Introduction
The United States is known for its massive prison population, which has emerged as a result of harsh sentencing laws. It is substantially easier to argue for increasing the punishment for a criminal offense than for reducing it since the person has acted immorally, and the punishment systems used by humans generally act as deterrents rather than reformation attempts. As a result, the argument that the crime keeps occurring because the deterrent for it is not strong enough will almost always sound convincing. However, this situation has escalated to an unprecedented degree in the United States, harming society as a result.
Recent administrations have begun reversing the trend, but the change is a slow process. This essay will discuss the current mass incarceration situation in the United States and analyze the potential changes that the sentencing reform may bring.
Sentencing Policies and Mass Incarceration
The emergence of harsh sentencing laws in the United States was not without a rational reason. Reitz (2018) claims that in the middle and later parts of the 20th century, the country developed substantially higher violent crime rates than most other Western countries, to which the government proceeded to respond with increases in punishment severity. The action was intended to make violence a less attractive option and stop potential criminals from committing offenses.
The success of the initiative is a matter of another discussion that is not the topic of this essay. However, once the law was put into effect, it would be challenging to scale its provisions back. If it were effective, it would be unreasonable to end such a successful initiative. If not, then, in the absence of other cost-effective options, further increases would be the only path likely to be approved.
Moreover, increases in punishment severity are an effective political tool, a fact that partially explains their lasting popularity with both the Republican and Democratic parties. In the public mind, criminals as a whole were typically seen as dangerous aggressors and an overall harmful category that should be isolated from other people. As such, whenever people were concerned about crime, politicians could gain popularity by talking about being ‘tough on crime’ and retaliating against those who would endanger public peace. They offered a solution that would be easy to implement and effective from the voters’ viewpoint.
The success of the strategy led to a continuous increase in the sentences for various crimes throughout much of the 20th century. Moreover, the focus on criminals as a distinct category of people who are separated from the general population created problematic legal situations.
The War on Drugs is an excellent example of how the politicization of criminal justice has created potentially unfair sentencing systems. As the name indicates, the policies associated with the initiative were intended to eradicate drug usage from society, a task at which they have failed. However, as Barkow (2019) notes, drug-related sentencing laws do not take the broad range of culpability in the matter into account, considering only whether the individual possessed or distributed the substance as well as its type and quantity. Drug users are seen as a separate and immoral part of society, and most or all of them are treated equally poorly. Judges and politicians are uninterested in looking into one’s circumstances and pronounce everyone equally guilty. Many of the same considerations apply in the cases of other crimes, such as sexual offenses or theft.
The existence of private prisons in the U.S. has contributed to the problem further, creating a substantial lobby that wants harsher sentences. According to Eisen (2018), the nation’s incarceration industry is worth approximately $80 billion, a substantial amount that would lose a considerable part of its value if there were fewer prisoners. Private prisons are not the only enterprises that form it, with food, clothing, and other necessities also often being outsourced to companies and corporations. All of these diverse actors are interested in retaining the status quo of punishments that either stays the same or escalate with time.
On the other hand, a lobby that pushes for the opposite does not exist because there are almost no companies that benefit directly from lower prisoner numbers. Overall, the presence of motivations for introducing harsher sentences without any significant drawbacks explains the emergence of the mass incarceration phenomenon.
However, at the beginning of the 21st century, the prison population grew to the degree that began concerning the population. The U.S. has one of the largest prison populations in the world with no discernible benefits to it. As a result, harsh sentencing policies have become less popular than they had been before. However, there was no strong support for reducing sentences, either, and the Bush and early Obama administrations made little effort to address the mass incarceration problem. Ultimately, President Obama began making some changes in his second term, which President Trump has continued. However, sentencing policy reform is still in its early stages and requires substantial refinement before it can remedy the current situation.
Sentencing Policy Reform and the Criminal Justice Landscape
As mentioned above, American criminal law does not give sufficient regard to the specific circumstances behind the offense and treats all criminals in the same category similarly. As such, reform would likely focus on differentiating these cases and ensuring that circumstantial criminals do not receive the same degree of punishment as people who do what they do with full awareness of the consequences.
There will not necessarily be fewer convictions and prison sentences, but the average period a prisoner spends in a correctional facility may become substantially shorter. As a result, the prison population would fall over time, with current inmates finishing their sentences and new ones spending less time there. As a result, the mass incarceration problem would be at least partially alleviated, with lower prisoner numbers and, consequently, less space and resources needed for their management.
The incarceration industry would suffer as a result, which may affect other parts of the economy. However, this effect may ultimately be beneficial to the nation rather than harmful to it. According to Suprenant (2018), private prisons are currently using the overcrowded state of state and federal prisons to extract money out of the government without any competition. They are effectively less regulated arms of the government that drain resources and are only concerned with generating profits. A reduction in prison populations would force them to fight each other and the government for the dwindling supply of prisoners.
As a result, the prices would fall while the quality of treatment at the facilities would increase. Ultimately, after the initial period of turbulence, the private prison situation would improve from all perspectives other than theirs.
One may argue that crime will increase as a result of the reduction in the average prison sentence. Because of the lower deterrence factor associated with it, offenders should be more likely to decide to commit offenses despite knowing the consequences. However, Spurr (2019) claims that the benefits of harsh sentencing policy and a high prison population are partially counteracted by the side effects of such an arrangement, such as the rising number of single-parent families, and that in the end, the reduction in crime does not justify the cost. Moreover, with the changes discussed in this paper, serious offenders would remain in prison for a long time while people with extenuating circumstances may have their punishment reduced. The circumstances of such people may be improved through a reduction in the side effects mentioned above, making them less likely to re-offend.
With that said, crime may not be a concern comparable to that of the period which saw the initial sentence increases. Punishment is not the only factor that affects the incidence of crime in an area or nation, and others may be contributing to an overall reduction. Barkow (2019) lists several examples of states that have seen their crime rates keep falling despite introducing sentencing reform that lightened the punishments.
If the same trend is taking place across the United States, sentencing reform may only contribute a small influence to it. As a result, punishments, along with the burden on the criminal justice system and the taxpayers, will be lighter while achieving their intended results. However, to confirm this hypothesis, it would be prudent to analyze the examples of the states mentioned above and experiment with sentencing policy to see the results.
Lastly, the people who remain in prisons will be treated more fairly than before as a result of the reduction of the prison population. Currently, American prisons are often overcrowded, which tends to worsen the circumstances of each inmate. It is possible to argue that this arrangement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, as people are forced to use facilities that were not designed to handle such a high number of users.
Moreover, they continue doing so for years without any substantial change instead of having to handle occasional sharp increases in activity due to how prison arrangements work. A lower prison population will return the situation closer to the intended arrangement and make it easier for inmates to live out their punishment as intended by the courts that sentence them.
Conclusion
Overall, the current mass incarceration situation in the United States is not the result of the application of criminal justice paradigms. Instead, it has arisen from political expediency and lobbying by companies that are interested in maintaining a high prison population. As such, the efforts of the Obama and Trump administrations to improve sentencing policy and reduce the average prison term by differentiating different degrees of offenses should be commended. These alterations should contribute to the reduction of the prison population, which would reduce criminal justice spending and, consequently, the profits of the incarceration industry.
However, crime will likely not increase substantially as the result of such a change, as it has been becoming less frequent in recent decades for unrelated reasons. As such, the criminal justice landscape should not suffer substantially and may even improve due to the elimination of prison overcrowding and the associated issues.
References
Barkow, R. E. (2019). Prisoners of politics: Breaking the cycle of mass incarceration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Eisen, L.-B. (2018). Inside private prisons: An American dilemma in the age of mass incarceration. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Reitz, K. R. (ed.). (2018). American exceptionalism in crime and punishment. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Spurr, S. J. (2019). Economic foundations of law (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Suprenant, C. W. (ed.). (2018). Rethinking punishment in the era of mass incarceration. New York, NY: Routledge.