Contemporary Corrections

A Critical Thinking Approach

Rick Ruddell, G. Larry Mays, L. Thomas Winfree Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429671609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Sentenze

Contemporary Corrections: A Critical Thinking Approach introduces readers to the essential elements of the US corrections system without drowning students in a sea of nonessential information. Unbiased and accessible, the text includes coverage of the history of corrections, alternatives to incarceration, probation/parole, race/ethnicity/gender issues in corrections, re-entry into the community, and more. The authors' unparalleled practical approach, reinforced by contemporary examples, illuminates the role corrections plays in our society.

The authors have reinvigorated earlier work with additional content on international comparative data to increase our understanding of how prison officials in other nations have developed different types of responses to the problems that challenge every US correctional administrator, a new chapter on correctional personnel, and an integration of race and ethnicity issues throughout the book.

Unrivaled in scope, this book offers undergraduates a concise but comprehensive introduction to corrections with textual materials and assignments designed to encourage students' critical thinking skills.

Chapter 1

Introduction to Corrections

OUTLINE

• Introduction
• Overview of American Correctional Systems
• Philosophies of Punishment
• Direct and Indirect Costs of Imprisonment
• Five Trends Affecting Corrections Today
• Summary

OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter you will able to:

• Describe the extent of correctional populations
• Explain how six philosophies of punishment underlie the operations of community and institutional corrections
• Describe how vested interests influence the operations of correctional systems
• Describe the differences between the direct and indirect costs of correctional interventions
• Describe five key trends shaping corrections today

Case Study

Incarcerating Deadbeat Dads

On any given day there are tens of thousands of jail inmates being held for not paying their fines, fees, or failing to make their court-ordered payments, including child support. We lack a national estimate of those numbers but the National Conference of State Legislatures (2019, para. 5) cites one study showing that 13% of South Carolina’s jail population “were behind bars for civil contempt related to nonpayment of child support.” Most of these inmates are poor and unemployed, and unable to make their court-ordered payments. Writing about deadbeat dads in Philadelphia jails, Melamed (2017, para. 11) cites a lawyer who says that “it was routine for parents found in contempt to be incarcerated 30, 60, or 90 days. Even six months is not unheard of.”

Wesley Bell, a reformist prosecutor, took over the role of district attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri in January 2019 and one of the first policy changes he introduced was stopping the prosecutions of individuals who were not paying their court-ordered child support because they have no money. Prior to Bell’s appointment, about 500 St. Louis parents were prosecuted every year for this offense, and some were incarcerated or ended up with felony convictions. He says that situation is like the English debtors’ prisons from hundreds of years ago where individuals were imprisoned until their debts were paid. Bell questions the wisdom of incarcerating these people as they are unable to earn any income and being saddled with a felony conviction for failing to pay child support creates a barrier to their lifetime employment prospects.

Bell’s policy change has been controversial as many women are fearful that they will not receive their court-ordered payments. The St. Louis County Police Association has waged a public war with the prosecutor over this issue, and it has argued that “The decriminalization of failure to pay child support puts livelihoods of hardworking single parents in jeopardy” (as cited in Byers, 2019). Nonpayment of child support is also a significant national issue, and there are over $100 billion in unpaid court-ordered support payments.

This issue of incarcerating individuals unable to pay fines, fees, or court-ordered payments is drawing more attention as many believe that is an inappropriate use of custody, and some say it is an example of a war on the poor. Awareness of these cases has resulted in Missouri’s Republican Attorney General introducing legislation making it difficult to hold an individual in jail for debts, and he said that “De facto debtors’ prisons have no place in Missouri, and I am proud to stand up against a system that seeks to treat its poorer citizens as ATMs” (Erickson, 2019, para. 3).

Critical Questions

1. Are there other alternatives, both within and outside the justice system, to ensure single parents receive their court-ordered support?
2. What is the benefit to taxpayers, to hold a deadbeat dad for six months because he cannot pay his court-ordered payments?
3. Why would prosecutors and police officers oppose the introduction of policies intended to reduce incarceration?

Introduction

What comes to mind when you hear the word corrections? Do you think about prisons with massive stone walls and the inmates portrayed in movies and television series such as Orange Is the New Black? Perhaps you think about inmates in orange jumpsuits picking up litter alongside a highway or prisoners in white uniforms working in a field. Do those images accurately reflect contemporary corrections?

The answer is yes, to a degree. But today corrections encompasses more than the custody supervision of convicted offenders inside or outside the fences of a secure facility. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there were 6.8 million individuals, or about one in every 36 adults, under some type of correctional supervision in 2017. Most of them were serving probationary sentences in the community (3.7 million) while another 875,000 were on parole (Kaeble, 2018). Almost 1.5 million inmates were held in federal or state prison systems (Bronson & Carson, 2019), and almost 750,000 were in local jails (Zeng, 2019). Others were held in immigration detention, military confinement facilities, and a growing number of ex-prisoners are civilly confined, which means they are held past their release dates because of their potential risk to the public. Tens of thousands of youths were also held in detention and custody facilities throughout the country. Figure 1.1 shows the entire US correctional population from 1980 to 2017.

FIGURE 1.1
Total Community and Institutional Correctional Population, 1980–2017.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics (2019).

PHOTO 1.1
The drawing captures a common moment in the life of a nineteenth-century debtor in London, England, who, without the personal resources to maintain himself in debtor’s prison, must rely on the charity of others, in this case a small boy. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

Probation. Parole. Prisons. Jails. These are critical components of corrections in the twenty-first century and every nation holds individuals accused of committing crimes or have been convicted and sentenced to a community or custody sentence. What differentiates the United States from other nations is the sheer number of people under correctional supervision, and we lead the world in the number of persons living behind bars. While the world’s average incarceration rate is about 150 persons per 100,000 residents, the United States incarcerates 655 per 100,000 residents (Walmsley, 2018, p. 2). The extensive use of custody has been called mass incarceration, and a growing number of scholars are now using the term mass probation to describe how America has the highest rates of probation in the world as well (see Phelps, 2017). Probationers and parolees who violate the conditions of their probation orders or releases contribute to these high jail and prison populations.

Being a world leader in the use of punishment has implications for American society. Throughout this book we describe the costs and benefits of an approach to crime control based on mass imprisonment and mass probation. We point out who loses and who benefits when various crime control strategies are carried out. Ultimately, these practices shape the operations of the entire justice system. Regardless of whether high imprisonment practices are an effective crime reduction approach or not, we all pay for these policy choices in higher taxes. There are also indirect costs to incarcerating so many individuals, including losses to individuals, families, and communities.

In this chapter we explore the philosophical and practical underpinnings of contemporary corrections. In order to gain a better understanding of our nation’s formal response to criminals, we provide a brief overview of US corrections and examine the philosophies that provide the foundation for “correcting” people convicted of committing crimes. We find that the approaches we have developed to control crime are very costly and we introduce the topics of the direct and indirect costs of corrections, and that section is followed by a brief overview of five trends affecting corrections today.

Overview of American Correctional Systems

The following section contains an overview of correctional systems that provide a foundation to better understand some of the issues presented in the next three chapters. When considering the different correctional interventions used in the United States, we must remember they are delivered by a range of federal, state, and local governments, and in some cases private corporations are paid to supervise probationers or parolees living in the community or in correctional facilities. As a result, there are hundreds of different approaches to delivering correctional interventions and they are administered b...