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The UK and the USA incarcerate a higher proportion of their populations than other comparable countries. Despite more than a decade of generally decreasing crime rates, incarceration rates have continued to rise. Is incarceration the best way to spend criminal justice resources? We would argue not — nor is it a worthy approach to justice in supposedly free societies.
Introduction
This book aims to capture the birth and early history of a new movement in criminal and social justice in both the USA and the UK: Justice Reinvestment. At its heart, Justice Reinvestment (JR) postulates that it is more economically efficient to prevent criminality in a neighbourhood than it is to try to live with crime and the consequences of crime. This holistic approach locates JR within economic and political debates about criminal justice. However, the breadth of its vision means that it also touches upon broader debates about social justice and the type of society we want to live in.
Where we are
The clink
The citizenry of the United States of America and the United Kingdom — once the “leaders of the free world” — are among the most highly incarcerated on the planet. The growth in incarceration over the last three decades has been unforeseen and unplanned. In the USA of the late 1970s, A World Without Prisons was envisaged quite realistically by Dodge (1979), among others (see also Scull 1977, Sommer 1976 and Mitford 1973). The policy of “decarceration”, according to Scull (1977), was a product of the social organisation of “advanced capitalism” and the associated rise of welfare.
Notwithstanding, over the last two to three decades the USA prison population has tripled. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (1999), the total number of inmates in state or federal prisons in mid-1985 was 744,208. This had increased to 1,802,496 by mid-1998 (ibid.). By the beginning of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were incarcerated — 1,596,127 in state or federal prisons and another 723,131 in local jails (Pew Center on the States 2008).
In their 2008 report, the Pew Center also noted that America was the global leader in the rate of incarceration, outpacing South Africa and Iran. The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. According to the Pew Center, in 2008, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates (Pew Center on the States 2008: 5). The UK, like the USA, has seen the prison population rise seemingly inexorably over the same period. In 1991 the prison population in England and Wales was 44,800 (Hicks and Allen 1999); on 22 June 2012, according to the Ministry of Justice (2012a), the prison population in England and Wales was 86,456.
Yet, for all this emphasis on incarceration, there is no evidence that the populations of the USA or the UK feel markedly safer. For example, in the UK, research by Ipsos MORI (reported in Duffy et al. 2007) shows that the proportion of the public confident in the government's cracking down on crime fell from 63 per cent in 1997 to 27 per cent in 2007. This occurred despite increases in criminal justice expenditure and decreases in crime rates.
This emphasis on incarceration has occurred despite the lack of evidence that the use of prison discourages criminality (Nagin et al. 2009). Indeed, Nagin et al. note that incarceration might have a criminogenic, rather than a deterrent effect on some offenders — that is, they emerge from prison more likely to commit crimes than when they were first sentenced.
The think
If the social organisation of “advanced capitalism” and the associated rise of welfare led to the policy of “decarceration” (Scull 1977), has a reversal in this “advance” and a decline in welfare, justified by a social-economic paradigm which emphasises individuality and self-centred behaviour at the expense of society, led to an emphasis on incarceration? This certainly is the conclusion of Beckett and Western (2001), who find high levels of incarceration are associated with weak welfare systems in the USA. They suggest that the rise of an economic paradigm based on individuality and self-interest has seen the state's response to social marginality shift from welfare support to incarceration. See also Cavadino and Dignan (2006) in this context.
As the so-called neo-liberal paradigm came to dominate thinking on social and economic policy, so it became increasingly influential within thinking about crime and criminal justice. Thus, Rational Choice theory, when applied to thinking about crime, began to suggest that all of a nation's citizens (now categorised as economic agents) have the potential for criminality and will commit offences if they can get away with it. This is first set out formally in the analysis of Becker (1968). Becker's model suggests a system of deterrence through detection and incarceration as the standard state response to crime — though he also emphasises that fines may be imposed for lesser offences, the expected cost of the fine, ideally, being greater than the expected return on criminal behaviour.
On top of this, the public's increasing fear of crime, based in part on the media's portrayal of the problem, has led to “a political arms race in the field of crime and punishment” (Justice Committee 2010: 92), where each party and politician tries to outdo the other. There are major political costs of being seen to be soft on crime (The Columbus Dispatch 2008). This fear is compounded by the prevailing paradigm; we have come to believe that our fellow citizens are potential criminals, held in check only through constant vigilance and the threat of sanctions.
There is, however, some justification for the UK's reliance on prisons. Indeed, compared to our European neighbours, we are not especially punitive. In the UK, we lock up a higher proportion of our population because we have a higher rate of crime (Civitas1 2010, HEUNI 2010). Paradoxically, it is perhaps promotion of the neo-liberal economic paradigm and the associated decline in community efficacy which has influenced populations to be more criminogenic (Reiner 2005). In other words, the state has arguably undermined social capacity and replaced it with prison capacity.
The brink
Whether or not the rate of incarceration in the UK and the USA is justified, it is apparent that it is no longer affordable. In the UK In 2007, the government spent approximately 2.5 per cent of GDP on public order and safety, the highest of all countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Duffy et al. 2007). Spending has been increasing over recent years. The total budget for the Ministry of Justice for 2009–2010 was just over £10 billion (Ministry of Justice 2009), and the National Offender Management System (NOMS) budget, from which the cost of prisons is met, is approximately £4 billion of this. These costs are likely to rise in the short to medium term (Justice Committee 2010).
Expenditure on corrections in the USA has also increased rapidly over recent decades: total state spending rose from $12 billion in 1987 to $49 billion in 2007 (Pew Center on the States 2008). Henrichson and Delaney (2012) estimate that the average per-inmate cost in the USA is $31,286, although the range was very wide, from $14,603 in Kentucky to $60,076 in New York. In the UK, costs are equally high. According to The American Prospect (2003: unnumbered) it is “neither just nor fiscally possible” to lock up every first-time offender for life.
Back from the brink
If you can't go on the same way, try a different way! In criminal justice, we suggest this way is Justice Reinvestment. The motivating force for the early development of JR was the financial constraint imposed by a burgeoning criminal justice sector in the UK and the USA. Ironically, the same forces which motivated increasing criminal justice budgets have undermined the ability of the state to pay. The current approach to crime is largely ineffective and inefficient, and has little evidence to support it. On the other hand, JR cuts to the heart of the problem by seeking to reduce crime rates and re-offending rates effectively, efficiently and, through evaluation, evidentially.
In this respect, JR isn't a way forward, it is a way out!
In the remainder of this chapter, we briefly summarise the contents of this book, in which we hope to move on the debate about criminal justice and suggest a more effective, more efficient and more just approach to criminal and social justice.
About this book
JR is an approach that can be and has been applied in both the adult and youth justice systems. This book concentrates on the adult criminal justice system. Before we get to JR we need to set out some of the relevant context, and we turn to this in Chapter 2. An essential part of the context for JR is sharply rising prison numbers on both sides of the Atlantic, leading in the USA to the claim that one in a hundred adult Americans is behind bars (Pew Center on the States 2008).
Despite a decade of prosperity in both the USA and the UK, some communities, and some groups within communities, remain relatively disadvantaged and produce a disproportionate number of the people who end up in the criminal justice system. In the current economic crisis, continuing to invest in more prison beds is not an option, and new solutions are needed. However, developments in criminal justice and criminal justice reform must take place within the context of the current structure of the criminal justice system, encompassing the range of organisations and interests responsible for developing criminal justice policy and commissioning and delivering services. These structures in the USA are very different from those in the UK, although in some respects they are becoming more similar.
In Chapter 3 we attempt to answer the question “What is JR?” We begin to examine its development, refecting the substantial interest that JR has been receiving from policy-makers, practitioners and researchers on both sides of the Atlantic. There is some evidence that JR has been successful in the USA, but relatively little formal evaluation of the USA experience has taken place. Interest in the UK is growing rapidly, but implementation of JR in the more complex policy landscape of the UK presents fresh challenges, and further methodological development will be needed — which will, in turn, be of interest to USA readers.
Arguably, the version of JR dominant in the UK policy dialogue is fairly narrow and focussed primarily on re-offending by individual offenders. This is a departure from the original USA vision, which made stronger links between criminal justice, community safety and wider economic and social justice. To some extent, this may be due to the different context in the USA, where social welfare systems are arguably less developed, and JR represented a means of bringing additional state and federal (criminal justice) resources to bear on social welfare issues. A challenge for the present book is to explore whether this broader vision is relevant to the UK and how it might be further developed to ensure its relevance.
In Chapter 4 we examine some of the existing theories which underpin JR. While JR, with its focus on social justice, is a more universal approach than rehabilitation, it is broadly based on “prehabilitation” and rehabilitation — that is, the reduction of both offending and re-offending. Given that reducing re-offending has been the main policy focus in the UK and an emerging policy aim in the US, we begin to outline our theoretical justification for JR by considering Ward and Maruna's (2007) rehabilitation framework. However, an approach to JR that includes investing in measures to prevent or reduce offending (as opposed to re-offending) may also draw implicitly on developmental criminology and/or the importance of the offender's “life course”.
Given that the early underlying principles of JR concentrated on the role of communities and social inclusion, we also examine JR in relation to one of the most influential concepts to emerge from recent sociological theory and research, that of social capacity (Putnam 2000). We complete Chapter 4 with a detailed review of the type of interventions deployed in the USA and the UK which constitute JR, categorising them in relation to their impact on different points in the criminal justice system: arrest, pre-trial, case processing, sentencing, discharge from prison (known as “re-entry” in the US) and community supervision.
JR relies on a detailed understanding of the demands placed on the criminal justice systems and associated social welfare services, with an understanding of the costs and a way of estimating the savings to be derived from investment decisions, both actual savings and averted savings (as noted by La Vigne et al. 2010). In Chapter 5, we review the types of data that are required for this understanding, and how they are used, making a distinction between two processes: justice analysis, understanding who is involved in which parts of the criminal justice system, when, for how long, and why; and justice mapping, use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to link together criminal justice expenditure and the neighbourhoods where these resources are deployed. We also consider the challenges involved in data collection, data sharing, data integration and data access. The critical challenge which embraces all of this is the capacity and capability of government and local agencies engaged in JR initiatives to make effective use of data, which must therefore be available in a timely fashion so as to inform investment decisions and to enable the management of performance.
Given the impact of the economic downturn, and subsequent reductions in public expenditure on the shaping of criminal justice policy, it is perhaps no coincidence that JR, in particular its close reliance on economics, has found favour with policy-makers. In Chapter 6 we argue that understanding the cost-drivers in criminal justice systems can lead to an understanding of the potential savings that can be made from JR.
To illustrate this point, we consider a range of economic methods that can be used in JR, including: cost analysis, which focusses just on the cost of an intervention; Cost Benefit Analysis, which places a monetary value on the consequences of an intervention; and economic modelling as developed by Aos and colleagues (2006) in Washington State, which offers criminal justice system investment portfolios based on modelling future costs and benefts. We also examine the challenges inherent in this economic-theory-led endeavour.
In Chapter 7 we consider an important conundrum about the extent to which models of JR can and should be “evidence-based”. While one might consider this a rhetorical question, it is not altogether the simple proposition it may at first seem. In this chapter we join the debate about what constitutes evidence and how it is used. We consider the role of politicians, policy-makers, practitioners, the media and the public in influencing and shaping the use of evidence to make decisions about what approaches to adopt in addressing issues of criminal justice. In the USA it appears that the use of evidence has enabled radical reforms to state and county criminal justice systems. For both the USA and the UK we try to determine whether evidence-based policy-making is possible or whether in fact, it is policy-based evidence-making that holds sway.
In Chapter 4, having tried to construct a theory of JR based on existing published work, we conclude that JR has been theoretically under-developed. In Chapter 8 we start the process of developing a new theory of JR. Our starting point is to recognise that one of the things that makes JR distinct is its recourse to economic thinking...
