27 May 2009
Reviewing Reviewers--Dreams from the Monster Factory
)Published on May 27th, 2009 @ 07:34:34 pm, using 1140 words, 203 views
We talk here occasionally about the massive but rarely recognized tumor on the American body politic known as its prison policies. Despite other much more effective methods of stopping most crime and victimization at far less cost, our fears and egos have led us for years into throwing away money we’ll never get back while having more crime than we needed to. This isn’t opinion. It’s the conclusion of every nonpartisan investigation of the impact of prison versus policing versus juvenile justice versus practically any social program oriented toward kids. Of course, all you need to know about American criminal justice is to know that the latest buzzword is “evidence-based practice,” which, yes, is more than one word and which should also reveal exactly what practice has never been based on to date.
The result? A prison system, social dysfunction, and fiscal profligacy not even a mother could love. It’s really coming to a head now that most states can’t afford to burn dollars anymore and are looking at other ways of dealing with social threats and disorder. It’s only because of the fiscal crisis, though, and we’ll go right back to locking everyone up for anything as soon as the dollars start rolling in again, so don’t worry too much. But for now we might actually pay attention to programs that show that you can turn offenders around and not into better criminals if you just know what you’re doing and run more effective programs.
Such as a restorative justice program in California detailed by Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell in their Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All, reviewed here. What did the program do?
Shortly after she began work at San Bruno, Schwartz attended a conference in Minnesota where she heard for the first time about “restorative justice.” Contemporary justice in the United States is largely based on the idea of retribution, and relies primarily on punishment. Restorative justice, as Schwartz explains it, is based on the concept prevalent in more traditional societies that offenders must also try to repair, as far as possible, the harm they have caused others. In order to do this, offenders must first confront what they have done, and then make amends to their families, their communities, and, if possible, their victims as well. Schwartz writes that she very soon came to believe that restorative justice could be a means of transforming these men from chronic offenders into productive members of their communities.
The first step, persuading the San Bruno inmates to face up to their own violent behavior, would be the most difficult. What is particularly striking about violent men is how remorseless they often seem, as if they were devoid of feeling. Schwartz shows how their experience under the justice system only reinforces this sense of detachment. During their trials, defense lawyers coached them to deny or minimize their crimes. In jail, they spent their days complaining about the conditions, their sentences, the behavior of the deputies and other inmates, and society at large. At no time were the men ever required to assess their own behavior or acknowledge the pain they had caused.
Schwartz was familiar with various kinds of “anger management” classes, most of which simply taught violent men to suppress their rage or walk away from situations that might provoke it. She wanted something different, a program that would help the men examine and ultimately “rewire” their own emotions. She decided to experiment with Manalive, a community-based program for men who had committed domestic violence that had been created years earlier by Hamish Sinclair, a San Francisco–based educator and community organizer. Manalive soon became the foundation for all of Schwartz’s other programs, which collectively came to be called the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, or RSVP.
And what did it accomplish, you ask?
In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York University and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP and found that it sharply reduced recidivism rates. The longer the men stayed in the program, the better it seemed to work. Among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail a year later, compared to a control group of men who had not been through the program.
This is all good for you to learn, if you don’t already know about these things, but what makes the review itself even better is its backgrounding of the prison policy issues and the insanity that are their results. For example, a small sample:
America’s prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in this country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our incarceration rate is now higher than that of any other country in the world. Many, if not most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness and should be in treatment; a similar fraction is made up of children under eighteen. Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug-related charges. Of those, most have no history of violence or drug dealing, and were arrested mainly for possession of drugs.
Sexual and other forms of abuse in prison are common, reported by some 20 percent of inmates. These “monster factories,” as the lawyer and author Sunny Schwartz calls them, do little to break the cycle of violence in society and may even accelerate it. Roughly two thirds of those released from US jails and prisons end up back inside within three years. Some studies suggest that the experience of imprisonment can be so brutal and humiliating that it actually makes men, in particular, harder and meaner, so that the crimes they commit the next time around are even worse than what got them incarcerated in the first place.
We’ve said frequently here that, were we to start practically any American policy area from scratch and base it on what we know that works and doesn’t work in those areas, we would do virtually nothing that we do today. Sunk costs, vested interests (and, lord, are there people who make money off us having criminals and victims), lack of imagination, you name it, all the arteroschlorosised failures that plague all our major institutions, we’ve got a system that is flat-assed stupid but only Senator Webb so far has managed to confront realistically (which you can read a little about in the review as well). We don’t have to do it this way, as this book and review show. But we do have to support the Webbs and any others who have the cajones to try to change it. Read this review, then the book, then get started.
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