I think it’s fair to say that many (if not most) of us have a sense that the world is more dangerous today than it was 50 years ago. There are a lot of reasons for this and we don’t do a great job of teasing them out in order to really understand where our senses of safety come from.

The September 11th attacks shook many Americans’ belief that war happens in other places. Mass shootings happen often enough that “it could never happen here” feels like a foolish thing to say. Living through a global pandemic and an increasing number of severe weather events also undermine our sense of stability as we look toward the future. Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, things are happening that – if you are of a certain age, and by that I mean 30-ish or older – you probably never thought were possible. All of this leaves us feeling a little unsteady, a little unsure of the ground beneath our feet.

To get away from those monumental fears, we “escape” into true crime entertainment and ubiquitous exposure to the ongoing wonder that is NBC’s Law & Order and its many offshoots (a show I dearly love, for what it’s worth). Local news regularly sensationalizes crime, from the mugshots they use to the way they feature victims, who are often very much in shock. We end up thinking that terrible things are all but inevitable when one leaves the house. So, we conclude that we are considerably less safe than we used to be.

However, according to the Pew Research Center, crime rates have been on a significant downward trajectory since the 1990s. The number of reported violent crimes per 100,000 people in the population dropped by about 49% between 1993 and 2019 (and by 74% when you also consider unreported crime). Between 1990 and 2019, our prison population increased by 187%, while the total US population grew by 33%:

That graph is a little silly. It’s made up of data I pulled from different (but reliable!) sources to draw a visual point, but there are hundreds of nuances beneath each factor. There is an important insight that can be drawn from this information though: we are incarcerating human beings at a rate that is far higher than the crime rate is dropping. When we look at this way, the question becomes: is incarceration working?

I was surprised to find another statistic, albeit a little bit older. Researchers who followed incarcerated individuals in 34 states for five years after their release from prison found that 54% were convicted of a new crime in that time frame. We like to believe that incarceration has some sort of rehabilitative effect, that people will “learn their lesson” by being locked up for awhile. A 54% re-incarceration rate does not sound like a resounding success to me. It sounds like we’re doing it wrong.

Incarceration as we do it in the United States is not rehabilitative. Yes, there is some educational and loosely therapeutic programming available, but it is offered to a very small portion of “eligible” incarcerated individuals. Often, services are not offered until an individual has a release date, so they can spend years developing responses to the highly problematic environment they are in before receiving a little bit of assistance just before released. Underlying all of that, though, is the overarching fact that to manage prison populations without providing real treatment, incarcerated individuals must be dehumanized.

People who commit crimes do so for a great variety of reasons, and it is my belief that the vast majority (I can make an argument for ALL) do so from places of great pain, struggle, and trauma. Our prison systems operate under a belief that the fastest way to manage unruly behavior that is sure to occur when you crowd a bunch of people with high defenses and low coping ability together is to strip them of any belief that they are in control, and to punish them into submission.

I know lovely people who work in prisons who have nothing but good intent and I’m grateful for the ones who conduct their work with integrity. I’m not saying that those working in prisons are to blame. But the entire ethos of prison environments is “Us vs Them” and the first thing you learn when working in a prison as that “Them” can hurt you.

I have attended a tiny portion of the training that corrections employees go through to learn how to restrain people and intervene in situations where someone is becoming aggressive or unpredictable. I took this training as an intern and because my role was limited, I was mostly taught basic self-defense and how to get out of the way. It was never going to be my responsibility to restrain people. But even in the 3 hours I attended for that, the messaging was clear: always be suspicious, you are the authority, “they” are to be controlled.

I am not naive. I know mental health care providers who have suffered significant physical trauma at the hands of incarcerated individuals. I know that people die as a result of prison violence (including at the hands of guards). It is not a place you want to have a picnic. But I can’t help wondering how much of that is because we treat people like potentially dangerous animals instead of human beings struggling mightily with their own senses of safety and stability.

Causing harm through criminal activity is wrong. And it has to be addressed to have a civilized society (more on that in a future post). But the way we are currently doing it seems neither efficient nor effective to me. So why do we keep doing it this way?

Because we tell ourselves it makes us safer.

Politicians can grab our emotions so easily by promising to get dangerous people off the streets. They don’t need to say much more and we nod and say “Yes, please do. I would feel safer if you would do that.” But we don’t think about where “off the streets is” or ask questions about how those individuals will return or what happens to their families and communities while they are gone. We’re content to have them out of sight and out of mind.

Except they’re not. Because we don’t really feel any safer.

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References from that handy chart I “made up”:

(1) U.S. violent and property crime rate have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source | Pew Research Center – Full article: Crime in the U.S.: Key questions answered | Pew Research Center

(2) Research – Get the Facts – The Sentencing Project – Note: These figures only include state prisons, and not local jails or federal prisons. In recent years, those additions would add over 40% to those figures. Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023 | Prison Policy Initiative

(3) Historical Population Change Data (1910-2020) (census.gov)

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Next post in series: Against the Good Guy/Bad Guy Binary