Author: Johnny Monsarrat

The NCSC Sentencing Attitudes Survey: A Report on the Findings

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National Center for State Courts, July 2006

The climate of public opinion toward crime and punishment in this country has changed considerably over the past decade. As the national crime rate has declined, crime is less likely to be in the forefront of people’s minds and – with the exception of certain high-profile crimes and cases involving celebrities – is less prominent in media coverage. What had been a frequent polling topic 10 years ago gets much less attention today. Moreover, recent surveys about crime often fail to specifically address public attitudes toward sentencing, or have examined the issue from one particular ideological point of view. The NCSC Sentencing Attitudes Survey, a national poll of 1,502 randomly selected adults, was designed to fill this void by delivering specific, unbiased information about what people think and why. The new survey thoroughly examines the American public’s views toward sentencing and related issues in an objective manner. The new survey was preceded by a review of past survey data. This review revealed that, similar to controversial issues like immigration, abortion, and capital punishment, sentencing is a topic on which public opinion cannot be properly characterized by simply relying on the general measures so commonly used. More specific lines of questioning were developed to dig deeper, clarify previous findings and identify the competing values and concerns underlying sentencing attitudes.

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When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner

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Joan Petersilia, March 20, 2003

Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educational pre-release programs, leaving many all but unemployable. Not surprisingly, the great majority is rearrested, most within six months of their release. What happens when all those sent down the river come back up–and out?

As long as there have been prisons, society has struggled with how best to help prisoners reintegrate once released. But the current situation is unprecedented. As a result of the quadrupling of the American prison population in the last quarter century, the number of returning offenders dwarfs anything in America’s history. What happens when a large percentage of inner-city men, mostly Black and Hispanic, are regularly extracted, imprisoned, and then returned a few years later in worse shape and with dimmer prospects than when they committed the crime resulting in their imprisonment? What toll does this constant “churning” exact on a community? And what do these trends portend for public safety? A crisis looms, and the criminal justice and social welfare system is wholly unprepared to confront it.

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Time Served: The High Cost, Low Return of Longer Prison Terms

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The Pew Charitable Trusts, June 06, 2012

The length of time served in prison has increased markedly over the last two decades, according to a new study by Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project. Prisoners released in 2009 served an average of nine additional months in custody, or 36 percent longer, than offenders released in 1990.

Over the past 40 years, criminal justice policy in the U.S. was shaped by the belief that the best way to protect the public was to put more people in prison. Offenders, the reasoning went, should spend longer and longer time behind bars.

Consequently, offenders have been spending more time in prison. According to a new study by Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project, the length of time served in prison has increased markedly over the last two decades. Prisoners released in 2009 served an average of nine additional months in custody, or 36 percent longer, than offenders released in 1990.

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Liberal But Not Stupid: Meeting the Promise of Downsizing Prisons

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Joan Petersilia & Francis T. Cullen, 2 Stanford Journal of Criminal Law and Policy, June 23, 2014

A confluence of factors — a perfect storm — interfered with the intractable rise of imprisonment and contributed to the emergence of a new sensibility defining continued mass imprisonment as non-sustainable. In this context, reducing America’s prisons has materialized as a viable possibility. For progressives who have long called for restraint in the use of incarceration, the challenge is whether the promise of downsizing can be met. The failure of past reforms aimed at decarceration stand as a sobering reminder that good intentions do not easily translate into good results. Further, a number of other reasons exist for why meaningful downsizing might well fail (e.g., the enormous scale of imprisonment that must be confronted, limited mechanisms available to release inmates, lack of quality alternative programs). Still, reasons also exist for optimism, the most important of which is the waning legitimacy of the paradigm of mass incarceration, which has produced efforts to lower inmate populations and close institutions in various states. The issue of downsizing will also remain at the forefront of correctional discourse because of the court-ordered reduction in imprisonment in California. This experiment is ongoing, but is revealing the difficulty of downsizing; the initiative appears to be producing mixed results (e.g., reductions in the state’s prison population but increased in local jail populations). In the end, successful downsizing must be “liberal but not stupid.” Thus, reform efforts must be guided not only by progressive values but also by a clear reliance on scientific knowledge about corrections and on a willingness to address the pragmatic issues that can thwart good intentions. Ultimately, a “criminology of downsizing” must be developed to foster effective policy interventions.

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Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons

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Alan Elsner, 2004

Gates of Injustice is an extraordinarily compelling expose of the American prison system now completely updated in this new paperback editon: how more than 2,000,000 Americans came to be incarcerated; what it’s really like on the inside; what it’s like for the families left on the outside; and how an enormous “prison-industrial complex” has grown to support and promote imprisonment in place of virtually every other alternative. Reuters journalist Alan Elsner shows how prisons really work, how race-based gangs are able to control institutions and prey on weaker inmates, and how an epidemic of abuse and brutality has exploded across American prisons. Readers will discover the plight of 300,000 mentally ill people in prisons, virtually abandoned with little medical treatment. They’ll also meet the fastest growing segment of the prison population: women. Readers go inside “supermax” prisons that cut inmates off from all human contact, and uncover the official corruption and brutality that riddles jail systems in major cities like Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. Finally, they’ll learn prisons accelerate the spread of infectious diseases throughout the broader society–just one of the many ways the prison epidemic touches everyone, even if they’ve never met anyone who’s gone to jail. 

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Recidivism Of Prisoners Released In 1983

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Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., Bernard Shipley, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 1, 1989

Of the 108,580 persons released from prisons in 11 States in 1983, representing more than half of all released State prisoners that year, an estimated 62.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.8% were reconvicted, and 41.4% returned to prison or jail. Before their release from prison, the prisoners had been arrested and charged with an average of more than 12 offenses each; nearly two-thirds had been arrested at least once in the past for a violent offense; and two-thirds had previously been in jail or prison. By yearend 1986 those prisoners who were rearrested averaged an additional 4.8 new charges. An estimated 22.7% of all prisoners were rearrested for a violent offense within 3 years of their release.

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Tracking State Prison Growth in 50 States

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Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative, May 28, 2014

Over the last three decades of the 20th century, the United States engaged in an unprecedented prison-building boom that has given our nation the highest incarceration rate in the world. Among people with experience in criminal justice policy matters, the “hockey stick curve” of the national incarceration rate is well known; but until now more detailed data on the incarceration rates for individual states has been harder to come by.This briefing fills the gap with a series of more than 100 graphs showing prison growth (and sometimes decline) for every state in the nation to encourage states to confront how their criminal policy choices undermine our national welfare.

Ending the U.S. experiment with mass incarceration requires us to focus on state policy because individual states are the most active incarcerating bodies in the nation.

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Behind Bars: Surviving Prison

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Jeffrey Ian Ross, May 1, 2002

A judge hands down a stretch in a local, state, or federal prison. It’s time for some serious life lessons. With the crime rates soaring in the United States and the prison population growing faster than at any other time in American history, staying alive and well – both mentally and physically – is tougher than ever.

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Quick Facts

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Families Against Mandatory Minimums, 2014

Since Congress created mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes in the 1980s, the federal prison population has grown from 24,000 prisoners to over 218,000 prisoners – the largest prison system in the country.

The United States has more people behind bars – 2.3 million – than any other country in the world.

One in every 100 Americans is in prison or jail.

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