Warehousing Criminals
By: Donald R. Cressey
Exercises: J. Geffen
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1.
Psychiatrists have clinical evidence suggesting that capital punishment causes
murder. Some people kill in the hope that their crime will energize the state into
killing them.
2.
This psychological fact illustrates the workings of a general principle long ago
discovered by sociological criminologists: a nation’s program for dealing with
criminals is always reflected in the country’s crime rates. If a society tries to control
crime by rewarding conformity, citizens will keep the crime rate down by rewarding
each other for good conduct. If a society tries to control crime by terrorizing its
citizenry, the citizens will terrorize each other.
3.
In Beyond the Punitive Society, the proceedings of a conference on Skinnerian
principles, Harvey Wheeler put the matter succinctly and well:
Just as prisons teach criminals how to be criminals, not how to be good
citizens, so punishment teaches persons how to punish; how to punish
themselves by haranguing themselves with guilt feelings, as well as how
to punish others retributively. The result is a society characterized by
punishing; repressive behavior produces a suppressive society.
4.
The idea that prisons are schools of crime, in the sense that they provide
opportunities for naive youngsters to learn new tricks from old cons, has been overplayed. The damage done by prisons is much more direct, subtle, and devastating.
Every prison is a crime factory because it models how all criminals, not just those
locked behind its walls, are supposed to behave. The prison, like the police officer’s
armament, the decorum of the courtroom, and the dinginess of the county jail, is a
symbol of authoritarianism, coercion, condemnation, and rejection. The symbolic
message sent by towering walls, razor-sharp barbed fences, armed men on catwalks,
and cages of reinforced steel suggests that criminals are uncommitted, alien, wild.
Because America has increasingly been broadcasting this message, it is not surprising
that our criminals have become increasingly violent. Ironically enough, in the last
decade legislators and other government officials have responded to the ensuing
violence with violence – more and more citizens are being punished by confinement
behind walls of concrete and steel.
5.
Americans are strong believers in the idea that the state should hurt criminals by
depriving them of their liberty, perhaps because imprisonment as punishment for
crime was invented by the radicals of the American Revolution. Today, close to four
hundred thousand adults are confined in America’s state and federal prisons, up from
under two hundred thousand ten years ago. Most will be discharged within a decade,
but others will take their places. Altogether, we will imprison over a million people in
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the next decade, not counting those locked in county jails for short terms. No other
Western nation has an imprisonment rate this high.
6.
Despite their love of incarceration, Americans do not want to pay the price of
locking up so many citizens. It costs at least $50,000 to build a cell these days, and to
keep a prisoner in a cell requires another $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We need a
solution to the dilemma that surfaces whenever someone (usually an economist) notes
that as the state increases the cost of crime for criminals (longer and harsher prison
terms for more offenders), it increases its own economic costs proportionately
because it must build, man and maintain new prisons, pay board-and-room costs of
prisoners for longer terms, and pay for increased police and court work as well.
7.
Deterrence policy, long championed by political conservatives, asks that pain be
inflicted on criminals as a means of repressing crime – the assumption being that
hurting criminals will reduce crime rates both by reforming offenders (specific
deterrence) and by terrorizing bystanding citizens so much they will be afraid to
violate the law (general deterrence). The psychology underlying this policy, which is
the backbone of contemporary criminal law and its administration, has long been
discounted by psychologists. Economists, however, like considerable numbers of the
general public, continue to subscribe to the hedonistic doctrine that individuals
calculate potential costs and benefits in advance of action and regulate their conduct
accordingly. The implication is that undesirable acts will not be performed if enough
pain is attached to them and if the amount of pain thus attached is made knowable to
all, so that prospective criminals can make rational calculations. The upshot, of
course, is a tendency to increase punishment (the cost of committing crime) whenever
the crime rate seems too high. This tendency now requires more money than even the
advocates of deterrence policy are willing to pay.
8.
Influential contemporary liberals (some call them neoconservatives) also have
effected policies that are dramatically increasing the costs of punishing criminals. One
such policy inflicts the pain of imprisonment on criminals not for its utility but simply
because criminals deserve to suffer (“just deserts”, “retribution”, “vengeance”).
Noting that discretionary practices permit discrimination against the poor, liberals also
have replaced indeterminate sentences with mandatory, flat, and presumptive
sentences. Finally, liberals have begun locking criminals up for purposes of
“incapacitation” (warehousing), rather than for either utilitarian or retributive
purposes. All three policies, singly and in combination, are being used to imprison
more people for longer terms, thus driving state costs out of sight.
9.
It is reasonable, then, to expect economists and others to give their attention to
ways of cutting down the costs of punishment while increasing the assumed costs of
committing crimes. Some recommend more frequent use of gassing, hanging, and
electrocution. Others recommend that we once again banish criminals to a distant
land, as Britain once transported criminals first to her American colonies and then,
after the Revolution, to her Australian colonies. Still others, like Tom J. Farer, also
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recommend self-governing distant colonies but with a difference – these colonies
would, like the penal colony in French Guiana made famous by Henri Charriere’s
Papillon, be compounds with armed guards at the perimeters.
10. Transportation of criminals at first cut Great Britain’s punishment costs. The
Transportation Act of 1718 declared that its purpose was both to deter criminals and
to supply colonies with labor. In 1786, after the American colonies had become
independent, the policy of transportation to Australia was adopted, and this practice
continued until 1867. It was abandoned because it was strenuously opposed by
Australians, because it did not seem to produce general deterrence, and because it
became too expensive.
11. Looking back, it cannot be denied that Britain’s transportation program was a
success. After all, the United States and Australia are now exemplars of democracy,
with liberty and justice for all. There is something good about nations whose
Constitutions were written by the descendants of convicts.
Policing the Perimeters
12. But the stories of other penal colonies have no such happy endings. Russia has
used Siberia as a penal colony since 1823. Witold Krassowski and I long ago showed,
in a 1958 issue of Social Problems, that life in Soviet labor camps is not exactly a
bean feast, a fact also documented in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich. These camps, where inmates govern inmates while armed guards
patrol the perimeters, seem more like what Farer is proposing than do the Australian
and American colonies.
13. Farer has unwittingly called for more prisons that are run as Attica, San
Quentin, and Smokey Mountain are now being run. These and other penitentiaries
have the nightmarish character, the hopelessness, the unspeakable humiliations, and
the deadly violence Farer mentions. So do Soviet labor camps. Significantly enough,
prisons and labor camps have these features precisely because prisoners are left
largely alone to conduct their own affairs, as would be the inmates in Farer’s guarded
compounds.
14. Until recently, guards in most American prisons functioned like traditional
police officers, protecting inmates from each other by arresting and taking misbehaving inmates to disciplinary court for conviction, sentencing and punishment. In a
few prisons, which were said to be “treatment oriented”, guards borrowed from the
child-rearing techniques of middle-class people and thus controlled inmates by giving
love and affection to those who were behaving, and withdrawing love and affection
from inmates who were not. Today, guards rarely use either of these control systems,
nor have they invented new police methods. They have withdrawn to the walls, as the
guards of Farer’s compounds would do. As a consequence, inmates are robbing,
raping, assaulting, and killing each other as never before.
15. There are at least three different ways to make sense of the fact that prison
guards and their bosses now concentrate on perimeter control, rather than on keeping
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the prison crime rate down. Each of the three is relevant to Farer’s plan for a prison
colony “with an easily guarded periphery”, a colony that is, like a trust territory,
“being prepared for self-determination” through “technical and capital assistance”,
supervised “democratic elections”, and punishment by state officials, not residents,
“in case of grave abuse”.
16. The first is to observe that in contemporary prisons, as in Farer’s future camps,
guards have no obligation to assist inmates. State officials insist only that criminals be
warehoused under conditions not constituting cruel and unusual punishment.
Accordingly, residents are provided with food, shelter and clothing, an occasional
low-paying job, and technical assistance in the form of meager academic and
vocational training for those who demand it. That’s it. The deterrence policy of
conservatives, like the just deserts and incapacitation policies of liberals, insists on
nothing more. Guards ignore the needs of inmates because everyone else is ignoring
their needs.
17. Second, haphazard policing in contemporary prisons – the same kind of policing
Farer recommends for his compounds – is a way of supplementing the psychological
pain stemming from restricted liberty with the bodily pain inflicted by inmates on
other inmates. Among unpoliced prisoners the crime rate is high, but not because the
prisoners “are too sick, too emotionally and psychologically crippled to perform
necessary social functions”. The crime rate is high because most prisoners are bad
guys who have track records of violence. Guards are prohibited from beating,
choking, cutting, or clubbing inmates, and instances of guard brutality are now rare,
despite stories to the contrary. But guards can, and do, retreat to the periphery, thus
letting inmates do their dirty work.
18. Third, poor policing in prisons is valuable to guards and other prison workers
because it maximizes inmate divisiveness, thus discouraging inmates from joining
forces in attempts to overpower the staff. Armed guards at the perimeters also provide
such discouragement, but, if we can believe our Pentagon generals, it is not safe to
rely on retaliatory and defensive weapons alone. “If they are fighting each other, they
aren’t fighting me,” a warden told me long ago. They are not banding together to
foment revolution either.
Preventing Crime
19. Crime prevention, whether inside or outside a prison, requires more than merely
arresting, convicting, and hurting wrongdoers. There must be preaching and practicing
of brotherly love, racial equality, and forgiveness rather than hate. Crime prevention
also requires positive programs for giving more and more citizens a larger and larger
stake in the economic and political institutions. Penal colonies, whether on the British
model (America, Australia), on the Soviet model (labor camps), or on the model used
by Howard B. Gill in the Norfolk Prison Colony of Massachusetts during the 1920s
(Farer’s model) cannot do these things.
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20. Last winter, when federal and state governments were trying to raise about $10
billion for prison construction, Chief Justice Warren Burger recommended that the
new prisons should be “factories with fences around them” rather than mere “human
warehouses”. The rhetoric is right. If prisons would use inmate labor for production,
imprisonment costs would go down. For that matter, if we repeated statutes that limit
prison industrial production, as the Chief Justice recommended, prisoners might even
be persuaded to build their own new prisons, saving even more money. Who knows,
an occasional prisoner might even acquire conventional work habits, give up a life of
crime, and live happily ever after? As a Wall Street Journal editorial put it on
December 17, 1981, “On the average, it is probably expecting too much of prisons to
do more than segregate criminals as a way of protecting the rest of us. Still, there is
always the individual who would benefit from the opportunities Justice Burger has in
mind.”
21. A half-dozen years before the Chief Justice gave his speech, Canada introduced
a penitentiary industry system modeled on outside industry rather than on traditional
prison factories. Only a handful of inmates have been employed, but the plan is to
build factories at several prisons and to concentrate on profits rather than on training
or rehabilitation. Candidates for jobs must apply in the same manner as they do in
private industry, and must be qualified for the position if they are to obtain it. Hours
of work are similar to those in private industry. Inmates are paid the federal minimum
hourly wage. From their earnings, they pay the prison for room, board, and clothing,
and they also pay income taxes as well as fees for unemployment insurance and the
Canada Pension Plan (social security).
22. Maturation of these “factories with fences around them” should be watched
closely by U.S. officials. Using inmate labor under fair conditions is a promising way
to cut down the costs of punishment. It should be noted, however, that proposals for
prison factories, like proposals for penal colonies, do nothing to challenge either our
practice of punishing so many citizens or the absurd assumptions on which this
practice is based. Every prison and every penal colony, regardless of its program, is a
punitive institution. Every prison and every penal colony, no matter how cheap its
program, is therefore a symbol of a society’s failure to prevent crime by positive,
nonpunitive, interventionist means.
23. Sir Thomas More hurled an angry question at his fellow Englishmen: “What
other thing do you do than make thieves and then punish them?” Now, four and a half
centuries later, too many Americans are responding, “Nothing”.
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Choose the best answer.
1.
What is the main idea in paragraph 1?
a.
A high rate of violent crime will inevitably lead to the adoption of strict
penal laws.
b.
Only the death penalty is likely to deter potential murderers.
c.
Murderers are rarely aware of the consequences of their acts.
d.
Capital punishment is essentially self-defeating.
e.
Since murderers expect to be punished for their deeds, capital
punishment must be enforced.
Mark the statements below as TRUE or FALSE, according to the text. Correct
those that you consider FALSE, so as to make them TRUE. They are related to
paragraphs 2-4.
2.
Crimes of violence abound wherever the courts adopt a lenient attitude.
3.
Harvey Wheeler suggests that the punished criminal will soon mend his ways.
4.
The oppressive atmosphere prevailing in prisons deters criminals from acts of
violence.
5.
The number of American citizens jailed for criminal acts has decreased
considerably over the last ten years.
Answer in your own words.
The next seven questions are all related to paragraphs 5-8.
6.
Who first put forth the idea of jail sentences as an appropriate way of dealing
with criminal offenses?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
7.
How many Americans are likely to be jailed within the next ten years if the
present rate of imprisonment is maintained?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Answer the question below in English.
What is the nature of the dilemma facing the American society in its struggle for
crime prevention (paragraph 6)?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
What particular section of the American public seems to be favouring ever
harsher measures against criminals?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
In what sense do the arguments put forth by the advocates of deterrence,
paragraph 6, agree with the reasonings of economics?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
A closer reading of paragraph 7 would further suggest that the deterrence policy
is in fact based upon a false premise; what is that premise?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
In what sense is the term liberals – paragraph 8 – a misnomer when applied to
contemporary liberals?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
The next four questions are related to paragraphs 9-11.
13. Mention three ways of cutting down the costs of punishment while raising the
cost of crime commission.
a.
b.
c.
]
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14.
15.
16.
Answer the question below in English.
What was the rationale behind the Transportation Act passed by Great Britain in
1718?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
It would appear that the process of settling the continent of Australia gained
momentum in the wake of political events taking place elsewhere; when and
how did it happen?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
When and why did Great Britain give up its policy of deporting criminals?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
17. What would be the immediate consequence of a policy – paragraphs 13-14 –
aimed at establishing penal colonies run by the inmates themselves?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
18.
Answer the question below in English.
What arguments would those prison authorities – paragraphs 15-18 – that are
likely to support the policy of non-interference in the affairs of the inmates use
in their attempt to justify their attitude?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Choose the best answer.
19. Judging by paragraphs 19-20, one of the main faults of the American system of
dealing with crime is that
a.
its treatment of wrongdoers is far too lenient.
b.
it emphasizes the rehabilitation of wrongdoers rather than the
prevention of crime.
c.
it is punitive rather than preventive.
d.
it fails to realize that criminals are pathological personalities.
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20.
Answer the question below in English.
What aspect of penal policy – paragraph 20 – does Chief Justice Warren Burger
stress?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
21. What contributions to society – paragraphs 21-22 – would a penitentiary
industry system make?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________