Small is de-uglified: on how to dramatically improve the U.S. prison system

From pages 425 to 435 of Bill James’s sprawling, unpredictable (but brilliant) book Popular Crime, James outlines a dramatic reform of the prison system that is, in my opinion, exactly correct.

It would be a huge step forward: in terms of crime reduction, fear-of-crime reduction (not at all the same thing), in-prison behavior, and the integration of former criminals into society. I say that as a guy who’s come up with dramatic prison-reform schemes of my own, purely as a hobby, btw (my profession is teaching): his scheme is better than mine ever were. Because my forthcoming review is struggling not to be as sprawling and unwieldy as the original book, I’ve decided to write up his proposal here.

In very short form:

* No prison should be allowed to exceed 24 inmates. (The average jail/ prison/ juvenile facility contains around 400 inmates now.)

* Prisons should be sorted into ten levels, from most punitive to most halfway-house-like, allowing inmates to be sorted by risk factor. Every level of prison should be clearly more pleasant than the level below it: so that behaving well carries deeply felt rewards, and behaving badly results in immediate suffering.

* Prisons should also, above the most punitive levels, be arranged to train prisoners in their choice of sets of skills, talents, and career paths.

* Inevitably, the low-harshness prisons would be located in populated areas: with 15 to 20 times as many prisons in existence, you’d end up with prisons occupying floors of big office buildings, for example. But being small and full of not-terrifying people, this would be a good thing. It would allow family members to visit easily, and allow people from the community to come teach the prisoners, or play concerts for them, or otherwise help integrate them back into the world — things many people would do already if it didn’t involve long drives into bleak areas in order to visit deeply unpleasant buildings.

Why is this such a great idea? For several inter-related reasons.

1. Motivation. The current prison system tosses hundreds of people together: some of them ordinary people who’ve just wandered astray or cracked under pressure, some of them genuinely horrible human beings. In that kind of mixture, the genuinely horrible human beings have power: unless they’re in pure solitary confinement (a form of torture), they have chances to bully and intimidate other prisoners, who are then motivated to become scarier, tougher in return. Also, career criminals have chances to teach more incidental prisoners their skills and attitudes, and tell stories of their trade.

The straight world’s hope is that because prison is unpleasant, prisoners will be desperate to never ever return. But because prison is unpleasant, prisoners are also motivated to look down on, or become angry at, the straight world that chose to make it so: anger and contempt that are abetted by new skills and a fiercer self-presentation. Also, the straight world is increasingly difficult for ex-prisoners to make a life in: private businesses resist hiring them, and (a separate complaint for a different essay) the government isn't there to provide living-wage employment for anyone willing to work. So it’s *hard* to blend back into society even with a proper attitude. Prison, while awful, is regimented and orderly: too many ex-convicts are happy to come back.

Contrast this with Bill James’s system. If you’re in with the worst of the worst, your best chance of survival isn’t to be as scary as they are, or to learn their secrets — you’re in solitary 23 hours a day anyway, with an hour of exercise. Your best bet is to *get the hell away from them*, by meeting your behavioral goals.

And if you’re in the upper levels of the system, you’re starting to interact again with the straight world: on pleasant, cooperative terms, unless you want to plunge some levels down again. By level four you’re working; by level six or seven, you probably can take a bit of pride and ownership in your labor. By the time you’re at level ten, you have a job on the outside anyway. You’re ready to leave, and if you behave well, you’ll do so. If you don’t, there’s no more than 24 of you in the prison, so somebody’s going to figure it out.

2. Cost. Bill James states that liberals raised a big fuss when the U.S. prison population reached a million people, and that conservatives were sensible in ignoring them: there’s now 2.3 million Americans in prison, which is still less than 1% of the population. Think of any large population you’ve ever dealt with, a decent-sized school or employer for example, or a crowd at a sports event: do you actually think it’s far-fetched that in a randomly-selected group of 100, there’s at least one who oughtta be kept away from the rest? I can’t answer for you, but my answer is “heck, that sounds low”.

The problem is that prison is tremendously expensive, averaging around $28,000 per inmate per year. A huge reason why is the bureaucratic necessity that every prisoner be guarded as carefully as the riskiest, most far-gone person in the prison. Another reason is that larger facilities, being more complex, are automatically more susceptible to breakdown.

In small, graded prisons, the lowest levels would still be quite expensive per prisoner — which makes sense, since you’re protecting people from deadly menaces. But the higher levels would be very different, in the same way that the best-disciplined classrooms usually look, to a visitor, like ones where the teacher’s not doing much of any discipline at all. They would be significantly cheaper.

3. The side benefits of cutting costs. For one, the money saved could be redirected into any number of happier social goods. You’ve heard, I’m sure, the (generally true) argument that it costs more to keep a person in prison than to put them through a year of state university: if we reduced the cost of (most) prison, logically we could increase the amount spent on doing university right. Or community college, or pre-kindergarten.

But more directly… you read true-crime stories, and you’ll normally see cases where the justice system had someone in their clutches, and let them go. For example, right now I'm reading Jeff Guinn's Manson. Charlie Manson was in and out of prison for years. When he was paroled for the last time prior to creating the Manson Family and teaching it to murder, his prison psychologist *strongly* recommended against parole. Even Manson himself, in a final-week moment of panicked honestly, wrote to tell the parole board he didn’t think he could make it on the outside. But there was only so much room in prison, and all the incentive was to push him out. Make room, make room.

I don’t know that James’s system would need to encompass more prisoners. By creating a more sensible prison-to-reality pipeline, it might well reduce the number of people held in prison at any given time. But because it is far easier to build (or renovate) a home for 24 inmates than 400, it would create the flexibility to increase or decrease numbers in response to actual need.

Long sentences that aren’t needed, in rough conditions that aren’t needed, are a tragedy. But so are lives lost when a criminal is pushed out, for accounting reasons, to hurt or kill again. James’s system would dramatically reduce the frequency of both cases. It deserves to be brought, step by step, into reality.