Many lament the number of Americans in prison. “Our nation holds the shameful distinction of being the world’s largest jailer,” said Senator Cory Booker in a representative statement last year. America may not truly lead the world in incarceration—El Salvador now beats us on a per-capita basis, and autocratic states like China and Russia are probably lying about the true size of their prison populations. But we certainly incarcerate a great number: 1.2 million as of 2022, yielding a higher rate than those in any peer countries. Estimates suggest that about one in 20 Americans will go to prison in his or her lifetime, including one in 11 men. The projected rate among black men is one in six.
That these incarceration levels are shameful even appears to be a consensus. Despite a backlash against progressive prosecutors and defunding the police, two-thirds of likely voters still believe that it’s important to reduce the incarcerated population, including a majority of Republicans. In response to political and fiscal pressures, and with crime rates well below their 1990s peak, jails and prisons are shuttering. One estimate found that 21 states closed prisons between 2000 and 2022.
This shift in both policy and opinion represents perhaps the greatest success of the “criminal-justice reform” movement, which maintains that incarceration is expensive, inhumane, and either doesn’t reduce crime or actively causes more of it. So successful have these arguments been that contemporary debate around prison policy today often centers on whether the nation should put anyone behind bars—and, if so, at what diminished margin. Should we cut prison populations by half, or only by a quarter?
These arguments are a textbook example of what Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam and I have called “starve-the-beast progressivism”—in which progressives identify problems in the criminal-justice system and then argue that they should be fixed not by improving the system but by dismantling it. This dynamic facilitates bipartisan alignment on criminal-justice reform. The Left likes cutting the criminal-justice system; the Right just likes cutting government.
If the U.S. really could eliminate prisons, such downsizing would be merited. Unfortunately, the decarceration case is built on sand. Prison does work. It’s one of the few effective strategies that governments have for fighting crime. And many of prison’s alleged harms—to health, to employability, to families—may be statistical illusions, predictable consequences of the aberrant behavior of those who get sent to prison in the first place.
We’ve been having the wrong conversation about prisons. Rather than thinking about how to shut down facilities, we should be thinking about how to build new and improved ones. Meantime, policymakers could enhance the quality of existing prisons through interventions that would not only better the lives of prisoners and correctional staff but also reduce recidivism.
At the core of the debate over prison is the argument that the U.S. incarcerates too many people, and unnecessarily. Advocates of decarceration often claim that prison doesn’t reduce crime, or even that it increases offending. The pro-decarceration Vera Institute, for example, claims that “incarceration can actually increase the likelihood of future crimes by traumatizing people before releasing them back into their communities.”
How should one evaluate such arguments? At a theoretical level, prison affects crime through two channels. First, it physically restrains people from offending, at least in ordinary society (“incapacitation”). Second, it may discourage recidivism—say, by scaring detainees (“deterrence”). Various strategies exist to measure the effects of prison on recidivism via both channels.
One popular approach is to exploit the random assignment of judges in criminal cases, recognizing that some judges are intrinsically more likely to incarcerate offenders than others. Random assignment to a harsher judge is then used as an “instrumental variable” to assess the effects of incarceration, because the random element lets the analyst control for the other ways prisoners differ.
These kinds of studies occasionally find that prison increases recidivism risk. A 2022 review identifies two examples: one comparing incarceration to electronic monitoring in New South Wales; and the other a widely cited working paper that argues that incarceration in Houston’s prisons reduces employment and increases crime. But these findings are in the minority. Other studies have looked at drug offenders in Washington, D.C., and felonies in Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Across different measures of re-offense, and following offenders both from sentencing and from release, each of these studies finds that, on average, incarceration has no effect on recidivism risk. That is, offenders who go to prison are no less likely to re-offend than are statistically similar offenders who don’t get locked up.
Other research exploits sentencing guidelines, comparing otherwise similar offenders who receive different sentences due to being just above or below some guideline threshold. One such study followed offenders from sentencing in North Carolina, while another tracked release in the federal system. Both find that time in prison lowers recidivism in the years following release. This implies at least some deterrent effect for an added year of incarceration, though both studies offer caveats.
All this may feel underwhelming. Studies find that sending people to prison has little effect on their recidivism risk and that sentence length only somewhat reduces recidivism. Does that prove that prison doesn’t work? Not quite. All these studies follow their subjects either from release or from sentencing—either looking only at post-release or mixing incarcerated time with post-release time. In other words, they look only at deterrence, or at incapacitation and deterrence together. None isolates the effects of incapacitation itself: How many crimes get prevented during the time someone is behind bars?
A number of studies speak to this effect, and their result is clear: a prison stay reduces crime. These studies exploit sudden changes in the intensity of incapacitation. For example, a 2009 analysis took advantage of a change in Maryland law that cut the sentences of young adults by about seven months. It found that, during the period when they otherwise would have been incarcerated, offenders were arrested for 2.8 criminal acts and involved in 1.5 serious crimes, on average. Two studies examined the effects of nine mass pardons in Italy between 1962 and 2006. One, assessing the most recent pardon, estimates that incapacitation prevents 14 to 18 crimes per year served. The other finds that a 10 percent reduction in the prison population boosted crime by 1.5 to 2.2 percent. An analysis of releases in Uruguay estimates that one out of four releasees commits a crime—mostly property crime—on the day of his release.
So even if a prison stay does not deter someone from committing crimes once he gets out, it generally keeps him from committing crimes while he’s in lockup. In short, it incapacitates him. And if prison doesn’t cause a rise in recidivism—which most of the evidence says that it does not—then incapacitation reduces crime in absolute terms.
This may seem obvious to non-criminologists, but it’s a powerful insight. Incapacitation has the benefit of being a crime-reduction strategy that can be scaled: the amount of incapacitation that a state can do is constrained only by the number of prison beds and staff man-hours it can pay for. And a scalable crime-reduction strategy, as we shall see, is an all-too-rare tool.
Sure, a decarceration supporter might argue, putting someone in a cage might cut crime. But aren’t there better, more humane, ways to control criminal offending? Vera Institute president Nicholas Turner, for example, has called for replacing incarceration as crime control with strategies like “community violence intervention programs . . . as well as investing in schools, health care, and the other services, resources, and supports that communities need to thrive.” Such strategies are meant to cut at the root causes of crime, while avoiding the alleged harms of prison.
Regular readers of City Journal will probably know to be skeptical of “root causes” arguments. Precisely because they are so fundamental, root causes are hard to fix. (See “Contra ‘Root Causes,’ ” Summer 2021.) Further, “alternative” strategies for reducing crime without incarcerating don’t offer the same reliable, scalable efficacy as prison.
Some of the most popular of these alternative strategies work—but unreliably, particularly among persistent offenders. For example, research consistently finds that interventions meant to alleviate economic privation reduce property crime but have no effect on violent crime. Trying to target serious offenders with services does not always work, either. One recent evaluation of a program that provided services to gang members in Boston—the first such study that reported effects at the individual, rather than geographic, level—found that it yielded “no detectable effect on violence among the gangs that it served,” relative to control gangs. Non-pecuniary interventions, too, are hit or miss. As my Manhattan Institute colleagues Robert VerBruggen and Carolyn Gorman show in a forthcoming review, cognitive behavioral therapy—often touted as a silver bullet for curbing violent offending—has limited efficacy, particularly among more serious criminals. “Community violence interrupters,” touted by Vera, have a similarly spotty track record, with many evaluations yielding no effects (never mind the tendency of ex–gang member violence interrupters to get arrested for new criminal activity).
It’s not that service provision, cognitive behavioral therapy, or community violence intervention can’t reduce criminal offending—they can. It’s just that they don’t work every time. This is largely because they are complicated to implement—getting the right mix of services and interventions relies on knowledge about both the strategy and the offender that service providers often lack. Putting people behind bars, by contrast, is easy, and it necessarily stops someone from committing crimes.
Other non-carceral interventions do seem reliably effective, in part because they have simple causal models behind them. A good example might be street lighting, which has been shown to reduce crime at night. Street lighting does not change offenders’ situations or worldviews. It just makes it easier to see them, and so acts as a deterrent. At the same time, streetlights aren’t scalable: you can only put them up once. Prison, by contrast, is scalable. It can grow with demand for incapacitation, constrained only by resource limitations.
Yes, policymakers can and should adopt non-carceral approaches to fighting crime—if they actually work. But such approaches can never be the front line for crime control, for the basic reason that they do not work consistently and cannot scale with rises in crime. Prison does work.
Fine, say our imaginary decarcerationists: prison reduces crime. But it also inflicts other harms, doesn’t it? The pro-decarceration Brennan Center for Justice, for example, claims that “incarceration degrades people’s humanity, disrupts their social networks, and causes lifelong social and financial disadvantage through restricted access to education, jobs, and housing.” When we include those costs, is the crime-reduction effect of prison worth it?
Bracket the implicit moral claim that the harms of punishing a criminal offender should be weighted equally with the harms that he does to society. It’s just not clear that prison is making people worse-off. Yes, prisoners have worse social outcomes than people outside. But individuals who go to prison are not like those who don’t—they often have experiences, character traits, and behaviors that make them more at risk for worse outcomes, even if they aren’t locked up. And when statisticians try to address this disparity, by comparing similar offenders who do and don’t go to prison, they find that prison is less harmful than one might think.
Take the idea that prison makes people less healthy. Two Scandinavian studies suggest otherwise: one from Norway, finding that prison causally reduces mental-health-care utilization; and one from Sweden, finding that longer sentences had little effect on post-release health, and actually reduced mortality. Of course, those studies look at famously posh Scandinavian prisons. But a study of criminal offenders in Ohio finds the same pattern: comparing prisoners with statistically similar defendants who avoided incarceration, the risk of murder, overdose, and “natural causes” deaths are all cut in half by a prison stay. After release, mortality remains the same, yielding a total boost in longevity. In other words, even in America, going to prison makes certain people live longer. The reason: among the sort of individuals serving time, life on the outside tends to be even rougher than on the inside.
What about family? Again, those who go to prison differ from those who don’t in ways that make their family outcomes worse, independent of prison. Indeed, the evidence finds that household members going to prison have, at most, small negative effects on their kids’ educational performance (in a study of North Carolina) and can actually reduce their risk of future incarceration, without affecting academic performance (in a study of Ohio). Evidence from Colombia and Norway similarly confirms that parental incarceration tends to have no effect on children’s outcomes. There’s an obvious explanation: the kind of family member who goes to prison might not be as positive a household presence as a family member who doesn’t. (See “Fathers, Families, and Incarceration,” Winter 2020.)
Surely, though, incarceration must yield worse job prospects, right? Again, people who go to prison are probably not as employable as people who don’t. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research uses tax data on inmates from North Carolina and Ohio to find that, while prisoners earn less while incarcerated, within five years of their prison stay, there is “no evidence of lower employment, wage earnings, or self-employment” relative to statistically equivalent offenders who don’t get locked up. Many criminals, in turns out, aren’t that employable before they go in; those who avoid a prison sentence earn just $5,000 per year on average, the paper’s authors estimate.
Some might object that this is missing the point. Going to prison is intrinsically harmful—it deprives a person of his liberty, which most people uniquely value. Against this argument, one response is to observe the simple fact that people deserve to be punished for transgressions against others, society, and the law. In the long arc of punitive history, moreover, prison is among the kinder punishments that humans have concocted. Compared with the rack, the lash, and other implements of torture, an extended stay in a government-run facility is relatively benign. Indeed, with greater ingenuity, it could even be beneficial.
After all, the extent to which prisons help or harm inmates is also not immutable. The logical leap from “prison might do harm” to “stop using prison” is a hallmark of starve-the-beast progressivism. Opposing that approach means more than attacking its premises. Advocates of incarceration should also offer an affirmative vision: to say that prison can, and should, be improved.
American prisons certainly have lots of problems. Some, for example, lack critical infrastructure, such as air conditioning—a deficiency causally linked to prison violence. Some are dominated by violent gangs. Prison populations are graying, too, yet the facilities often lack the mechanisms to address elderly inmates’ needs. Most important, we still have only vague ideas about how, or whether, prison programming can cut recidivism.
Strong evidence also shows that the quality of prisons matters for their residents’ later behavior on the outside. While we might want prisons to be harsh for retributive reasons, evidence from Italian inmates suggests that harsher conditions worsen recidivism. Similarly, a study of Colombian prisons finds that inmates quasi-randomly assigned to newer prisons are 36 percent less likely to return to prison within one year of release. And assignment to an open-cell prison significantly lowers recidivism relative to a closed-cell one, at least according to a study in Italy.
This doesn’t mean that prisons should be fun. But they should be clean, neat, orderly, and not in dysfunctional disrepair, if only because this seems to make the incarcerated less likely to re-offend. Prison modernization is an adaptation to changing realities, but it is also a form of crime control. So, at the very least, we should be willing to spend money to rehabilitate run-down facilities—and, ideally, to build newer, improved ones.
Another way we might raise the quality of our prisons is to make them smaller. In The Puzzle of Prison Order, Brown University political scientist David Skarbek considers variation in the quality of life behind bars across time and space. He argues that the quality of a prison’s governance helps determine how orderly and functional it is. Governance, in turn, is partially about size: the larger a prison population, the harder it is to control it. In previous work, Skarbek contended that the rise of prison gangs is an adaptive solution to mass incarceration, as prisoners in super-massive facilities evolve ways to govern themselves.
American prisons are quite large. Data from the 2019 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities indicate that the average facility houses more than 1,100 people. Three-quarters house more than 200, and the top quarter more than 1,500. The largest facility in the census, Arizona’s Eyman prison complex, reported a population of 5,686 inmates—only about 80 percent of its actual capacity. Such gigantic facilities have benefits in terms of economies of scale. But they also have costs, including disorderliness and violence, as well as siting limitations—big prisons mean rural settings, which have all kinds of social and political consequences.
If we’re going to build more prisons, maybe we should start with smaller facilities. “Micro-prisons” of 100 inmates or fewer could be run in a more orderly, and therefore more humane, fashion than larger ones. They could also be sited in a wider array of locations.
Building more prisons would let corrections administrators do something sorely needed in their field: experiment. We still know relatively little about what does and does not work in prison rehabilitation. One reason is that the problem is hard—incarceration is, as City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald puts it, a lifetime-achievement award for persistent criminal offending. We should not expect it to be easy to change such people’s behavior. But another reason we don’t know much about how to rehabilitate is that we have not really tried to learn. Most research in this area remains low-quality; while criminology and policing research have, to some degree, kept up with evolving statistical methods, corrections lags dramatically behind.
New prisons would create opportunities for experimentation across and within facilities. Look to Pennsylvania’s SCI Chester, where a new 64-bed unit has been built around giving more individual choice and responsibility to residents. A Drexel University team is evaluating the project, dubbed “Little Scandinavia” and ostensibly modeled on northern European rehabilitative incarceration practices. While its long-run effects remain uncertain, it appears already to have raised the quality of life for both inmates and prison guards, which can, in turn, reduce violence and disorder within the prison walls.
Such experiments represent the fruits of an innovation mind-set. Even if prisons are not as awful as their critics claim, they can certainly be better—but only if policymakers seek, in a rigorous fashion, to make them so.
Political conditions seem to weigh against such possibilities. The cultural turn against incarceration is part of the story, but it reinforces, and is reinforced by, other factors. The incarceration rate has been falling for over a decade. Many state and local governments, which collectively spend more than $0.90 of every dollar dedicated to prisons, face fiscal challenges from ever-growing debt obligations. These might make slashing incarceration particularly appealing.
While such concerns are legitimate, policymakers should balance these costs against the benefits of prison and approach corrections with a more expansive mind-set. They should recognize that anti-incarceration arguments are often facile and that prison remains one of the best policy tools available for controlling the enormous human costs of crime.
We need, too, to stop arguing about prison abolition, and spend our time and energy asking how to improve prisons. Absent some kind of radical social revolution, incarceration will always be with us.
Top Photo: Studies show that incarceration does work, so rather than trying to close prisons, America should be thinking about how to build new and better ones. (John Moore/Getty Images)
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