Column: As prison reform gains more support, is reducing the number of incarcerations really a good idea?

Can someone please explain to me why incarceration has become a dirty word? Because in doing so, it’s undermined an assumption that long underpinned an orderly society.

The lawless rampage Chicago recently experienced strongly suggests that the time has come to resurrect a traditional connotation of the word.

It used to be commonly assumed that if the police caught someone who committed a crime, he’d be brought to court. If he was found guilty, a judge would give him prison time — and the rest of us felt relieved that there was one less bad guy out there to rob, burgle or shoot us.

State’s attorneys used to run for reelection on their conviction rate. Anything less than 90% would set editorial writers to screaming foul.

Now prosecutors advertise their adherence to what is alternately called the movement for prison reform or criminal justice reform. Stripped of flowery adjectives, the term means: a moral certitude that too many criminals are locked up. This used to be a Republican issue: The GOP would accuse Democrats of being soft on crime.

But recently, prison reform has gained bipartisan support. President Donald Trump signed a federal reform, the First Step Act, into law in 2018.

The act has bound together two seemingly incompatible objectives: reducing sentences for criminal offenses and reducing recidivism rates. The latter to be accomplished by establishing suitable programs for prison inmates.

The first aims at putting more prisoners on the street. The second acknowledges that not all will go straight. The numbers of those who commit another crime are not inconsiderable. Forty percent of prisoners released in 2005 were arrested within a year.

Multiply those two numbers: an increase in released convicts and the percent likely to commit a crime. Doesn’t the product suggest more total crimes?

And wouldn’t that suggest taking it one step at a time? First see if recidivism-reduction programs work. If they do, then reduce prison sentences.

The First Step Act was intended to release nonviolent offenders from federal prisons. But half of all prison inmates in the U.S. were convicted of violent crimes. So prison reform advocates argue that the only meaningful way to reduce prison populations is to take the next step: releasing violent offenders.

That may be logical from the reformers’ standpoint, but how about the rest of us? Doing away with the inequities the legal system imposes on the poor and people of color is one thing. But wholesale release of violent offenders is quite another.

Unfortunately prison reform has been exempt from the scrutiny to which other public policy issues are subjected. Its efficacy is considered self-evident — even when the numbers indicate otherwise.

Recently the nation’s crime rate has declined while the incarceration rate remains high. To me, that suggests something is working. If many criminals are incarcerated, wouldn’t you expect fewer crimes to be committed? So shouldn’t the old adage apply: If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Or, in this case, don’t tamper with the incarceration rate if it’s working.

Consider an analogy: If a lot of carpenters were put out of commission by banging their fingers instead of a nail, you’d expect fewer homes to get built. But for some reason, the logic of banged-up carpenters isn’t applied to locked-up felons, particularly in academic circles.

When falling crime rates and high incarceration rates are considered in scholarly papers, it’s generally argued that the one has little or nothing to do with the other. There must be some other factor at work.

Yet the most obvious factor isn’t mentioned. People in prison have fewer criminal opportunities than people on the outside.

Some pundits say the problem won’t be solved until the underlying causes of crime are addressed. But that begs a tough question: How can reinvestment be encouraged in economically deprived neighborhoods plagued by street crime?

Now let’s be blunt: The intersection of race and crime makes it hard for all of us to deal objectively with the issue of incarceration. Some conservatives tend to extrapolate from the larger percentage of Black criminals to a general fault of all Black people. Some liberals like to explain it as a heritage of slavery and segregation.

“The slums take their revenge,” Carl Sandburg concluded after the deadly Chicago race riots of 1919.

But that explanation doesn’t appear to fit the facts of Sunday’s looting. Television showed late-model cars and SUVs lined up in front of broken store windows waiting for their passengers to emerge with great armfuls of stolen merchandise.

Don’t confuse those images with the story of Jean Valjean. The hero of “Les Miserables” stole a loaf of bread because his family was starving. And all policemen are not reincarnations of Inspector Javert, who relentlessly pursued Valjean for the rest of his life.

Some will be tempted to think that in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. No person should have been exposed to the violence of rogue cops. What happened to George Floyd and Laquan McDonald left an indelible stain on America.

Any policeman who abuses a person because of his or her color must be punished. But similarly, looting can’t be justified because some cops abused African Americans. Crime is crime, no matter who commits it, and if we are ever to get a handle on it, we have to set preconceptions aside.

All issues have to be up for uninhibited consideration. Including the 64-dollar question — incarceration, thumbs up or down?

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