It’s well-known in criminal and legal circles that when first-time criminals are jailed, many times they learn tips and tricks from the “old hands” about how to get better at being a criminal.
(Note: I’m sure that at least one Doper will pipe up and say, “Well-known by whom?” The fact is, it IS well-known. If you have somehow managed to go through life without picking up that piece of knowledge, you can jolly well look it up for yourself.)
I’ve considered the possibility of reducing this phenomenon, and hopefully reducing recidivism at the same time, by the expedient of having separate prisons/jails for first-time offenders.
I’m fairly certain that in many cases, there would be no need to build any new facilities; I think that just shuffling the prison population around would be sufficient. But even if building a new building was necessary to make this work, I think that the benefit to society would be worth it.
If we could persuade criminals–on their first time through the system–that it would be a good idea to not commit any other crimes, it would help considerably in the long run. An essential part of this is separating first-time offenders from career criminals.
Of course, they could also learn tricks from their fellow first timers, “Oh you got out of the bank successfully? Well I managed to not leave any fingerprints or be seen on camera but they caught me leaving the building”
Not a stupid idea. It’s true simply putting first timers in the same place can still lead to them comparing notes and developing a relatively flawless paradigm for their particular specialty. However, I wonder if a more intensive effort to actually reform them would have more success in such a facility without an established prisoner culture to undermine it.
To some extent, we already do. At sentencing, a person’s “priors” are taken into account, and if a person has committed a first time offense, they are much more likely to be given a period of intensive probation than jail time.
Of course this is riddled with exceptions. Some crimes are so serious that even if it is your first time, you can expect incarceration. Even, then, though, prisons are usually segregated, so that nonviolent offenders are usually not mixed with violent offenders, and people who will be getting out in a relatively short amount of time aren’t likely mixing with “lifers”.
This is commonly stated, but that doesn’t make it true. What is meant by “better criminal”? If it involves skill in avoiding capture, then one would expect first-time convicts to be less likely to return to prison because they have learned how to better evade the police. In reality, though, each successive term in prison increases the chances of returning. So whatever they’re learning from each other, it’s not helping to commit better crimes.
At least from what I read, the “better criminal” comes from the fact they make connections in prison so when they get out they already know who to seek out to continue their illegal enterprises. The prison basically acts as a job interview for certain criminals because it allows them to gain others trust.
The OP’s program has been tried. Lots of programs have been tried.
But you have to be realistic; people don’t just happen to wake up in prison one morning. Getting sent to prison is based on a lot of bad choices (and a lack of good opportunities) that occurred years before the person arrived in prison.
It’s a hundred times easier to turn a person’s life around and stop them from going to prison the first time than it is to fix their life so they don’t go to prison a second time. I’m not saying we should give up on prisoners (it was, after all, my career) but we should remember that the resources spent on reforming one prisoner could be used to keep dozens of other people out of prison.
If you want to fix prisons, you should work on fixing schools and community centers and health care clinics and libraries and public housing and public transportation. Fix those and you’ll find your prisons are empty in ten years.
Along with what the OP posited, maybe a further measure - albeit rather expensive - would be to design prisons so that each inmate never interacts with any other inmates, but only with prison staff or visitors.
Human contact is necessary (solitary confinement drives people crazy,) but by doing it this way, you’d prevent the inmates from learning from the baddies.
The reason that many people turn back to crime after getting out of prison is because their opportunities to earn a living legally is severely curtailed by their record. (Not that they necessarily had great earning potential before hand either)
They may learn some skills and make some contacts, but they would not need to use those if they were able to support themselves legally.
As I’ve said on this board in the past, if there are not legal alternatives to poverty, people will turn to illegal alternatives to poverty.
You want to reduce recidivism, actually push for the inmates to learn trades and earn degrees. Have it so that once they have completed their probation, they are no longer subject to hiring discrimination based on their criminal past, and during probation, probation officers should work closely with the recovering criminal and the employer to make sure that they integrate well, rather than looking for any excuse to send them back to jail.
I believe that it has been already upheld in U.S. court that employers cannot discriminate against job-applicants on the basis of a criminal record unless the crime was directly relevant to the job in question (for instance, a bank might not want to hire a former embezzler, but a job flipping burgers at a fast-food joint isn’t relevant to embezzlement.) But there is probably a great deal of subconscious or unofficial discrimination anyway (why hire someone with a criminal record to flip burgers, when you could hire someone *without *a criminal record to do the same thing?)
Can you cite this, as it is not been my experience that this is true. Some states, I can certainly believe, but federal? I’d like it to be true, because that would be better, but my understanding is that this is not the case.
My lawyer, in fact, wanted me to change The Box from “been convicted of a felony” to “been charged with a crime.” I refused to, and ended up taking The Box off entirely, completely against his advice. (He also wants me to put in an arbitration clause, that’s not gonna happen either.)
I found a cite here, but apparently it only has to do with felonies. Not sure about misdemeanors. It is the second paragraph under “Private Employment.”
This would go far beyond “rather expensive”. It would be insanely expensive. My rough estimate would be that you’d have to increase prison budgets by at least a hundredfold in order to have prisons where inmates don’t interact. And that’s not counting the massive cost of building such prisons in the first place.
