garden allows them to recognize that it’s not something that’s just going to benefit themselves,” he says. “It teaches that in an experiential way.”

California’s new Ag Warriors program has partnered with four California colleges to equip veterans with the skills they need to pursue agricultural careers.

By Rachael Brugger, Hobby Farms Associate Web Editor

As the United States has felt the strains of economic recession over the past decade, so too have the nation’s servicemen and women. Between 2000 and 2009, veteran unemployment rose from 3 percent to 8 percent, according to a report from the Department of Veteran Affairs. Young veterans between the ages of 18 and 24 bared the biggest burden, with unemployment peaking at 8 percent. On the flip side, only about 15 percent of veterans held a college degree during that time period and only 30 to 35 percent had completed some college.

Recognizing an opportunity to help veterans get plugged into the workforce, the new Ag Warriors program in California’s Central Valley will launch this month to connect veterans and agriculture employers.

Founded by the International Agri-Center, which hosts the World Ag Expo in Tulane, Calif., Ag Warriors has partnered with four educational institutions to develop training curriculums that mingle the veterans’ military skills with those needed to thrive in a farming career.

“I believe if you have been on combat patrol in Afghanistan as a veteran, you are a strong team member with an equally strong work ethic—two characteristics sought most by employers,” says Larry Dutta, dean of career and technical education at College of the Sequoias, an Ag Warriors educational partner. “If a veteran has some additional job skills learned in the military or at a community college, they will become valuable employees.”

With more than 1,200 agricultural exhibitors each year, the World Ag Expo will serve as the conduit between the ag industry and Ag Warriors’ educational partners, with its participants serving as potential employers who can provide jobs and internships to the student veterans.

The key to Ag Warriors’ success, according to Dutta, will be identifying the needs of the agriculture industry and immediately getting veterans connected to a local training program that fits those needs.

“For example, if WAE was contacted by a global agriculture company seeking experienced crop-production specialists and had facilities anywhere in California, our partner colleges could provide training and veterans to fill those jobs,” he says.

As the first college to partner with Ag Warriors, COS already has a strong agricultural program as well as 180 veterans on campus, Dutta explains. With a new campus located just miles from the WAE on 500 acres of farmland, it’s perfectly positioned to fit the veterans’ training needs. Plus, it has the infrastructure in place to assist veterans with tuition, books, living expenses and other costs.

In addition to COS, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; California State University, Fresno; and West Hills College Coalinga will collaborate with Ag Warriors to develop agriculture curriculums and host veterans on their campuses.

The program will officially launch at the Ag Warriors Gala on Feb. 15, 2012, during the 2012 World Ag Expo. The event will feature a keynote address from President George W. Bush and a performance by country music artist Michael Peterson, Ag Warriors’ spokesperson, who completed nine tours to Iraq and Afghanistan and received the 2008 “Spirit of Hope” award for his service.

Many veterans have already expressed interest in Ag Warriors, according to Liza Teixeira, communications director for IAC, but the program will not begin enrollment until after the official launch. For details about the program and application information, veterans can call the IAC at 559-688-1030.

“We believe the agricultural community is well-suited to provide jobs to returning veterans,” says Jerry Sinift, CEO of IAC.  “Many of our friends in agriculture have expressed a need for bright, motivated and hardworking individuals to join their teams—Ag Warriors will be the conduit that connects employers with veterans in search of careers in agriculture.”

In case you haven’t been following my tell-all confessional — I mean Twitter feed — lately, I’ve been in Manhattan for the last few weeks. Hanging out in all the wrong places (read: painfully hip power hotels), I’ve had the questionable privilege of overhearing more than my fair share of Very Serious Conversations from the movers and shakers of the world.

And boy, have they been tedious: mostly, about eking out slightly sharper terms for deals for more yawn-inducing stuff (whether flicks, financial instruments, or kicks) that’s destined not to matter. So here’s a tiny hypothesis: maybe the real depression we’ve got to contend with isn’t merely one of how much economic output we’re generating — but what we’re putting out there, and why. Call it a depression of human potential, a tale of human significance being willfully squandered (on, for example, stuff like this).

If that’s the best we can do, no wonder our economy is falling short of its potential — and no wonder our lives occasionally feel empty, even meaningless. (Even star quarterbacks married to Brazilian supermodels occasionally say to themselves, there’s got to be more than this.) Hence, If we want to do better, I suggest it’s time to get lethally serious about doing stuff that actually matters. So here are three questions to ask about yourself about what you’re spending your life doing:

Does it stand the test of time? Ponder this for a moment: the vast majority spend the vast majority of our lives sweating, suffering, and slogging mightily over stuff that’s forgotten by next quarter, let alone next year or next century. Call me crazy, but I’d suggest: mattering means building stuff that’s awesome enough to last. Maybe not forever, like Giza’s Pyramids — but surely more than a couple of months, before it’s absent-mindedly tossed into the dustbin of history along with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of the age of disposable plastic junk. I’d give you a handful of recent real-world examples, but beyond the labors of love a new generation of artisans are working on, whether microbrews, novels, or games, here’s the hard truth: when it comes to the stuff our largest institutions are invested in, I can’t think of any, so poor is our cultural performance at standing the test of time. (Just ask yourself: is anybody really going to be watching Mission Impossible 4 a century from now, except a handful of irony-soaked action-movie-worshipping 22nd century hipsters?). Of course, all that really means is that since nearly everyone seems to suck at standing the test of time, you’ve got a tremendous opportunity not to.

Does it stand the test of excellence? In most boardrooms, the first and last question asked is: will “the markets,” financial and “consumer,” like your latest shiny trinket slightly better than the next guy’s? Of course, that’s a perfect recipe for mediocrity: to have barely satisfied weary, oppressed, jaded “consumers” already trained to demand the bare McMinimum is to have furiously smashed the glass ceiling of the lowest common mass-market denominator — and little more. Here are some higher bars: do critics, scholars, aficionados, and diehard enemies pan it, or love it? Mattering means recognizing that everyone’s opinion is not created equal — some count more than others, for the simple reason that some opinions are more nuanced, educated, sophisticated, historically grounded, and self-aware than others.

Does it stand the test of you? Sure, I can understand why the dudes and gals I’ve been overhearing in my little Manhattan adventure are so energized by the stuff they’re “working” on — it feels exciting to be part of a buzzing milieu’s in-crowd. But let’s face it: on our deathbeds, the accomplishments that matter most to most of us probably won’t be recounted thus: “In 2012, I sold another thousand copies of someone else’s middle-of-the-road blockbuster to an overweening VP with really bad hair and worse manners at a giant monopolistic corporation that was destroying my grandkids’ futures. Man, I lived.” So while I too sometimes feel enchanted by the seductive power of glittering fantastic excess that seems to have mesmerized my little informal sample of Manhattanites, I’d also like to challenge them — and you — to consider the questions of mattering in a slightly more sophisticated, humane, considered way. It’s one thing to work on stuff that seems sexy because it’s socially cool and financially rewarding. But fulfillment doesn’t come much from money or cool-power — all the money in the world can’t buy you a searing sense of accomplishment.

Being human is never easy. But that’s the point. Perhaps as an unintended consequence of our relentless quest for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now, we’ve comfortably acceded to something akin to a minor-league contempt for the richness and grandeur of life unquenchably meaningfully well lived. Hence, call this post my tiny statement of rebellion. Hex me with all the bland management jargon in the world, zap me with all the perfect theories and models you like, but I’ll never, ever accept the idea that triviality, mediocrity, and futility are appropriate goals for any human being, much less our grand, splintering systems of human organization.

We’re all built differently — but none of us is here to not make a difference. So what are your three questions for getting lethally serious about doing stuff that matters?

That was one of my life lessons through the last long-term romantic relationship I had. Some people do not want or need your help! As a matter of fact, they resent your “intrusion”.

This is something we at Namaste Healing Center will surely run into and we must be careful not to over-step our bounds.

I hope you follow the link and read the blog. It’s a good lesson for us all. Enjoy. Namaste

Helping Those Who Do Not Want to be Helped

Elected officials across the nation from both political parties have begun to examine ways to replace a tough corrections policy with a smart one.

John Buntin | February 2012  Governing the States and Localities

Three years ago, a group of conservative legislators from California slipped off to Texas. Among the purposes of their visit was to learn more about a new approach to controlling crime. The strategy involved investing in community corrections, not new prisons. The somewhat surprising thing was that the plan had been developed in Texas, with strong support from conservatives. Texas, after all, is a state that prides itself on being tough on crime. It executes more inmates than any other state and incarcerates the highest percentage of its population of any big state.

For two decades starting in 1985, Texas had built prisons with gusto, increasing by 300 percent the number of inmate beds. But in 2007, when Gov. Rick Perry produced a budget that asked the Legislature to appropriate $523 million in additional funding for three new prisons — with more prisons to follow — legislators balked. Instead, lawmakers decided to invest $240 million in diversion and treatment. By all accounts, this approach has been working. There have been declines in ongoing crime. Parole violations have plummeted. Prison overcrowding has eased.

Texas’ success intrigued the California delegation, but it didn’t inspire them to follow suit. Facing a strong prison workers’ union, opposition from district attorneys and a general unwillingness to relinquish the one tool — being tough on crime — that had worked for the GOP in the Golden State, the Californians listened but left with no game plan. “I think they honestly wanted to get something done, but they really felt they couldn’t do anything,” says Texas Rep. Jerry Madden, who was at the meeting as one of the architects of corrections reform in his state. “There were too many other influences they had in their system. It was almost an impossible situation for them.”

Today, California’s corrections system is a trainwreck. The state prison system is so overcrowded that the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that conditions violated the Constitution’s 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Unable to balance its budget, California is currently in the process of shipping 40,000 state inmates to county jails. Texas, meanwhile, has become a model for corrections reform. Last year, at least 11 states, including Arkansas, Kentucky, Ohio and North Carolina, undertook similar sweeping corrections reforms with the intention of limiting the growth of their prison populations. This year, states as diverse as Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Hawaii are expected to take up corrections reform based on ideas that have played out successfully in Texas.

“The Texas story helped spawn a wave of reforms around the country,” says Adam Gelb, who directs Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project. “We hear over and over, ‘If Texas can do this, [the approach] can’t possibly be soft on crime.’”

Cost clearly has been a major impetus for reform. Between 1985 and 2008, state prison populations nearly tripled. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, corrections spending rose even faster, by more than 600 percent. It now makes up 7 percent of state general fund spending. But cutting costs is only part of the story. Ideas matter too. When crime began to spike in the 1960s, criminologists and public policy experts responded with a simple and compelling proposition: Lock away more people for longer. Today, new ways of thinking about public safety — some of them rooted in game theory, behavioral economics and sociology — are challenging the perceived wisdom about how to improve public safety and reduce incarceration rates.

Game theory seeks to understand what constitutes a rational course of action in situations where other people’s responses determine outcomes. For decades, academic game theorists have explored how promises, commitments, threats, the elimination of options, and other tactics can affect outcomes and the resulting “equilibrium.” In Texas and in a growing number of states and cities across the country, policymakers have found a smarter approach based on a new generation of research that applies insights from the world of game theory to the criminal justice system. It’s still a very new concept, but the resulting body of work is pointing policymakers toward new and potentially transformative ways of improving public safety while reducing the number of people behind bars. It also grapples with one of the most notable — and appalling — features of what some have called the current era of mass incarceration: its destructive effect on many African-American communities.

“Our crime rates have been dropping for nearly 20 years,” says Madden, “but we still have a greater demand for prisons. Why is this?”

A number of cities and states are asking the same thing. In response, elected officials across the nation from both political parties have begun to examine ways to replace a “tough” corrections policy with a “smart” one.

The U.S. incarceration rate — 700 state and federal prisoners for every 100,000 residents — is by far the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world. It wasn’t always so. In the first half of the 20th century, U.S. incarceration rates had hovered around 110 per 100,000 residents. Then came the crime explosion of the 1960s. In 1962, the United States experienced 4.2 murders per 100,000 residents. By 1964, the homicide rate had climbed to 6.4, and by 1972, it was 9.4. Robberies were even worse. In 1959, the rate was 51.2 for every 100,000 residents; by 1968, the rate had nearly tripled. Crime, the political scientist James Q. Wilson concluded, “had assumed epidemic proportions.”

Wilson looked primarily to cultural changes to explain this explosion in criminality. However, he posited another cause as well, as did the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker: Crime was rising because the risk of punishment was falling. Crime was up but the number of prison beds was down. By 1974, the “average” punishment per committed burglary was four days of incarceration. The average punishment per committed aggravated assault was eight; for robbery, 28. In short, crime increasingly “paid.” That gave rise to a straightforward solution: Incarcerate more people for longer periods of time. States went on a prison-building spree.

By 1996, the United States had regained the level of punitiveness (as calculated by dividing crimes committed by punishment given out) of 1962, the year before the crime spike of the 1960s began. Crime, meanwhile, had begun to fall. Although academics differ on the details, most agree that increased imprisonment played a significant role in the lowering of crime numbers. But as the crime rate declined, something odd occurred. By 2008, some 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, 1 percent of the adult population. Forty percent of the inmates were black. What had happened?

Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander offers at least one answer: the misguided war on drugs. In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, she notes that “drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000.” As a result, 500,000 of the people behind bars today are serving time for drug offenses — versus fewer than 50,000 in 1980. And that, she argues, has had implications for African-Americans. “Nothing,” she writes, “has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs.”

The panic surrounding the emergence of crack cocaine in the 1980s was, she suggests, a media-created phenomenon. Had the war on drugs really been about drugs, then “the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games.” That it did not, she says, reveals the truth about the drug war: “The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.”

There is some truth to Alexander’s interpretation. When crack first appeared, some of the reportage was overstated and overwrought. But there also was unprecedented violence associated with the street markets where crack was sold. In the new book, Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America, author David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, strongly disputes the claim that the “moral panic” sparked by crack was overblown. Some people, Kennedy writes, believe “it was never really that bad, that the public and political and law enforcement response was just a fevered overreaction.” The reality, he says, is that the crisis was even worse than most people realize.

Kennedy got a first-hand look at the crack market 25 years ago, at Nickerson Gardens, a 1,000-unit housing project in Los Angeles. “I’ve never been so scared before or since,” writes Kennedy of the day spent walking through the project with two police patrolmen. “My lizard hindbrain knew instantly that if they were somehow magicked away all that would ever be found of me would be my bleached bones.” (In fact, he later realized, the dealers had been scared of him; they saw a white guy in the projects in a suit and thought, “Fed.”) To Kennedy, what was unfolding in the Nickerson Gardens of America was like “the end of the world.”

Kennedy shares Alexander’s belief that, with or without the war on drugs, something has gone terribly wrong with the way America polices minority communities. “We are destroying the village in order to save it,” he writes. But where Alexander sees racism, Kennedy sees misunderstanding. The notion that crack was created by the government, a persistant belief among parts of the black community, is wrong, he says. The belief among cops that residents of America’s most dangerous communities are “uncaring, complicit, corrupt, destroyed” is also wrong.

What’s right, he believes, is an approach that he and a group of police, probation officers and others developed in Boston in the mid-1990s. Instead of targeting drugs or gangs, Boston targeted violence.

The shift in focus happened almost by accident. Kennedy and two other researchers wanted to work with the Boston Police Department to understand and disrupt youth access to guns. The department brass sent them to talk to the anti-gang unit. There they heard stories about an amazing approach in Dorchester called Operation Scrap Iron. It had started as a conventional collaboration between the Boston Police Department; the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The agencies targeted “straw” buyers who bought guns and then sold them to underage kids. But by the end of the operation, neighbor gang members were voluntarily dropping guns off at the anti-gang unit. Even more extraordinary, they were going to the police to report when other gangs were hoarding guns. What was happening?

Kennedy realized that the authorities — gang unit officers, probation officers and Boston’s so-called street workers (in effect, former gang members turned social workers) — already knew who the small subset of truly violent gang members were. Reducing gang violence wasn’t about ending poverty, shrinking the number of guns or some other huge social issue; it was about getting to this small group of bad actors. What the police had done during Operation Scrap Iron was to talk directly to this group. They’d told the most violent gang, the Wendover Street crew, that everyone would be all over them until the violence stopped. Then they made good on the threat, using every tool possible — probation checks, public drinking arrests, drug tests, curfew enforcement, area and association restrictions — until the violence stopped. By the end, the gang was so eager to return to the status quo that they were coming to police when other groups threatened them so that they wouldn’t get violent. Wendover Street had started policing itself.

It didn’t last. Still, Kennedy was intrigued. Gang members did not enjoy a reputation among academics as rational actors. Economists had long since established that crime doesn’t pay very well. (Contrary to the popular imagination, drug dealers selling cocaine earn sums equivalent to working elsewhere at the minimum wage.) People who committed crime, economists theorized, had poor self-control and short time horizons. But Scrap Iron suggested that when authorities delivered a clear warning that certain, specific activities were off limits — not “don’t be in a gang” or “don’t sell drugs” but rather “don’t use guns to kill people” — and followed up on the threat, gangs would listen and comply.

As an experiment, the group Kennedy was working with decided to try it with one of the city’s most violent gangs, the Vamp Hill Kings. Representatives from the police, probation agency, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office convened a forum with gang members (who were brought into a courthouse by street workers and probation officers) and explained in respectful tones the new rules of the game — no violence or else. To underscore the threat, the group pointed to the fate of Freddie Cardoza, a member of another gang, the Humboldt Raiders. Cardoza, whom Kennedy describes as “pretty much the city’s worst badass,” had ignored a similar message. Officers stopped him and found a single bullet in his pocket, a no-no for a convicted felon. Cardoza was sent to prison for 15 years. The room went quiet. Then Boston went quiet.

Boston’s crime decline made Kennedy a star. In the years that followed, Kennedy has used this same basic intervention in cities nationwide. But UCLA professor Mark Kleiman argues that the principles Kennedy has applied in the field have a broader application to the criminal justice system as a whole.

Economists who study crime often frame their discussions with a simple equation: The social cost of crime equals the cost of crime plus the cost of crime control. Framing it this way makes an important point. Arrests, prosecutions, incarceration — the things that many public-sector managers spend their time measuring — are actually costs. The benefit is crime reduction. Framing matters thusly encourages policymakers to consider questions such as the following: First, how much crime control is too much? Second, what if we could achieve the same level of control at a lower cost?

In his book, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, Kleiman makes a compelling case that the answer to the second question is that we can. Kennedy’s interventions illustrate the three ideas central to Kleiman’s proposed approach: concentration on the worst offenders, substitution of swift and certain punishment in place of severe punishment, and direct communication of deterrent threats. Central to Kleiman’s work is the insight that “swift and certain punishment, even if not severe, will control the vast bulk of offending behavior.”

Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) experiment offers a striking example of how this works. Started in 2004 by Judge Steven Alm, HOPE identifies probationers at high risk of reoffending — probation and parole violations account for about a third of prison admissions — and warns them that they will be subjected to frequent, randomized drug testing. Positive tests will result in an immediate but short return to jail, sometimes simply for the weekend. The results have been dramatic: HOPE probationers are 55 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime and 53 percent less likely to have their probation revoked than parolees in the control group.

What is particularly striking about HOPE is how few resources are needed to enforce compliance. In game theory terms, Hawaii has moved from a high-violation, high-punishment equilibrium to a low-violation, low-punishment equilibrium. In short, it tipped, just as it had in Boston and other cities where Kennedy-style intervention operations worked. Not surprisingly, the National Institute of Justice recently announced plans to replicate HOPE. Programs are getting under way in Clackamas County, Ore.; Essex County, Mass.; Saline County, Ark.; and Tarrant County, Texas.

Kleiman also emphasizes the importance of concentration. “Concentration,” he finds, “outperforms equal-opportunity sanctioning.” By identifying the worst offenders, warning them of the new zero-tolerance rules for certain activities and then enforcing the policy, authorities can “tip” violations downward. As violations within the targeted group fall, authorities can then extend the zero-tolerance policy to new groups of potential offenders.

Strategies that combine direct communication, concentration of resources, and swift and certain sanctions clearly work (though questions remain about exactly how they work). Kennedy and Kleiman make a convincing argument that not using these tools is itself a choice — and not a good one. A growing number of policymakers seem to agree. After his disappointing meeting with California Republicans, Madden recalls thinking, “I will know I have made it when I get invited to talk in California.” He got his invitation last October — to speak at an event with Gov. Jerry Brown.

The message he would deliver to any public official interested in following the Texas model is to figure out what your desired results are, measure how well you are getting there and require that the programs show their results toward that goal. “If you could take a rate of return to prison that was 30 percent for a certain type of criminal,” he says, “and reduce that to 20 percent — if you can put a program out there that can keep people from committing serious offenses — then you can have a huge impact.”

BY CHRISTOPHER ZOUKIS

Most of us know we will be released from prison. One day, sooner or later, we will be out on the street again. The question is: will that be a one-way trip? Will each of us leave the prison world never to return? To do that, we must know how to survive – no, not survive, succeed – when we re-enter society. Statistics are stacked against us. Most prisoners get out and, eventually, most of us find ourselves back in. There are many reasons for the high rate of recidivism (the return of ex-prisoners to incarceration), but studies consistently show that the primary cause is unemployment. On the outside you need a job to eat. To have a place to live. To support your family. To hold your head high and know you can handle freedom. But jobs are hard to come by when you carry a prison record with you. Still, we can’t use that as an excuse. With good skills and education – solid vocational training at the very least or, even better, an advanced degree – released prisoners can overcome a prison record. In fact – and this is the good news – 75% of college-educated ex-convicts are able to surmount the stigma of their criminal record to find stable employment.¹

Getting Out and Staying Out

Once released back into society, education is, beyond a doubt, your ticket to a second chance at life, your best hope for never seeing prison walls again. Nothing else has proven to be as effective. And, not surprisingly, the higher your level of education, the greater your ability to secure steady employment. In other words, prisoner-students who complete a college education or get an advanced degree qualify for the best jobs, the higher salaries, and a good standard of living. Workers with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 93% more than workers with only a high-school diploma.²

Many who live within prison walls come from broken families and inadequate schools; they’ve known racial discrimination and physical or sexual abuse.³ For some, that kind of life is all they’ve known, and they can’t imagine striving for anything different. For them, the first positive experience they encounter might ironically be during incarceration, when they participate in a correctional educational class.

Whether the course is vocational, basic literacy, high-school equivalency, peer-to-peer sessions, or college-level, learning introduces prisoners to the idea that they can succeed through hard work. For people on the “outside,” that may be self-evident. But for many within prison walls, it is a brand-new concept.

Working at class assignments gives prisoners a purpose in life, a focus, and the deep satisfaction of seeing hard work lead to positive results. More than half the incarcerated population has minor children with whom they maintain regular contact, either by telephone, mail, or visits.⁴ Their commitment to working hard on studies serves as a role model for their children who, in turn, may become motivated to pursue an educational track. So to be successful when released, to function and survive in today’s economy, there is only one way: education. To live a rewarding life, with a job that provides satisfaction, as well as a salary, there is only one way: education. To protect and raise a family and serve as a positive role model, there is only one way: education.

Inner Freedom

It is powerfully liberating to develop the ability to reason logically and analytically. Senses numbed in prison awaken and release creativity that is both therapeutic and rehabilitative.⁵ Given the reality of daily brutality that strips one of control and connectedness, writing and education bring to the prisoner a most basic freedom: that of self-expression. Men and women writing from prison have demonstrated astonishing potential that can develop into real talent within a structured learning environment.⁶ They discover that writing is a great tool for preserving one’s sanity, for healing, and for giving voice to those who are silenced. It creates autonomy in a world where none exists.

Transcending imprisonment with fresh discovery is freedom, an inner freedom that even prison can never take away.⁷ The body may be trapped, but the mind is liberated, opened to new visions and new worlds. A prisoner who studies defies a stultifying daily existence and escapes the boredom, the monotony, the do-nothing that turns a brain into silly putty. The best escape route, second to none, is: education.

Education is not just acquiring practical knowledge or new skills, facts, and concepts; it’s about learning to think. Learning to express oneself clearly and in a healthy manner. It is a path to developing stable personal and business relationships, to acquiring new values, constructing a new life, and staying out of prison forever. It’s about the transformation of a person. And this is what it takes for an individual to “make it” when released into the world.⁸

New Tricks for Old Dogs?

Too late, too old, you say? Education is not realistic for the aging prisoner? Nonsense. Your life isn’t over until it’s over. In reality, very few older prisoners are motivated to pursue a college education. Too many of them think, “What’s the point?” An example is my own cell mate, a man in his early 60s who will be released when he is 71. I have actually offered to pay his tuition if he would enroll in college. It was both surprising and disappointing when he declined the offer. He had lost his ability to envision or care about any kind of a future.

It is understandable, but how sad! At any age – even if you have a life sentence with no hope of release – education is a way to make something meaningful of the years you have left.

Ask yourself, “How much time have I wasted in my life because of poor decisions?” I say to you, do something positive now, so you don’t waste a single minute more! Take the plunge!

As prisoners, we do have some advantages over students on the outside. Time, for example. You’ve got time on your hands, plenty of it. Make it work for you! Use it to read, to learn. It needn’t be a burden: it should be an exciting adventure.

Studies indicate that adult learners perform as well as, or even better than, traditional-age students. They are often more focused, more purposeful, and more motivated. So there is no reason for prisoners to fall back on advancing age as an excuse. Don’t look for reasons why you cannot; rather, look for ways that you can.

“But four years from now, I’ll be X years old!” you might protest. Yes. Well, guess what: four years from now, whether you get a degree or not, you will still be X years old.

For “Lifers,” What’s the Point?

What about prisoners who have no hope of ever being released? Is there any point to putting themselves through the grueling hard work? People incarcerated permanently, or for a very long time, also desire meaningful participation. They, too, welcome an intellectual and academic challenge to combat the deadening effect of prison. “But to think they are developing resumes or preparing for a successful career is delusional.”⁹ So why pursue it?

Some would do it to build a sense of self-worth or to escape the stress and tension of a violent environment. But there is another reason, more profound and more compelling than any other: Education is a means to making restitution.

Prisoners who have ever wondered how they can make amends, how they can ever contribute to society and make their lives count for something, discover that education is a way to do it – even within prison walls. Those with lifelong sentences who educate themselves can later educate others. They can teach fellow prisoners who are thirsty to learn, who are looking for a way out of the cycle of crime, who hunger for the adventure of new discoveries. They can be for their fellow prisoners a stepping stone to a productive life, they can inspire them with enthusiasm for living, even while confined.

Most prisoners who anticipate release cannot afford traditional courses. Imagine if a lot of older, long-term or life-term prisoners pursued a quality education, built their knowledge base, and developed communication skills: why, they could start a school for teaching their fellow prisoners, the ones who will be released and return to the outside world. When they experience the kind of transformation and motivation that turns lives around, they’ll make positive changes in their own lives, their children’s lives, and the lives of others in the communities to which they will return.

Educated “lifers” can teach the others. Tutor them. Help them pass exams. They can become part of the process to transform fellow prisoners and, when those prisoners leave the prison world, to transform the society they will rejoin.

Pursuing an education and, in turn, educating others is one very meaningful way to make a contribution.

A Tough Road to Travel — Not for Cowards

Without question, as a prisoner, the single smartest thing you can do for yourself and for your life, is to get an education. A degree. That’s the ticket to … wherever you want to go!

What’s not so easy is making it happen. We mustn’t kid ourselves: this is not an escape route for cowards. It is fraught with obstacles, frustrations, and defeats. In your situation, this could be the single hardest thing you will ever have to do in your life. And for your life. Are you up to it?

Prison is a tough place: degrading, painful, and caustic.¹⁰ Cages restrain people in a mean-spirited system staffed with workers who are not always held accountable. It is neither designed for reform nor for rehabilitation.

Pursuing a post-secondary education in prison is no easy task; there are obstacles in every direction. But obstacles do not mean defeat. All is possible. Nevertheless, it will help to be aware of the difficulties so you can prepare – not just financially or logistically, but also psychologically and emotionally. Here are some of the barriers you will probably encounter when you set your sight on education.

Lack of Vision: Looking at the big picture, a most pervasive barrier to post-secondary education for incarcerated students is the lack of vision and support from policymakers and the voting public.¹¹ This is what prevents the necessary state and federal funding. And whenever budget cuts become necessary, educational programs are the first to go. Why? Because there is no support from the general public, because prison administrators see them as non-essential, and because other services, like medical care and sanitation are legally required and, therefore, get priority.¹²

Limited funding means limited space, resources, class materials, equipment for vocational programs, and technology. Trained instructors are rare.

With very few exceptions, prisons do not offer courses beyond literacy and basic – very basic! – life skills. So prisoners interested in advanced education have to pay for it on their own (except for the free Bible courses), they must study on their own and take the tests on their own. It is something the incarcerated have to do for themselves; no one will help.

Without awareness on the part of the public and support from legislators, higher education for prisoners may prove to be impossible. Lack of Literacy and Basic Skills: As compared to the general population, prisoners are an under-educated class coming from a culture of poverty, with few skills for handling everyday tasks, and little or no experience in a trade or career.¹³ As a result, prison educators find it is no easy task teaching incarcerated adults who carry a skewed, troublesome experience of life and the world and have less than a fifth-grade proficiency in reading and math.¹⁴ Many require significant remedial help before they can attend more advanced educational classes.¹⁵  Addictions and Maladies: In the incarcerated population, there is a prevalence of learning disabilities, emotional and behavioral disorders, and mental illness, often undiagnosed and untreated. One instructor observed that half the prison population where she taught was medicated. Even prisoners who really wanted to learn could not absorb the information because of the effect of the medication on their thinking. Occasionally, students from mental units came into classrooms creating such disruptions they had to be escorted out.¹⁶ Drug addiction and alcoholism are statistically significant. In the hope of changing destructive behaviors, instructors who try to infuse new knowledge into their students’ harsh realities, sometimes where it is not wanted, must be highly dedicated.¹⁷

All that said, however, we must not forget that the prison population also contains individuals who are ready and able to succeed at college, and whose life trajectories will be substantially improved by higher education. There are sufficient numbers of prisoners like these, good candidates for college-level studies, to make a real difference. To educate them will make a considerable impact on the rates of recidivism and on our entire society.

Limited Access to Schools: Prisoners obviously cannot leave the facility to attend classes, so instructors must go into the prisons to reach them. The best proven way to offer advanced college-level programs in prisons is to partner with local colleges and universities who are willing to send in teachers.¹⁸ However, most prisons are located in isolated areas, so getting qualified teachers to the prison for on-site instruction can be difficult.

Without on-site instruction, the only other option is distance-learning by correspondence, since computerized distance-learning technology is not possible in prisons, because prisoners are barred from access to the Internet.

Restrictions on Teachers: The ABE (Adult Basic Education) and GED (High-School equivalency) courses are usually taught by prison employees, or by prisoners themselves; therefore, credit from some of these courses may not be accepted at all educational institutions or by many employers.¹⁹ Qualified educators are rare to non-existent, because even if they were willing to teach on-site, behind bars, the requirements of prison security impose unique constraints upon them. Prison facilities are, first and foremost, institutions of control and security, not classrooms or schools”.²⁰ Instructors and volunteers cannot enter or leave easily and clearance is difficult to obtain. Once inside, professors go through extensive security procedures before reaching the classroom, and again on the way out.

In addition to commuting long distances and submitting to security procedures, teachers have to develop a special set of courses and assignments to accommodate the prison environment in which their prisoner-students live.

Teachers must accept frequent interruptions to students’ participation in classes, and students being absent for reasons beyond their control. And there is no flexibility for instructors to run even a few minutes over class time when necessary.

Several times a month – sometimes several times in a week –the prison initiates a “lock-down” when all prisoners have to leave the classroom and return immediately to their cells. Numerous other barriers lock prisoners out of classes, too, including disciplinary actions, an upcoming parole hearing, or visits from an attorney. And many prisoner-students who must earn money for essential items like shampoo or toothpaste have to drop out of courses that interfere with work assignments.²¹

Instructors need special training and orientation, as well as a lot of dedication and perseverance to teach in a prison environment where security, not learning, is the priority. Many feel it is not worth it.

Until …

Until they see how many prisoners are hungry, starved for education. Until instructors realize they may be the last link between the prisoner-student and rehabilitation, and that they can really turn a life around. The idea that there might be an opportunity to be educated “may be the first glimmer of hope that [a prisoner] can escape the cycles of poverty and violence that have dominated their lives.”²² Therefore, prisoner-students often see their teachers as knights in shining armor, as the only people who have not given up on them, who believe in them and in their abilities. “They don’t ever want to leave the classroom,” one teacher said.²³

Prison educators approach the prisoner-students with an attitude that is very different from that of prison guards. They teach with the concept of behavior by expectation, as opposed to behavior by coercive rule. Coercion produces obedience, not cooperation, and not a desire to change. Educators, conversely, inspire thinking; they help prisoner-students discover for themselves the kind of behavior that leads to positive results. Prison educators are mindful that these students will return to society one day, and they need help to develop a sense of responsibility. While behind bars, prisoners care only for themselves. Once released, they will also have to care for family members they have left behind. In the classroom, they often develop something that goes beyond a desire to “stay out of trouble;” they develop a more conscientious approach to life.

Lack of Support for Prisoners: If the prison environment imposes hardships on instructors, it does so equally or more for the prisoner-student who desires to learn. This is not an environment that encourages academic achievement. Prisons are extremely loud throughout the day and night, with prisoners yelling, guards shouting, public address systems interrupting routinely, security gates buzzing, and televisions blaring constantly. There is no quiet time when students can concentrate on their work and, working in small cells shared by roommates, hardly any physical space to store books and other personal property.²⁴

In prison there are no academic libraries, and no access to tutoring or updated, relevant materials. Even simple supplies such as dictionaries, notebooks, pens, pencils, highlighters or sticky notes can be hard to come by.²⁵ You may not have access to bookseller catalogs with book descriptions. If your course requires certain books, and if you are required to submit a synopsis of books to obtain purchase approval, this creates a “catch-22,” because without a catalog you can’t write a synopsis and, therefore, you can’t get the book.

There are restrictions on the number of books prisoners can keep in their cells and on the type of materials used for instruction. Nothing with a metal binding is allowed. Even spiral notebooks, used by students universally, are barred because the metal binding can be undone for use as a weapon. And chemistry lab courses are banned because they involve substances that can be used to manufacture drugs.²⁶

As you well know, prisoners have no internet access. Therefore, none of the 2,500 on-line schools are available to the incarcerated; they don’t exist for you. And each year, there are fewer and fewer schools that offer courses by mail; each year more of them go on line.

Mail is rigorously screened. Receiving books and texts can take weeks – if they are delivered at all. In my personal experience, course materials have been rejected because the mail room misplaced a form. When a package is rejected, the recipient prisoner should theoretically be notified, but usually the recipient is not, so (s)he can be left to wonder why the books have not arrived after two months. Filing grievances against the mail room for these rejections, which I do, seems to be an exercise in futility. The mailroom can withhold all or parts of packages and correspondence, even pre-paid correspondence courses and materials; they can limit envelope enclosures, prohibit receiving stamps, and continue to increase restrictions that further isolate you from the outside world.²⁷

Another inconvenience is that prisoners have no access to their instructors. There are, of course, no “office hours” and no way to call or e-mail professors with questions.

Prisoners deal with a reality of which people on the “outside” may be unaware: within the prison, there are times when violence causes one to drop everything else and focus entirely upon survival, times when one’s personal safety is at stake.

But probably the most difficult aspect of trying to get an education is that prisoners are frequently and involuntarily transferred to other prison facilities with only days or hours notice.²⁸ Transfers disrupt any educational program, whether vocational training or at the college level. For prisoners sent to institutions with no similar educational programming, it is an abrupt end to earning credit for what they’ve learned, and for completing their degree or certificate program. Frequently transfers occur regardless of how close the prisoner is to finishing the course or program. They can happen just before the point of completion. Up in smoke goes your passport to survival on the outside.²⁹

The Warden Rules: Prison officials, prison educators, and higher education administrators often work for different agencies which may have conflicting priorities (security vs. education, for example). Conflicting priorities work against developing policies to promote post-secondary prison education.³⁰ At the end of the day, therefore, it comes down to the warden’s authority over any individual facility. Unfortunately, wardens and prison administrators do not always encourage prisoners engaged in higher education because of the extra paperwork and processing it imposes upon them. Even guards have vast discretionary powers, and the prison environment often brings out the hostile, aggressive, and abusive sides of their character. One prisoner described educational events being cancelled on a moment’s notice for ‘security reasons.’ He had seen guards flex their muscle and return men to their cells with no provocation, just to undermine the educational process. He said prisoners were treated with disrespect and left with little or no avenue of defense.³¹

When an individual becomes educated, (s)he becomes a critical thinker and is likely to dissent. It’s what we (normally) want students to do. But dissent in prison – even perceived dissent –any challenge to the status quo or to authority can be interpreted as a threat, and you can be silenced in harsh ways. So prisoner-students walk a delicate political line. Materials they have requested (and have paid for) can be refused. Peter Collins tells of one prisoner-student who had sent away for information on Black Panthers and the Native American movement. He was not able to receive it.³² And if the writings of prisoner-students displease prison officials, it is not unusual for them to experience retribution by having parole denied, losing good-time credit, physical threats, cell searches, long-time confinement in ‘the hole,’ exclusion from all courses and extra-curricular programs,³³ or disciplinary transfers to other prisons.³⁴ They might confiscate books, files, supplies, typewriters, correspondence and manuscripts with excuses as flimsy as calling them “a fire hazard.”³⁵

It happened to me. My school materials and research work were reported as “causing a fire hazard” because there was too much paper in my cell. The guards dumped all my neatly filed and organized paperwork out of my locker onto the floor. They opened and emptied every envelop and file and confiscated my highlighters, paper clips, and book light. Afterward, they denied confiscating anything.

Educational programs could go a long way if the Department of Corrections worked together with the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges to administer for-credit vocational certificate programs, or for-credit transferrable college-level courses from accredited schools. In the two states with the largest post-secondary prison education programs, Texas and North Carolina, there is a statewide culture of commitment to prison education and clearly defined policies that apply to all their prison facilities, policies that not only enable, but require them to offer higher education to prisoners. These states have initiated cooperative contracts between the DOC and the Community Colleges. They have proven it can work!³⁶

Sadly, this is not always the case.

In almost all other prisons, it comes down to what the warden wants. If the warden does not believe in using public funds to offer post-secondary educational programs, there will be none spent – even if money is available. If a facility is currently offering post-secondary prison education and a new warden comes in, those programs may be shut down. The warden makes the rules regarding the possession of textbooks, correspondence through the mail room, the use of the prison library, and other critical restrictions.

Each individual prison warden has the authority to allow or to not allow higher education programs and to negotiate with local colleges or universities to provide instruction. Some wardens don’t believe in the benefits of educational programs. Others are short-staffed and do not welcome the additional burden.

When dealing with the prison education staff and guards in various prisons where I served time, what I have personally observed is lethargy. They appear completely uninterested in seeing prisoners educated. They seem focused instead on when their shift ends and how to get by doing as little as possible until that time. If anyone thinks this is an exaggeration, it is well documented by those who study the prison environment. Prison staff interviewed by the Institute for Higher Education Policy expressed resentment that prisoners were offered educational opportunities which they, themselves, did not have.³⁷

An uncooperative prison staff can obstruct post-secondary education programs in many ways. They might not, for example, release a prisoner from his or her cell to attend class. They might confiscate a prisoner’s texts. They can do many things to thwart the efforts of prisoners who are capable of, and eager to, learn.³⁸ Understandably, action like this on the part of prison staff creates real antagonism and frustration.

Prisoners seeking an advanced education must rely on cooperation from their facility’s Education Department. At FCI Petersburg, where I am incarcerated, the Education Department houses a library comprising a few law books and many low-quality novels (romance and thriller types – not real literature). It has typewriters, TVs with DVD players, and classrooms for the GED courses. The primary purpose of the Education Department is to administer the GED courses. There is no listing of schools that offer correspondence courses accessible to prisoners. This information is not available in prison libraries or from prison Education Departments. Determined incarcerated students have to rely on themselves to identify and locate these schools, write to them for information, enroll in their courses, and pursue the programs. When they do find the right courses and enroll, they have to concentrate amidst all the distracting activities, do the assignments, and put in the time. No one else cares if they do; they have to discipline and motivate themselves.

Courses are Costly: Perhaps the hardest obstacle to overcome for a prisoner-student is the cost of education. Distance-learning programs are expensive and, once enrolled, there are additional hidden costs. Unless you are personally wealthy (and how many prisoners are?), money is hard to come by, especially since Pell Grants and most student loans are no longer available.

Correctional educators observe that prisoners are generally enthusiastic about the idea of getting a college education.³⁹ Even those who are not prepared academically have shown a willingness to complete the necessary remedial work, motivated by the possibility of gaining access to post-secondary education.⁴⁰ They are eager to be occupied and engaged in educational efforts that lift them out of an otherwise idle, bored, and frustrated existence. Sadly, what little funding remains for educational programs is spent on Adult Basic Education (literacy, anger management, etc.) and GED (high-school equivalency) classes – the bare basics. Vocational training is very limited and academics are rare. “Inmates are not earning college degrees, not even Associate degrees, in any significant numbers. In 2003-2004, there were less than 5% of the total prison population nationwide enrolled in post-secondary educational classes.”⁴¹ For female prisoners, opportunities for education beyond a high-school diploma or GED are fewer still. Only 20% of prisons housing women offer any kind of college-level educational programming.⁴²

According to Stephen Steurer, Executive Director of the Correctional Education Association, prison budgets have skyrocketed because our prison population is expanding exponentially; however, funds allocated for prison education have drastically decreased.⁴³ It makes no sense, but there it is: Decreased! Gail Oliver, retired Deputy Corrections Secretary for Prisoner Re-Entry, said, “Education is the number-one way of preventing people from going back to prison.”⁴⁴ But despite all the research and documentation that proves it is true, funding for in-prison education is almost completely wiped out.

Walls of a University

Prison doesn’t have to be a hell hole. It can be your own university. It can be an exciting career training center. A seminary. It can improve your life, now and for years to come.

No doubt about it: as a prisoner-student you have got it tough. Hopefully, it is helpful to remember you are not alone. Thousands of your fellow convicts are going through the same thing. Prison is not a picnic, but keep working at it. Sometimes success is achieved “in spite of,” rather than because of the system. There is nothing sadder to see than people passing days, weeks, months, and years in a passive, do-nothing state that rots the mind and spirit, wasting in limbo, eyes glazed and dulled by perpetual TV watching.

At the very least, whether you enroll in a formal college course or not, remember: you have time on your hands. Use it to educate yourself. Use it to read. Reading is your best preparation for beginning higher education. Good literature and serious books provide a mind-expanding experience that can literally transport you into another life.

Get a more educated view of what is going on in the prison world with journals like the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. Read newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, or news magazines like Newsweek and Time for a better understanding of the world you will one day belong to again. Learn about issues people and politicians are dealing with, issues that may affect your future life.

Write to your local public library and ask if they will get permission from prison authorities to donate good books to your library. Ask your friends and family to send good nonfiction and literary fiction books to you. They can get them at Amazon.com, a great resource for deep discounts on books. Borrow good books from other prisoners who read a lot. If you know fellow convicts who are taking college courses, read their old textbooks to get a leg up on plans to enroll in school. And thumb through your prison library. The library, unfortunately, may be stocked with trashy fiction, not literature, not books worthy of your effort. But there could be a gem or two in there.

Imprisoned Intellectuals

Here is something you may not be aware of: Some of the world’s finest and most enduring literature was written by brilliant, incarcerated people. From within prison walls came the work of writers like Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote); Fyodor Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov); Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo); Antonio Gramsci (founder of the Italian Communist Party whose writings focus on politics, ideology, and culture); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago); and Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace).

Others who were incarcerated and made a powerful impact upon society and the political or social order were Mahatma Gandhi, William Reich, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King.⁴⁵ There is much one can do to contribute, even behind bars. Imprisonment is not an excuse.

Despite the nearly complete shutdown of higher education classes in prisons across the country since 1994, when the Pell Grants were denied to incarcerated students, persistent prisoners are taking independent study courses and many have done so with surprising success!

A Sound Investment

People are incarcerated 1) to protect society 2) to punish the offender, and 3) to rehabilitate the prisoner.”⁴⁶ Our prison systems manage the first fairly well and the second very well. It seems that the third, rehabilitation, has been largely ignored.

Today’s prisons are about incarceration, not rehabilitation. They are human warehouses. The focus is on protecting the public by locking offenders away and keeping them inside as long as possible, as well as on the security of the prison facility. Prison is prison. It is not a school. It is not even a vocational school.

Of course, it is critical that we protect our citizens; we have no argument there. But we would protect them so much better if we could rehabilitate prisoners so that when they return to society – and most all of them do – they are no longer a threat.

Key to successful rehabilitation will be partnerships between prison systems, the academic world, business and industry, and political leadership.

The evidence is there, and it is well documented. Prison administrators, lawmakers, and the general public need to understand that a sound investment in education will reduce our national deficit, improve prisoner behavior and security inside prison facilities, and contribute to a much safer, more prosperous society outside the prison walls.

ENDNOTES:

1)       W. Erisman and J. B. Contardo, “Learning To Reduce Recidivism: A 50-State Analysis of Postsecondary Correctional Education Policy,” The Institute for Higher Education Policy (2005)

2)       ibid.

3)       ibid.

4)       ibid.

5)       J. Piché, “Barriers to Knowing Inside: Education in Prisons and Education on Prisons,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Vol 17, No 1 (2008) p.10

6)       S. Nagelsen, “Writing as a Tool for Constructive Rehabilitation,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Vol 17, No 1 (2008) p. 107

7)       Jon Marc Taylor, “Piecing Together a College Education Behind Bars,” Prison Mirror, v115 n10-13 (May-Aug 2002)

8)       Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

9)       G. Banks, “Learning Under Lockdown,” ColorLines from the Applied Research Center (Spring 2003)

10)    Peter Collins, “Education in Prison or the Applied Art of ‘Correctional’ Deconstructive Learning,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Vol 17, No 1 (2008)

11)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

12)    Brazzell, Crayton, Lindahl, Mukamal, and Solomon, “From the Classroom to the Community: Exploring the role of Education during Incarceration and Re-entry,” The Urban Institute, Justice Policy Center, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (2009)

13)    Gerald G. Gaes, “The Impact of Prison Education Programs on Post-Release Outcomes,” Reentry Roundtable on Education (2008)

14)    Brazzell, Crayton, op. cit.

15)   15 In New Mexico, the corrections department reported that 10% scored at or below the third-grade level, 32% tested at or below sixth-grade levels in reading and math, only 50% had a high-school diploma, and fewer than 20 prisoners (.003%) had some college-level education [Gerald G. Gaes, "The Impact of Prison Education Programs on Post-Release Outcomes," Reentry Roundtable on Education (2008)].

16)   16 D.N. Williams, “Correctional Education and the Community College,” ERIC Digest (1989)

17)    S. Soferr, “Prison Education: Is it Worth It?” Corrections Today (Oct 2006)

18)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

19)    ibid.

20)    Brazzell, Crayton, op. cit.

21)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

22)    ibid.

23)    Banks, op. cit.

24)    Johanna E. Foster, Ph.D., “Bringing College Back to Prison: The State of Higher Education Programs for Incarcerated Women in the U.S.,” 8th International Women’s Policy Research Conference (June 2005)

25)    ibid.

26)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

27)    S. Ferranti, “Fighting Prison Censorship: An Interview with Paul Wright,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Vol 17, No 1 (2008)

28)    K. Mentor, JD, PhD, “College Courses in Prison,” draft of submission to the Encyclopedia of Corrections, M. Bosworth, Ed.

29)    One prison system is working to correct the problem in Virginia where they will hold prisoners enrolled in education classes until they complete their coursework. When considering these transfers, the Virginia DOC works closely with the Superintendent of the Department of Correctional Education to determine the best solution. Virginia’s Department of Correctional Education also works closely with contracting community colleges to ensure prisoners complete their coursework. Occasionally, however, other factors (e.g., drug treatment) “trump” this agreement. North Carolina’s Department of Corrections also tries to ensure that post-secondary prison education programs are offered only at prisons where prisoners would be able to finish them. It does not yet work perfectly, but it is a laudable attempt to address a critical issue [Jeanne Contardo and Michelle Tolbert, "Prison Postsecondary Education:Bridging Learning from Incarceration to the Community" a monograph presented at the Reentry Roundtable on Education convened by The Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in cooperation with The Urban Institute (Spring 2008), pp 9-10].

30)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

31)    Piché, op. cit.

32)    Collins, op. cit.

33)    Banks, op. cit.

34)    Piché, op. cit.

35)    ibid.

36)    Most of the instruction provided for the few post-secondary correctional education programs that do exist comes from public two-year community colleges that voluntarily donate their faculty and services. Rarely do private (for-profit) institutions offer college courses within prison walls.

37)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

38)    ”In 2003, a local chapter of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association undertook an active campaign to end state-funded post-secondary programs at two state prisons and was, in fact, able to persuade the warden at one facility to suspend the program” [Erisman and Contardo, op.cit.].

39)    Erisman and Contardo, op. cit.

40)    ibid.

41)    ibid.

42)    Foster, op. cit.

43)    Drs. Stephen J. Steurer, Linda Smith, and Alice Tracy, “OCE/CEA Three State Recidivism Study,” Submitted to the Office of Correctional Education United States Department of Education (September 30, 2001)

44)    Trip Jennings, “Quarter of State Prison Education Jobs are Vacant,” The New Mexico Independent (September 2009)

45)    Jeffrey Ian Ross & Stephen C. Richards, Beyond Bars (2009), pp. 91-107

46)    Williams, op. cit.

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

by Adam Gopnik January 30, 2012

Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. Photograph by Steve Liss.

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed toprotect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.

Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

Friend, do it this way:
that is, whatever you do in life,
do the very best you can
with both your heart and mind.
And if you do it that way,
the Power of the Universe
will come to your assistance,
if your heart and mind are in Unity.

When one sits in the Hoop of the People,
one must be responsible,
because all of Creation is related,
and the hurt of one is the hurt of all,
and the honor of one is the honor of all,
and whatever we do
affects everything in the Universe.

If you do it that way,
that is, if you truly join
your heart and mind as One,
whatever you ask for,
that’s the Way It’s Going to Be.