Todd R. Clear

Break the incarceration habit

The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America by Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost (NYU Press, $30).

Todd R. Clear and Natash A. Frost are both academics who specialize in criminal justice issues. Using four decades of research—dating back to the birth of this most recent incarnation of our “law-and-order, punish the offenders” approach to criminal justice in the U.S.—they show how badly the plan to simply “lock ‘em show more up” has failed and point a clear way forward that involves rehabilitation and restoration.

It’s more than a timely assessment; dismantling our system of mass incarceration in favor of evidence-based approaches to criminal justice may be the only way that we can prevent crime, rehabilitate criminals, and avoid going bankrupt.

Clear and Frost provide an excellent overview of the current system, with its mandatory sentencing, “three-strikes” terms, and the political focus on placating the American instinct for vengeance as express in punishment. The current state of the prison systems (it’s not one system, obviously, but some political responses to crime—like the aforementioned “three strikes” and mandatory sentencing—do seem to move quickly from state to state) is detailed, and followed with some clear-cut proposals that would lead to more humane—and sane—sentencing and incarceration policies, especially for non-violent offenders.

The Punishment Imperative is an excellent historical overview of how the prison systems got to this point—especially in the way that it makes clear that the problem is not one of criminal justice, but of politics—and, particularly if combined with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, will be an excellent first step toward a public conversation about prison reform.

(Published on 2/2/2014 on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/75358214571/break-the-incarceration-habit-the-pun... show less