Prison Reform

Humans have used various forms of corporal punishment, including public humiliation, banishment, and capital punishment, against each other since Paleolithic times, but the practice of incarcerating those convicted of criminal acts dates to just the eighteenth century in the United States. The US prison system is based on the deterrence model, which holds that a severe punishment or long-term incarceration will prevent an individual from committing repeat offenses.

Successful civil rights movements in the United States have included the prisoner rights movement, in which advocates have worked to improve conditions inside the prisons and create a more just and effective penal system. Prison civil rights also include reforming the individual prisoner to reduce rates of recidivism, or repeat offenses.

History

The first prison reformers in the United States took on the harsh treatments of torture and deterrence executions. Later prison reformers looked at human rights and rehabilitation. By the late twentieth century, reformers were advocating for unconventional ways to reform criminals, reassessing the duration of their removal from society, and protesting the rising costs of incarceration.

By the 1860s US prisons were vastly overcrowded because of long sentences for violent crimes. Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight toured prisons in eighteen states and produced a report describing flaws in the system, the most egregious being that not one of the prisons had prisoner rehabilitation as its primary goal. Their report proposed a reform agenda that Samuel June Barrow, who became secretary of the Prison Association of New York in 1900, attempted to implement. Barrow used his influence to change attitudes toward prison and prisoners and produced several classic documents of American penal literature, including Children’s Courts in the United States.

The twentieth century brought psychiatric methodology into a central role in criminology and policymaking. By 1926, sixty-seven prisons employed psychiatrists and forty-five used psychologists. They tried to use medicine and its language to cure criminality. Prison officials instituted a probation system, but probation officers had little training, and their heavy caseloads made it impossible to monitor every prisoner. In the 1950s a series of prison riots shook the US prison system, provoked by the deficiencies of prison facilities, lack of hygiene and medical care, poor food, and guard brutality. In 1954 the American Prison Association became the American Correctional Association, and in 1955 the United Nations Standard Minimum Rule for the Treatment of Prisoners was formalized but not uniformly implemented in US prisons.

The incarcerated population in the United States rose steadily from the 1960s until 2008. This occurred in part because the lenient sentencing practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s were revoked in favor of an established set of minimum and maximum sentencing guidelines, particularly for drug-related offenses. By the 2010s the United States had a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world. However, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the total correctional population began to decline in 2008. The BJS reported that in 2020 the United States incarcerated over 1.76 million adults in either local, state, or federal correctional facilities (down from 2.39 million in 2008), and over 3.91 million others were under community supervision, whether probation, parole, or another program (down from 5.09 million in 2008).

Decreases in crime and arrest rates, as well as alterations in sentencing (including for crimes involving drugs) and criminal laws, were cited as possible reasons for such continued decline in incarceration. The bipartisan First Step Act of 2018, which was largely considered a successful step toward combating mass incarceration, altered sentencing laws concerning nonviolent drug offenses, giving judges more discretion, and was aimed at expanding programming to reduce recidivism. Following recalculations of good behavior according to the First Step Act, approximately three thousand federal inmates were released when it went into effect in 2019.

Specific Reform Concerns

Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans face disproportionately higher levels of incarceration than White Americans. Thus, addressing racial and ethnic disparities has been a major goal among prison reformers. Iowa, which in 2007 had the greatest racial disparity in prison populations in the US, became the first state in the nation to pass a racial impact statement measure, the following year. Since then, eight other states have required racial impact statements be drawn up to help their governments better assess the potential racial and ethnic disparities of bills under consideration.

Another area of ongoing debate is providing inmates opportunities to participate in meaningful labor that is fairly compensated. Nearly every prison reformer in history has believed prisoners should perform useful work. For example, in his book Fifty Years of Prison Service (1912), Zebulon Brockway outlined an ideal prison system where prisoners would support themselves with prison jobs in preparation for obtaining employment outside of prison. Sentences would be indeterminate, with prisoners earning their release with constructive behavior; humane treatment would be guaranteed. Many US prisons do provide labor opportunities. However, the amount of compensation varies widely by state, and work is often mandatory, with little to no worker protections.

A related concern of reformers is the for-profit private prison industry that arose in the 1980s and expanded through the 2010s. This industry received increasing scrutiny for its role in mass incarceration and potential human rights violations in the twenty-first century. By 2020, four states had passed bans on private-prison contracts, and in early 2021, President Joe Biden ordered the federal Justice Department to phase out its contracts with private-prison operators. In 2022, private prisons in twenty-seven states and the federal government still held more than 8 percent of incarcerated people in the United States.

Reform advocates have also called for the elimination of money bail and bench warrants to reduce pretrial detention, and for changes to the probation and parole systems, as a substantial share of those being incarcerated are held for noncriminal reasons, such as technical violations of probation or parole. Other areas of proposed reform include diversion programs for those with mental illness and addiction, limits on youth detention, access to federal benefits for those formerly incarcerated, and expungement of minor drug offenses to bolster prevention efforts and reduce recidivism.

Bibliography

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Elsner, Alan. Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons. 2nd ed., Pearson, 2006.

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Kim, Catherine Y., et al. The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform. New York UP, 2010.

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Porter, Nicole D. "Racial Impact Statements." The Sentencing Project, 16 June 2021, www.sentencingproject.org/reports/racial-impact-statements/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2024.

Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022.” Prison Policy Initiative, 14 Mar. 2022, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2024.

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Tonry, Michael. Penal Reform in Overcrowded Times. Oxford UP, 2001.