Read an Excerpt
Introduction
In early 2014 I was invited to breakfast by Neil Barsky, a journalist turned investor turned philanthropist, who had an audacious proposition. Neil planned to start a nonprofit news organization to focus attention on our broken criminal justice system. The Marshall Project, which he named for the civil rights giant and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, would assemble an independent team of reporters and editors to investigate the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. To maximize its impact, it would share the work with other news organizations. He was looking for an editor in chief.
I’d spent thirty years at the New York Times as a correspondent, editor, and, most recently, op-ed columnist, but had never covered criminal justice, unless you count a few months long ago on the night cops beat for The Oregonian. So before accepting Neil’s offer, I did a little reporting, which marked the beginning of an education that continues to this day.
My crash course in criminal justice taught me that this country imprisons people more copiously than almost any other place on Earth. Some countries, notably including China and North Korea, do not fully disclose their prison populations, so America may not actually hold the dubious distinction of first place. But there is ample justification for calling what we do in America “mass incarceration.” Our incarceration rate per 100,000 population, which includes adults serving time in state and federal prisons and those awaiting trial or doing short time in county jails, is roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times England’s, six times Canada’s, nine times Germany’s, and seventeen times Japan’s. Our captive population is disproportionately Black and brown.
Much of the public debate was focused on the “mass” in mass incarceration, a growing consensus that we lock up too many people for too long. There was also considerable agreement on how to reduce the incarcerated population—if we can muster the political will. We can make some relatively minor crimes—starting with low-level drug offenses—non-crimes. We can divert people to mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service. We can abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage prosecutors and judges to apply the least severe punishment appropriate under the circumstances. We can raise the age at which accused youngsters are subject to adult punishment. We can give compassionate release to old and infirm inmates who are unlikely to pose a danger. We can reduce the use of cash bail, which traps the poor in the modern equivalent of debtors’ prison.
In fact, the incarcerated population in this country has been in a gradual but steady decline since a peak in 2008—from 2.3 million to 1.8 million in 2020, according to data compiled by the Vera Institute of Justice. That includes an unprecedented 14 percent drop in 2020, attributed in part to early releases and locked-down courts during the coronavirus pandemic.
States have demonstrated that they can cut prison populations without jeopardizing safety. In the decade ending in 2017, thirty-four states, red and blue, simultaneously reduced incarceration and crime rates. Addressing the “mass” could also mean prisoners left behind would be less subject to overcrowding, which contributes to explosive violence and, as the 2020 plague year demonstrated, leaves prisons more vulnerable to rampant contagion.
This book examines the “incarceration” part of mass incarceration. Our prisons are not the most transparent institutions, and out of sight too often means out of mind. But the American way of incarceration is a shameful waste of lives and money, feeding a pathological cycle of poverty, community dysfunction, crime, and hopelessness. What is the alternative? Can we use our prisons to improve the chances that those caught in the criminal justice system emerge—and upward of 95 percent of them will emerge—with some hope of productive lives?
For more than two hundred years, there has been a tension between a punitive streak and a faith in rehabilitation, between treating prisoners as incorrigible Others to be incapacitated and shamed and, alternatively, viewing them as capable of restoration, even redemption. Opinions about how we should use prisons have ranged from the mean-spirited “no-frills prison” movement of the 1990s, which proposed to take away such amenities as television and hot meals, to, at the other end of the spectrum, calls for abolishing prisons altogether.
Assuming that outright abolition is not in our near future, what kind of incarceration do we want for those we’re not yet ready to set free? What’s prison for?
I begin the inquiry by recounting how that question has bedeviled our politics over the decades, the historical context for our current debate about mass incarceration. I continue with a review of the research into how well incarceration accomplishes its ostensible purposes – punishment, incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation. The rest of the book examines attempts—some familiar, some experimental—to assure that people return from prison better equipped than when they arrived for the challenges life presents. It draws on what I learned during my five years as editor of the Marshall Project, on the rich reporting of my colleagues there, and on roughly a year of conversations with experts, advocates, and the men and women who live and work behind bars. It is a work of journalism, not social science or political advocacy, but I have searched both science and politics for credible evidence of what works—meaning what serves the legitimate cause of public safety while treating the incarcerated as fellow human beings and future neighbors.
Like millions of Americans, I have family members who have been victims of violent crime, including my wife, whose mother was murdered in New York City in1983. I understand the yearning for retribution. But a humane society cannot be driven solely by anger.
