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Filling the Vacuum Between Prison and Probation
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18544 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
3,718 Words |
| Author
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Norval Morris
Norval Morris is Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and
Criminology at the University of Chicago and the coauthor of
Between Prison and Probation (Oxford University Press, 1990). |
By the end of 1990, the raw figures on prisons and jails in the United States gave urgency to the search for less costly and equally effective punishments for crime. There were then more than 1.1 million adults incarcerated in our prisons and jails and more than 4 million under some form of criminal justice system control.
Over the space of one decade, our prison and jail populations have more than doubled, as have our probation parole populations. And this burgeoning of prison, jail, probation, and parole populations took place in a decade in which, it is important to appreciate, there had been broad stability of crime rates.
To be more precise about crime rates: By both main measures of the incidence and prevalence of crime--the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, which count serious crimes known to the police, and the National Crime Survey, which is a nationwide victim survey--serious crime reduced somewhat in the period 1980 to 1985 and then increased from 1985 to 1990 to roughly where it had been in 1980. Three types of crimes revealed increases: drug sealing, familial sand sexual offenses, and, toward the end of the decade, homicide. Rises in the first two are a product of increased public and police concern about those types of crime; the slight increase in homicide since 1980 in some cities appears to be a product of the increased firepower of illicit weaponry and of the violence attendant on drug dealing.
Whatever the causes, by the end of 1990 our prisons and jails were bursting at the seams. Other countries witnessed similar pressures on correctional facilities, but nothing like those we faced. For example, at the end of 1990, the numbers of those in prison and jail per hundred thousand of population in the following countries were as follows: the Netherlands, 36; Sweden, 61; United Kingdom, 98; Canada, 109; the United States, 426.
These figures are not, as some suggest, merely the reflection of higher crime rates in the United States. Whereas it is true that our crime rates are indeed higher, particularly for violent crime, they are nowhere near as different from those other countries as the incarceration figures would suggest.
And another sad statistical fact must be added to this depressing picture. Our prisons and jails disproportionately hold racial and ethnic minorities. Correcting for differences in populations (that is, as a rate), for every Caucasian male incarcerated in our prisons and jails there are more than seven black males
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