Introduction
For a long time, institutionalization has been viewed by the society as the most appropriate way of curbing crime. This has led to many criminals getting locked up in confined places in order to separate them from the rest in the community. The fact that over-institutionalization is now being practiced in many countries reflects some level of dissatisfaction with prevalent methods of dealing with suspected or convicted offenders. Commonly, criminals end up being physically confined in large institutional facilities.
To opponents, the practice of over-institutionalization has a wide range of detrimental consequences. This paper discusses the causes of over-institutionalization, its consequences, and some potential solutions.
Causes of Over-institutionalization
Generally, over-institutionalization is the result of a lack of confidence in the existing substitutes for punishing criminals. Fear that alternative solutions to institutionalization have little effect on offenders has certainly compelled jurisdictions to turn to incarceration as the most reliable way of dealing with offenders (Elrod & Ryder, 2011). Most members of the public strongly believe that when the society punishes criminals, they should really be punished, and for most people, this means being locked up. Alternatives such as community based program thus start with the disadvantage that the public sees them as being inherently unsafe, and if members of the society feel that a program is unsafe, to them it is unsafe.
The high cost associated with some of the alternative solutions is another concern that has led to over-institutionalization. If house arrests or community based programs have to be adopted by a nation’s criminal judicial system, it means that more employees will be required to oversee a successful implementation. In order to maintain an additional number of employees, more money will have to be allocated to the judiciary and police departments.
Another cause of over-institutionalization is possibly the desire by nations to create the impression that the security of its people is critical. Citing the weaknesses of alternatives such as a community based program, a country’s criminal judicial system and top security organs may find it extremely difficult to avoid institutionalization. According to Elrod and Ryder (2011), the quality of many alternative programs is questionable, and many offenders fail to receive any services after institutional release. This is further worsened by the fact that the number of offenders to be monitored after being released is often higher than the number of officers tasked with the responsibility of following up on them.
Consequences of Over-institutionalization
When a country relies so much on institutionalization, other issues arise that must be addressed. Notable among them are the spread of dangerous diseases such as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Sadly, institutionalization creates a fertile environment for inmates to engage in immoral activities that leave victims with dreaded illnesses. According to Flowers (1990), institutionalization does more harm than good to juvenile offenders since it treats them as criminals rather than people who are in need of delicate care. It deprives them of normal familial and environmental settings that relate to proper emotional development.
It glues them with stigmatization effects of labeling and often socializes them to delinquent and criminal habits. Further, there are the differential and harmful patterns of detaining juvenile offenders with adult criminals. This notwithstanding, there are many who favor placing adolescents in correctional facilities, particularly habitual and violent delinquent offenders, for both punishment and as a deterrent to teenage crime. The objective of the juvenile justice system should be to treat juvenile offenders in a non-institutionalized manner whenever possible.
The jailing of young offenders may the worst example of the failings of the justice and correctional systems. Adolescents in jails affect youthful offenders in the society in a number of ways that make them even worse. Many juveniles held in adult jails are subjected to physical or sexual abuse, and tend to have a rate of suicide. At times, the abuse begins before the offender even reaches jail. Sexual abuse of adolescents in vans transporting them to jails and prisons in experienced in some countries.
Health problems are also a likely occurrence in the jailing system, as items that the offender may have taken for granted at home such as soap, toothbrushes, and clean towels and sheets are in short supply. Locking seasoned criminals with naïve offenders has many negative effects. Oftentimes, experienced offenders take advantage of the innocence of inexperienced offenders and expose them to greater harm. As time goes by, naïve offenders acquire wrong habits that make them even worse.
Clearly, this could be easily avoided by looking for alternatives that enable the separation of different categories of criminals. The use community based programs, for instance, can make it possible to place inexperienced offenders in places where their morals cannot be further polluted.
One of the major problems with any new correctional program is that they often appear on the scene and are proclaimed the solution to existing problems. Apparently, this has been the case with house arrest enforced by electronic monitoring. Although house arrest and electronic monitoring has existed for a long time now, there is still need to get a clear picture of what they can and cannot do. House arrest with electronic monitoring can be a very useful community corrections program, but it is not without problems.
Potential Solutions to Over-institutionalization
Among the alternatives that have been considered by several countries is the privatization of correctional facilities. According to Purpura (1997), correctional alternative are those correctional strategies other than traditional incarceration that attempt to produce results that are more beneficial to society and offenders than counterproductive prisons and jails. Potential solutions to over-institutionalization discussed in this section include extra-institutional punishment, community service, and house arrest with the possibility of electronic monitoring.
Extra-institutional Punishment
Rather than turning to over-institutionalization, the criminal justice system can adopt an extra-institutional punishment approach. According to Mays and Winfree (2008), extra-institutional punishment refers to the use of criminal sanctions administered outside a correctional facility. Any correctional program that provides punishment or treatment outside a jail or prison is a form of extra-institutional punishment. In this case, probation often serves as the mechanism by which the court releases an individual into the community and the means by which the same legal authority may remove community corrections clients from it for failing to abide by their release conditions.
Intermediate sanctions and diversion are two key terms that are associated with extra-institutional punishments. Intermediate sanctions are extra-institutional punishments that include all types of correctional programming between traditional probation and prison. These sanctions expand the scope of correction programs as well as the capacity to punish convicted offenders. On the other hand, diversion is the process of removing individuals from the formal system of prosecution and adjudication, and placing them in a less formal treatment setting.
Community Service
Another possible solution to over-institutionalization is community service. Over the years, community service as an area of community correction has seen tremendous growth. Like fines and restitution, community service has its roots in primitive legal codes and in notions such as reparations and restoration (Mays & Winfree, 2008). In its modern form, community service is an alternative to incarceration. Community service seems especially appropriate for crimes such as spray painting graffiti or other forms of vandalism. By and large, the aim of community service is to secure benefits for the community and for the offender as well.
The offender provides a service to the community such as helping to clean up graffiti. At the same time, the offender also gains something from community service. Actually, the offender seems to receive at least two major benefits. First, the sanction holds the offender accountable for the offense, which should help this person take responsibility for his or her actions in the future. Second, the offender benefits by avoiding incarceration and by not incurring a financial cost such as a fine or restitution that may be difficult to pay.
In cases that do not seem to warrant incarceration, a judge may order an offender to participate in projects that in theory should help the community. In some ways, like diversion programs, the only limits on community service projects are judicial imaginations (Mays & Winfree, 2008). For instance, the court may order offenders to work in community perks and recreation programs, or to clean up government offices. On occasion, offenders wash government vehicles.
Normally, this work is part of standard probation or as a specific condition of probation. A probation officer or some other government official, such as a parks and a creation supervisor, may administer these efforts. Other community service programs may require offenders to work in hospital emergency rooms or facilities such as clinics, libraries, senior citizen centers, and schools. Usually, the objective is for the offender to develop a sense of accountability, to recognize that his or her criminal activity has harmed the community.
Although community service would seem to be the least controversial community corrections programs imaginable, this is not the case. Three issues plague community service endeavors. First, ensuring offenders’ accountability presents many problems. Even though offenders may appear for their assignments, this does not necessarily mean that the jobs are meaningful to them or that they learn any particular lesson by having fulfilled the court order.
Second, there are questions about the supervision of offenders involved in community service projects. Simply because a judge has ordered an offender to perform a certain number of hours does not mean that the person will complete the duties assigned or even show up when ordered to. Someone will have to assume the responsibility of holding the offender accountable, and often this tasks falls to overworked probation officers.
The third and perhaps the most severe criticism of community service deals with punishment. Apparently, many members of the public do not believe that community service is a real punishment. The projects may, therefore, suffer from a lack of legitimacy because of this lack of credibility. The degree to which community service projects address the three concerns dictates the likelihood of their use. If the community based sanctions cannot adequately address these issues, judges may not order community service.
For some scholars, community service will continue to be part of the corrections continuum, if for no other reasons than prison crowding and the lack of enough finances to support the ever increasing institutional populations. The fact that much of the existing enabling legislation keeps community service from being punitive also undermines pubic confidence and lowers the threat of the sanction for offenders.
House Arrest with Electronic Monitoring
House arrest is a relatively old punishment concept that has been combined with electronic monitoring to improve efficiency (Mays & Winfree, 2008). Legal jurisdictions around the world have used house arrest with individuals not though to be flight risks. More recently, authorities in the United States have used it with offenders who might be candidates for jail or prison time. Historically, the presence of an armed guard at the offender’s home enforced house arrest. In some cases, a police or probation officer made frequent checks to ensure that the offender indeed was at home.
The advent of electronic monitoring, however, changed the playing field for house arrest. The normal procedure is to allow the offender to go to work or to have specified times when monitoring ceases, as long as the offender obtains prior approval. If no electronic reply is received by the monitoring officer, he or she has to report the subject as missing and organize to dispatch surveillance officers to the individual’s home.
Typically, surveillance officers are sworn peace officers or other probation employees with limited arrest powers. They patrol likely haunts of probation violators, check on probationers at night, and generally watch to see that those released follow rules. In this way, additional sets of eyes augment the probation officers’ technology. Indeed, newer technology, tied to global positioning systems, allows authorities to know the exact location of clients 24 hours a day.
As an alternative to incarceration, house arrest should save jail and prison bed space. In addition, freeing inmates saves money in the end. House arrest is, therefore, one way to reduce rapidly escalating corrections costs (Siegel, 2009). To justify the additional cost of electronic monitoring, most jurisdictions require program participants to pay a monthly monitoring fee. House arrest should also save institutional space and should minimize the stigma and trauma faced by jail or prison inmates.
One of the greatest dilemmas facing people who have served jail or prison sentences of any length is that reintegration into the community and their families is difficult. With house arrest, the problem of reintegration does not exist. Associated with the issue of community placement is the consideration that some treatment programs are available in the community but not in an institution. Therefore, offenders under house arrest may have access to more and better types of programming to meet their specific needs.
In many jurisdictions, most candidates for electronic monitoring are not really on their way to jail or prison. Since public opinion is often against using electronic monitoring with offenders who pose any significant risk, authorities typically use this method with low risk offenders who are not likely to reoffend or to commit a serious violation under this form of supervision. In those instances where house arrests and electronic monitoring divert offenders from incarceration, other offenders have likely filled up the saved bed space in the prisons. Therefore, electronic monitoring may expand the capacity of judicial officials’ capacity to punish. Electronic monitoring opponents argue that the technique monitors a specific place and not specific behavior.
While monitoring the offender’s place might be important for certain crimes, it may not be sufficient. Another criticism of electronic monitoring is that it is not punitive enough and many citizens and politicians feel that sending someone home to serve a sentence is not punishment enough, even if his or her freedom of movement is restricted. To many, electronic monitoring appears to be a cost effective alterative to incarceration. Since offenders are required to pay for the program, electronic monitoring often costs correctional systems little or nothing extra.
Conclusion
Faced with increasing prison populations, limited capacity, and the rising cost of running prisons, criminal justice officials have intensified their search for alternatives to incarceration. However, as they do so, they need to put in mind a number of concerns. Considering the concerns that have been raised by members of the public, it is necessary for stakeholders to reinforce alternatives to imprisonment.
Certainly, the consequences of over-institutionalization are serious and should be addressed. Thinking about the negative outcomes of locking offenders with varying backgrounds in the same place should be a strong motivation for looking for lasting solutions. As noted earlier, putting youthful and adult offenders together affects the youthful offenders in ways that make them worse. Being held in adult jails, for instance, subjects young or inexperienced offenders to physical as well as sexual abuse. In addition, health problems are likely to occur in jail confinements, creating more problems for a country. By getting inmates to share things like soap, toothbrushes, and towels, diseases can easily be transferred from one person to another. In general, maintaining the health of inmates becomes a real frightening experience.
References
Elrod, P. & Ryder, S. (2011). Juvenile Justice: A Social, Historical and Legal Perspective. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Flowers, R. B. (1990). The Adolescent Criminal: An Examination of Today’s Juvenile Offender. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Mays, G. L. & Winfree, L. T. (2008). Essentials of Corrections. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
Purpura, P. P. (1997). Criminal Justice: An Introduction. Newton, MA: Elsevier.
Siegel, L. J. (2009). Introduction to Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.