Perspective: Five myths about prisons
By John Pfaff John Pfaff is a professor of law at Fordham University. He is the author of"Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform." May 17 Criminal justice policy has secured a prominent place in the Democratic presidential primary race, with several candidates offering plans to reform the way Americans punish.
The share of those in state prison for committing violence is even greater than 55 percent, however. Prisoners are classified by the most serious offense for which they are convicted, not arrested or charged.
Myth No. 3 Long sentences are causing our prison population to age. It is true that the average age of prisoners has increased in recent years, as has the number of inmates who are older than 55 or even 65. The common explanation is “ultralong sentences,” as the Economist put it, or “the fallout of an era of long sentences,” as a Nation article said — people serving very lengthy stints are growing old and dying in prison.
Myth No. 4 A recidivist is a career criminal. “Once a criminal, always a criminal?” was the headline on a CBS News article about recidivism rates. And in its 2011 decision in Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court pointed to recidivism statistics to claim that California’s prisons don’t rehabilitate but instead “produce additional criminal behavior.”
The overcounting issue is less immediately obvious but arguably far more important. If someone shifts from committing one robbery per day to one per month, he could eventually be reconvicted and classified as a recidivist. That the amount of harm he caused fell by about 95 percent is immaterial. Ours is a binary metric; any one failure counts as recidivism. It’s a metric inconsistent with what we know about the rocky reality of desistance.
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