Prison overcrowding is not a valid reason to create more prisons

[The Painter]

I'm willing to pay the taxes

This is the mark of the truly insane.

 

[Prometheus]

A couple of good radio programs on this topic here and here.

 

[The Painter]

How do countries like Holland - which have too many prison places - feed into this argument?

Holland has the population of 2 cities in the USA. So I guess it doesn't.

 

[volatile]

Holland has the population of 2 cities in the USA. So I guess it doesn't.

Do you have any evidence that rates of imprisonment increase with populations? Will larger countries have a higher percentage of inmates in the total population?

Seems intuitively that the opposite would be true, but I have no idea and it's your claim, so I'm sure you have the evidence to back it up.

 

[volatile]

This is the mark of the truly insane.

If you want prisons, you must be willing to pay taxes.

So, are you insane by your own metric? I certainly would be.

 

[Praktik]

I think the problem with your premise is that the reasoning is too convoluted, and the approach is too roundabout. The People of California Have Voted, and your viewpoint lost- they believe that building more prisons is, in fact, a valid way to reduce overcrowding. It is (They Believe), a simple matter of supply and demand- build more prisons and the demand for floorspace will go down; it's market pressure, something the People comprehend.

Having lost the vote years ago (California has been on a prison building binge for decades now, and Cailornia has been a leader in the phenomenon of throwing the book at miscreants by way of 3-strikes, for instance), you are in effect trying to undermine The People's Decision through a back door- if you can't get what you want by popular vote (in this case, your actual goal appears to be to stop making laws more strict; lots of luck with that), you can try again by un-funding the prisons. Unfortunately this approach does not appear to work (at least in California) as evidenced by the financial schizophrenia in that state (mine, by the way, and full disclosure- I have been involved in the construction of 6 California prisons). The majority of Californians want more prisons (and more schools, and services, and parks, etc.) and the majority of Californians also don't want to pay for them.

I'm pretty sure I have made a hash of your argument at this point- my apologies, as I am sympathetic; but no new prisons = more overcrowding = less strict laws = less people sentenced to prison = less overcrowding is way too complex and speculative of a causational string to fly with The People. Try something simpler, like repealing 3 strikes and/or decriminalizing victimless crimes.

By the way, it's quite possible that we are doomed.

good post.

I think the OP has it in reverse. Especially if we're talking California.

The voters vote in harsh sentencing like three strikes, the pols play to that and make their own mandatory minimums. BOOM - prison population explodes. Now we have overcrowding. Whats the solution? More prisons.

God forbid we should reconsider overly punitive and harsh sentences for victimless crimes, or crimes where the hurt on others was minimal (such as shoplifting for a third strike).

Now of course, I am being a bit cynical and sarcastic with that last bit, as I understand it these kinds of laws are being reconsidered we'll just have to see what wins out at the end of the day: more prisons or more sensible sentencing.

Here in Canada for example, the minority government Conservatives are looking at expanding prisons and building new ones for the extra inmates they anticipate will be coming in if their suite of "tough on crime" laws passes.

Good of them to think about overcrowding in advance of these kinds of policies - I suppose - though I'd rather not deal with emotional, knee-jerk approaches to justice and not have the dumbass, chest-beating, feel good "tough on crime" ethos enshrined in policy in the first place.

Overall though, I think that harsh sentencing leads to more prisons rather than more prisons creating harsher sentencing to "fill the space".

 

[volatile]

Prison overcrowding kinda gives lie to the deterrent effect laws like "3-strikes" are supposed to generate, right?

 

[Kestrel]

A couple of good radio programs on this topic here and here.

A quote from that first link is interesting.

Parole and probation represent another complicating factor. California has the country's toughest parole sanctions on the books. Each year the system releases 120,000 parolees, and each year 75,000 return to prison for violating their parole on technical terms, such as missing an appointment with a parole officer.

Wouldn't it make sense to punish technical violations with more intensive supervision instead of an automatic trip back to the big house?

 

[The Painter]

Will larger countries have a higher percentage of inmates in the total population

?

Well. That certainly depends on the country, doesn't it. What kind of government does the country have??? On a percentage does England have more prisoners than China per se, or Iran or Scotland or Ireland or the USA? Do you really care?

 

[theprestige]

Voting NO was the most effective way to reduce prison overcrowding, but it appears (to people who do not think ahead far enough) to have the opposite effect.

I find it deliciously ironic that after being blindsided by this turn of events, you accuse other people of not thinking far enough ahead.

I think the greatest flaw in your logic is assuming that people get put in prisons because there's room for them in prisons. In reality, people get put in prisons--whether there's room enough or not--because the law requires them to be put in prisons. The way to reduce the prison population is to reduce the criminal population. Either define less crimes, or hire less cops.

 

[Donal]

So, Ben, which do you think is more likely:

1) Loosening the laws to ease the over crowding in jails

2) Greater use of the death penalty and procedures to speed up the appeals proccess

3) releasing more prisoners early to make room, meaning more criminals out on the streets

 

[Prometheus]

While I don't think Ben is correct that more prison space automatically means more prisoners, I actually agree with him that the correct vote was, 'No.' Building more prisons will not solve California's problems. They really do need to get rid of 3-strikes. I've not looked it up yet, but in one of those radio programs, a guest mentions some study that seems to show that, all other things being equal, increases in the incarceration rate actually lead to more crime, not less. If this is true, then as long as they're stuck with dumb mandatory sentencing laws the problems can only get worse.

 

[Bob Klase]

Unconditionally, in the USA, if there are more prisons, then laws (on average) will become stricter to fill those prisons, but if there are less prisons, laws (on average) will become less strict. Example: the less dangerous prisoners get released.

At what point in the last 200 years did we have exactly the right amount of prisons?

Since you don't think California needs to build any more, do they have exactly the right number now? Or do they still have too many and should tear some of the existing ones down so there's less space they have to fill?

 

[MattC]

MattC, criminal justice division.

... hire less cops.

This doesn't actually reduce the criminal population at large, rather the criminals you are aware of - which in a way directly means you'll have less of them in prison. This is probably what you meant, but I thought it best to clarify.

=====

The concept Ben espouses is sometimes referred to as a hard cap on prisoner population (as determined by the number of beds in the currently existing prisons), accordingly I invite everyone to consider the following analysis. Individual variables will be referenced in bold for emphasis while variable analysis will be conducted in italics.

Let n refer to every prisoner currently in the system (apparently California's judging by the content of Ben's OP), while c refers to whatever cap Mr. Rayfield intends to put upon the system. Given that he mentions the system as overcrowded, it is therefore clear that n > c. Therefore, let o refer to the overcrowded inmates in the aggregate, calculated by the simple o = n - c. According to Mr. Rayfield's tenets, o inmates must be gotten out of the prison system to remove overcrowding (which I commend him for being willing to pay for), but to remove o we must first identify what groups we desire to have in c. Presumably, it makes sense to include the most serious offenders in variable c, put a different way the more serious offenses deserve longer prison stays.

The determination of "most serious," however, is not so easy and it cannot be left up to subjective validation if any useful analysis is to be conducted - given the number of jurisdictions that make such determinations, we need to find some other way to determine this.. Thankfully the criminal justice system gives us an excellent way to judge "most serious" by examining sentence length of the offender, which we will refer to as s. Declaring variable x to refer to any specific offender and y as referring to anyone not offender x allows us to declare s(x) as the time to be served by any individual offender and s to refer to the time served by some other inmate.

Given the potentially broad scope of variable s, it makes sense to split it into more relevant parts and define those parts as separate variables. Again the system aids us by delineating two very specific sentencing categories - misdemeanors and felonies. Putting these into variable form, we can therefore declare m to be all inmates serving time for a misdemeanor and f to be all inmates serving time for felony convictions. Further, m(x) would refer to any specific offender serving time for a misdemeanor while f(x) would refer to a specific felony offender. As an aside m(x) and f(x) can exist simultaneously as someone can be serving time for a misdemeanor and a felony at any given time. This isn't important given the confines of Mr. Rayfield's example, but I thought it interesting and so mentioned it.

Variable f now poses a problem though, in that there are some sentences that aren't numerical - more specifically, you can be sentenced indeterminately. I refer here to life in prison, which is not a uniform numerical value and therefore poses a problem for this sort of analysis. Accordingly we must define variable L (I capitalize the variable here to avoid any confusion with the appearance of the lowercase character) as a subset of variable f that specifically references those serving life in prison. Continuing the previous trend, L(x) would refer to any specific individual serving a life sentence.

However, the prison population is constantly in flux as people enter and are released, which until now we have not accounted for. Therefore we must define variable r as the prisoners released from the prison who no longer occupy a space - for ease of calculation we'll include within r all of those who die or escape. As tradition dictates, r(x) would refer to any individual released from the system.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
The final list of variables before beginning analysis is as follows:
--------------------------------------------------------------------

t: any specific time
n: the total amount of people in the prison system at any given time
c: the total number of people possible to have in the prison system with no overcrowding
o: the amount of overcrowded prisoners currently in the system
s: the length of time to be served by a specific inmate, e.g. someone entering the system with time to serve
x: any individual offender
y: any individual offender that is not individual x
m: a subset of variable n that contains all offenders serving time for misdemeanor convictions
f: a subset of variable n that contains all offenders serving time for felony convictions
r: the amount of prisoners released

We also need to define two variables relating to growth and decay of relative populations:

g(var): referencing the growth of var
d(var): referencing the decay of var

We can now begin the analysis. Keep in mind that to maintain accordance with Mr. Rayfield's stated desires, x must at all times be less than or equal to c - it can never be greater. Put into analytical terms, x <= c for all t. Further, x + g(x) <= c for all t, or continued growth in n cannot cause the condition n > c under any circumstances. Therefore, our operating equation to preserve Mr. Rayfield's stated desires becomes x + g(x) - d(x) <= c for all t - the current population plus incoming inmates minus leaving inmates can never be greater than c.

An inmate serving time for a felony conviction will serve longer than an inmate serving time for a misdemeanor conviction: f(x) > m
An inmate serving life will, "on average" (absent untimely death or escape, which are thankfully not average), serve more time than an inmate serving for non-life felony convictions or misdemeanor convictions: s(L) > s(f) > s(m)
Conversely: r(L) < r(f) < r(m)
g for all t > r for all t - one cannot lose more prisoners than one has, ergo n can never be negative.
Variables m and f can never be negative - one cannot have "the opposite of an inmate".

This last premise is essentially the death knell for the Rayfield hypothesis. Any persistent source of growth in one sector of the sentencing population must be accounted for by the release of inmates in the others - a true "revolving door." Given the following values for the variables, the following table demonstrates the inevitable breakdown of the hypothesis once n=c as various lesser inmates are let go to make room for the more serious ones:

c = 30
L = 5
f = 10
m = 15
g(L) = 3


L f m
- - -
5 10 15
8 10 12
11 10 9
14 10 6
17 10 3
20 10 0
23 7 0
26 4 0
29 1 0
32 - - (hypothesis fails - overcrowding occurred)

After six iterations of Mr. Rayfield's proposed methodology, all misdemeanor inmates were released from this mock prison - this is unlikely to cause too much concern as misdemeanor crimes generally aren't that serious. However, as felons began getting released, the relative danger posed to society at large by this model became clear. Even presuming that the last few remaining members of f committed the most serious crimes, their eventual release was inevitable. This demonstrates the fallibility of the model both in terms of protecting society and preventing the need for more prisons.

~ Matt

 

[Suddenly]

Prison overcrowding kinda gives lie to the deterrent effect laws like "3-strikes" are supposed to generate, right?

Not at all. The whole point is to put more people in prison.

The real metric would be crime rates, but given the amount of variables good luck with showing much of a cause an effect.

 

[volatile]

Not at all. The whole point is to put more people in prison.

Really? They're not conceived and sold as deterrents? I thought the whole point of zero tolerance and the imposition of harsh punishments for [repeated] minor crimes were intended to deter...

 

[cwalner]

Really? They're not conceived and sold as deterrents? I thought the whole point of zero tolerance and the imposition of harsh punishments for [repeated] minor crimes were intended to deter...

I lived in CA when 3 strikes passed and that is defenitely one of the arguments that was used to sell it. Therefore, the overcrowding puts the lie to that part of the argument, but not the whole argument. There was also an appeal to emotion and sence of 'justice' that certain criminals, especially after repeat offenses, simply deserve harsher punishment. The overcrowding has no effect on the overall validity of that portion of the argument.

I also remember an argument against 3 strikes that claimed that criminals facing thier 3rd strike are more likely to commit escalated crimes (ie injuring or killing witnesses or police) to evade capture because they are already facing a more sever sentence having just commited something like armed robbery. I don't know what studies have been done to validate that argument either.

 

[Suddenly]

Really? They're not conceived and sold as deterrents? I thought the whole point of zero tolerance and the imposition of harsh punishments for [repeated] minor crimes were intended to deter...

It makes no sense as a deterrent as if prison worked as a deterrent... well... you see where that goes. It only makes sense as a simple matter of getting people who demonstrate an inability to live within the law out of circulation.

The whole thing is nuts because these days it is hard to live long enough to serve sentences for three major/violent felonies so it winds up being used against some pathetic small timer.

There was an NPR report where it was revealed that the California prison guard union did/does some heavy lobbying for this law... I'm guessing they put forth a bunch of arguments.

(What is funny to me is California making a huge deal out of it when many states have had three strikes rules for decades...)

Anyway, the real prison overcrowding issue isn't how fast people go in as much as the fact that sentences are longer and parole is less and less common. The three strikes rules, the total lack of parole in the federal system, and longer sentences have much more effect then some deal about victimless crime or whatever.