The Madness of American Incarceration
The Madness of American Incarceration
A Book Review
“Three strikes and you’re out” was supposed to stop crime in its tracks by increasing the consequences of all crimes, petty and otherwise. Stronger penalties were supposed to improve the quality of life for US citizens. Instead, as Dr. Christine Montross documents in her book Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, we have higher prison populations than ever with ever more inmates and fewer happy conclusions.
Dr. Montross is a psychiatrist, not a prison employee, but she conducts evaluations at prisons in order to determine if a prisoner is competent to stand trial. Her experience with clients aligns with the data that show prison does not fix the problem for the people who are in it, nor the citizens that prison is supposed to protect.
While most law enforcement professionals and the general public would agree that there are individuals who cannot be released due to the heinous nature of their crimes and their lack of repentance for their actions, they are the exception. And while personal responsiblity means that crime leads to punishment, the ultimate goal must be to prioritize the positive reentry of those released from prison into their communities.
Most of the people in the prison system are not there because they committed heinous crimes. They are there because before incarceration, people in prison ages 27-42 had an average income of only $19,185, 41% less than non-incarcerated people of a similar age. Poverty changes things. 43% of the prison population experience mental illness. Mental illness makes life more difficult. Trauma and post traumatic stress disorder are positively associated with the Black prison population. Those who are traumatized often traumatize others.
In the case of Angela, nine months pregnant when she stole clothing to resell in order to get the money she needed to buy a carseat, the crime was her first offense. She had to have the carseat to take her baby home. Yet she wasn’t sentenced to probation, community service nor was she connected with an agency that donates car seats. Instead, because she couldn’t pay bail, she gave birth to her baby in jail.
Then there is the case of Danielle who was convicted of helping her husband with his cocaine business and sentenced to three life terms and 30 years when her son was seven years old. Again, first offense.
According to Montross, up to 37% of the US jail population were diagnosed with mental illness before they ever got committed, and one-third of the long-term prison population have been diagnosed with major depression and a quarter of them with bipolar. That’s why they cause problems, because they have problems. For these people especially, as the National Institute of Justice observes, “Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.”
As Montross details, once in the system, people suffering with mental illness or relational difficulties are likely to stay longer because they react inappropriately in the prison milieu, get into altercations with other inmates, or irritate staff due to their lack of ability to conform to the harsh expectations. This in turn leads to them being given more time or solitary confinement.
Montross highlights the results of placing an out-of-control inmate with mental health problems in solitary confinement, which consists of circumstances we already know to be deeply damaging to humans. That’s why it is a severe punishment. It doesn’t solve the problem behaviors. In these cases, “We are rendering the people we hold in solitary confinement less sane.”
As a culture, we are not interested in rehabilitation. Prison does not provide the skills needed for people to come out and stay out. Montross quotes a maximum security prison guard: “The only skill you learn in a place like this is how to be a better criminal when you get out.”
But better options exist. Norway’s correctional system is directed toward giving inmates skills, and the confidence and respect that come with those skills, in order to live well once they’re out. Their recidivism system-wide since this approach was implemented has dropped to 20 percent. Only 20 percent of Norwegian prisoners are arrested in the two years after their release, whereas 44 percent of American prisoners are arrested at least once in the first year after their release.
A powerful revelation of the inside of our overfull prisons, Waiting for an Echo concludes with this: “If we’re wrong about the way we enact corrections, if we’ve locked up our sick and most vulnerable, have punished people not because they’re bad but because they’re ill…if solitary confinement is in fact torture, and we’ve enacted it on 80,000 of our fellow men and women every year, if we’ve taken people capable of doing horrible things and instead of attempting to repair their damaged selves have turned them into people capable of doing far worse…if [these things] turn out to have been the wrong things to do for the wrong reasons with the wrong outcomes, the truth would ravage us.
So better not to look. Better not to consider…Better [to ignore] the lengths that human beings will go to in order to convince themselves that their ill treatment of others is justified—necessary, even.”