Charles Fain Lehman joins Brian Anderson to discuss his article “Build More Prisons” and how to improve our incarceration system.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on today‘s show is Charles Fain Lehman. He‘s a fellow at MI and a contributing editor of City Journal. His work focuses on various issues, policing, public safety, drug abuse. And his writing has appeared in numerous publications, not only City Journal, but the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, National Review, and other outlets. Today, Charles is here to discuss his terrific feature story from our autumn issue called “Build More Prisons.” So Charles, thanks for joining us.
Charles Fain Lehman: Absolutely. Happy to be back on.
Brian Anderson: This is not an article that may win you many friends, but you propose a simple, but indeed controversial, anti-crime idea, which is, yes, to build more prisons. And that couldn‘t contrast more starkly with the perspective of what‘s broadly known as the criminal justice reform movement, which argues that the US has a huge problem with excessive incarceration. As you write, two-thirds of those who identified as likely voters in the last election, including a majority of Republicans, still believe that we should be working to reduce the number of people behind bars in the country. So to start off, why do you think that this belief is so prevalent? And why do you think it‘s wrong?
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, charitably, I think America does incarcerate a lot of people in international context. We incarcerate more than most peer OECD countries. It seems like the Salvadorans have finally beat us on a per capita basis. The Russians and the Chinese probably lie about how many they actually incarcerate, when you count incarceration extensively. But we put a lot of people in prison. And I think, if it were the case that prison was not an efficacious or proportionate strategy to the scale of our crime problem, then it would be quite reasonable to say we should incarcerate many fewer people.
And my response to that is the United States is, by many measures, a much more violent place than basically, every other high-state-capacity peer. We have a different scale of our crime problem than basically every other high-state-capacity peer, and so, we need to invest more in the tools of crime reduction than peer countries do. And then, the second component of my argument is prison is among the few well-supported effective measures for controlling crime, that quite simply, incapacitation works, many other things do not work. And as a result, we kind of need incapacitation, and we should stop debating about the need for incapacitation, writ large, and dedicate much more time, on average, to talking about the quality of incapacitation, which I think gets relatively short shrift in the debate.
Brian Anderson: Well, let‘s go back to that question about the effectiveness of prison though, because that‘s exactly what criminal justice reformers deny. What are some of the grounds, in terms of evidence, for this view that we should be increasing prison capacity? Are they just wrong about the fact that prison doesn‘t work?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so there were two channels by which prison can affect criminal offending. One is deterrence, which is to say the threat of prison or the experience of prison can cause somebody to not commit an offense they might otherwise commit. And there‘s incapacitation, which should say, if you were in prison, it‘s hard to commit crimes outside of prison, you‘re locked in the cell. The strong form of the critical argument is that there is an anti-deterrent effect of prison, that people who are let out of prison become more likely to re-offend, because it‘s a school for crime or because it‘s traumatizing or because it‘s otherwise harmful. And so, prison is self-defeating. And I look at the evidence and I say, I don‘t think there‘s really, with the exception of maybe one study, particularly strong evidence that that‘s true.
The evidence to me is much stronger that prison is not a very effective deterrent, which doesn‘t really surprise, once you realize that, by the time people get to prison, they have a fairly long history of criminal offending. They‘re sort of in the subset of offenders who are pretty hard to deter. But it is hard to argue that prison either deters or anti-deters. But that leaves incapacitation as a fairly effective tool for reducing crime. And we have a variety of estimates of the incapacitative effect of prison. One estimate says, during the period under which people would otherwise have been incarcerated, they committed between about three criminal acts and one and a half serious crimes on average. There‘s another one that uses Italian mass pardons, that estimates that incapacitation prevents 14 to 18 crimes per year served. And then, there‘s another one that estimates that one out of four Uruguayan releasees commits a crime on the day of his release. And that’s to say incapacitation works. And that‘s no surprise, but I think it‘s an empirically validated claim. And that says to me, “Look, we have this tool that works through very simple causal mechanism. We should at least be willing to consider it among alternatives.”
Brian Anderson: Many decarceration proponents look to alternative crime reduction strategies, so outreach services that provide mental health treatment for potential criminals, cognitive behavioral therapy will solve some of these problems of violence in the streets. Without being too dismissive, what‘s your view of these strategies? Can they work in some contexts? And how do they compare with the incarceration?
Charles Fain Lehman: There‘s a broad space of those, and what I would say is that some of them work some of the time. And my sort of criticism of them is that they‘re often either not reliable or not scalable. When I say, “not reliable,” I‘m thinking about something like violence intervenors who are, you hire somebody the criminal history to go out into the community and diffuse gang feuds or you give resources to people who are in gangs and you try to get them on the right track. And you look at…
Brian Anderson: These are what are called violence interrupters?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, violence interrupters, community violence intervention or interruption. And if you look at the empirical literature on them, they‘re very hit or miss. Sometimes they work. A lot of the time, they don‘t. And even within studies where they work, their success is pretty mixed. So they‘re not reliable, which is to say they don‘t meet the target every time. And then, there are other approaches which are more reliable. I think here about street lighting, we actually have pretty good evidence that street lighting decreases crime in the areas where it‘s implemented. But the thing is that those policies are not scalable. They are not repeatable. You can only put streetlights in once. And so, I think many alternative strategies that are like that, in that, if they are reliable, they often are sort of one-time confrontations, whereas the virtue of prison is, at least dealing with none of the fiscal constraints, prisons are arbitrarily scalable. You can theoretically construct more space, and they‘re reliable. They have a very clear functional mechanism.
Brian Anderson: That sort of opens the question of, well, are we running prisons as effectively as we should be running them? And you discuss, in your essay, various approaches to how prisons could be improved, what could be an improved structure for prisons. So in your view, what does make for an effective prison, other than just getting the bad guys off the street? Can some of them improve behavior? Can some of them lead to reform of personalities? You mentioned the Uruguayan study where these people being let out of prison commit a crime the first day they‘re out. Is there a way to structure prison so that doesn‘t happen?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so I‘ll say a couple of things. One is that we know in general that there‘s some relationship between prison quality and subsequent recidivism risk, that nicer, newer prisons, for example in Colombia, have been shown to reduce chance of re-offense. That said, there just isn‘t a great deal that we know about recidivism, about how to reduce recidivism. This is partially because recidivism reduction is hard. It‘s hard to change people, particularly persistent criminal offenders, but it‘s also because we haven‘t done a lot of experimentation. There‘s a lot we just don‘t know, we haven‘t tried to know. So I think good prisons are ideally focusing on trying to solve some of those experimental problems. That‘s thing one. Thing two is recidivism is not the only metric. Quality of life matters inside the walls. It matters for a bunch of reasons. It matters because it reduces re-offending within the walls.
It reduces violence. It preserves the legitimacy of the carceral system. It improves the quality of life of guards, who are currently extremely highly paid and have extremely high turnover rates, because it‘s not a pleasant place to work. And part of making prisons good is about making them clean, neat, orderly, not dysfunctional. We should care about the quality of prisons. Partially, there may be a connection to recidivism, but also because it is good to make them places of high quality intrinsically.
And the third thing that I suggest in the piece is that there is almost certainly a nexus between the size of prisons, how big they are and how orderly they are. And that almost certainly smaller prisons or selecting for smaller prisons on the margin would let us create more orderly, more functional, and potentially more rehabilitative prisons. We have very large prisons in the United States. I endorse the construction of more prisons. I would like to see many more smaller prisons. I noted, I forget if I note this in the piece, but there used to be two prisons in Manhattan. They‘re both closed now, but it‘s possible to site small prisons in some of the densest areas in the United States. We just don‘t try to do that anymore.
Brian Anderson: It‘s interesting. What about the training of correction officers? This isn‘t something you really talk about in the piece, but I wonder, there is a problem in some prisons of the correction officers getting involved in criminality themselves, with the prisoners, that they‘re being drawn from backgrounds which are sometimes similar. They could be behind bars or on the other side of the bars, given a certain set of circumstances. Can we do better, in terms of getting a kind of more competent class of correction officers?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, it‘s an extraordinarily hard problem, because it‘s a relatively low-skilled position, which is extremely demanding and therefore, experiences extremely high turnover. It also benefits from union protections and all of the costs associated with that. I think the dimension in which most states currently operate is that they pay their guards a lot. I‘ve met correctional officers who are making $200,000 a year as a correctional officer, because they get paid overtime. That‘s one dimension, but you still get very high turnover rates. I think that…
Brian Anderson: The high turnover is just because the job is so unpleasant?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes. Yeah, well, anti-social individuals. And so, part of my argument is, and there were lots of incentives to, as you‘re looking to collaborate with people outside the prison walls, people inside the prison walls, to continue to commit crimes, guards smuggle in most of the drugs, for example, and the best way to deal with this is to try to attract a better quality of guard. You can do that through money, but there‘s only so much money you can throw at the problem, which is part of my argument for increased quality of prisons. If prisons are more pleasant places to work, more people will be willing to work there. And that matters a lot at the margin. In terms of things like keeping drugs out, things like keeping contraband out, things like keeping guns out, all the problems that are generated by correctional officers, if we want that to be true, we have to make it a more attractive environment to work in.
Brian Anderson: Now, one argument made by decarceration proponents, and this relates to another theme that you work on, which is drug policy, is that the prisons are filled with pot smokers, that there‘s been this horrible injustice committed against people who are just smoking marijuana and minding their own business. That‘s largely a myth, right?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. That‘s almost categorically a myth. About 14 percent, I think these numbers are a couple years old, I have to get the exact fractions right, but 10 to 15 percent of people are incarcerated on any drug offense less than 5 percent of the total are incarcerated possession offense. And a vanishingly small fraction, almost certainly less than 1 percent, are incarcerated on marijuana related offenses, marijuana possessions specifically. The reality is the majority of people are in prison for serious violent offenses. And that‘s not a surprise, if you think about what prosecutors spend their dime on.
Brian Anderson: A final question. We‘ve got, obviously, this huge election result. You have a new administration entering the White House in January. Do you see any changes or would you recommend any changes on the federal level, in regard to how the prison system is managed?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I could go on all day about that. Part of the problem, of course, is that the prisons are mostly state-level institutions. The federal system houses between 10 and 15 percent of all prisoners, which means 85 to 90 percent of prisoners are under the care of the states. That said, federal dollars can have some impact. I would like to see some form of federal prison remediation. The 1994 Crime Bill allocated a great deal of money for constructing new prisons and improving old prisons. I‘ve advocated for an update to that, through the Manhattan Institute. I‘d like to see that happen. I‘m skeptical they‘ll want to spend the money on it, but what are you going to do? I can always push for it, and I think there would be real improvements associated with that. I think there‘s not nearly enough knowledge about corrections. National Institute of Corrections is, as far as I can tell, just a web page.
And there‘s not really enough experimentation in corrections either. I talked briefly in the piece about research being done in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, where they‘ve run something like 1500 control trials over the past 10 years. They‘re really out in front on corrections research. I would love to see somebody at DOJ or at the Bureau of Prisons or the National Institute of Corrections trying to push that more experimental ethos, with the goal of both reducing recidivism and improving quality of life for prisoners and for correctional officers alike. So I don‘t expect to get a lot of money. I do think that there is room for a greater investment in science and research in corrections. It‘s just not a 21st century field, and it‘s not that hard to make it one. And there‘s no reason that this administration, which has, in other spaces, committed itself to being experimental, couldn‘t get there.
Brian Anderson: Thank you very much, Charles. The essay in our most recent issue is called “Build More Prisons.” It‘s really a kind of terrific overview of this whole area of policy. Don‘t forget to check out Charles Lehman‘s other work on the City Journal website. There‘s quite a bit there. You can find him on X @CharlesFLehman, and we‘ll link to his author page in the description, where you‘ll be able to find all of this material. You can also find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI. And as usual, if you like what you‘ve heard on the podcast, please give us a good rating on iTunes. So Charles Lehman, always great to talk with you. Thanks very much.
Charles Fain Lehman: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on.
Photo: WIN-Initiative/Neleman / Stone via Getty Images
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