Transforming Justice | Compared to other nations, the United States sends more people to prisons, spends more tax dollars on prisons. Why?
Few pop culture quips are more memorable than 1970s TV detective Tony Baretta’s “Don't do the crime if you can't do the time!”
For nearly 50 years, countless aspiring “tough-on-crime” politicians have repeated that catchy little rhyme in one form or another. It’s easy to imagine police saying it as the handcuffs go on, judges saying it while passing sentences and parents saying it while they ground naughty children. It is deeply ingrained in our culture that incarceration — jail, prison, familial home detention — should be the default response when someone breaks the rules.
But have you ever thought about what it means? Not just the words, but the underlying assumption that incarceration should be the default response to crime?
Compared to any other developed nation, the United States sends more of its people into prisons, spends more of its tax dollars on those prisons and seems to do less to help the victims of crime. We even have a name for the outcome: mass incarceration.
In the half-century since Baretta solved crimes in his fictional community, we have heard many real-world attempts to justify the expansion of our carceral system through longer sentences and the construction of more and larger prisons. Some explanations cite policy goals that are undeniably legitimate, including accountability, justice, safety and healing for crime victims.
The problem is that during the age of mass incarceration — with more prisons and longer prison sentences — we never created a path to achieving those goals. Sure, we dished out a national overdose of punishment, but the arguments for mass incarceration as policy mostly boil down to this: there are “good people” and “bad people,” and “bad people” get locked up.
That’s a problematic response for a few reasons, even when we are talking about violent crime. Like violence itself, our response to crime causes devastating harm to communities, families and individual lives.
More than that, defaulting to incarceration too often causes us to fail crime victims. And, maybe worst of all, the “good-people-bad-people” justification does nothing to create solutions, only more incarceration. Eventually, it begins to feel like an excuse not to address the underlying causes of crime.
This incarceration-first response to crime is also too simplistic — maybe even dishonest, and too often racist — given what each of us knows about our own lives. We all know in our hearts, and the people who love us know, that the worst thing we have done or the worst thing that has been done to us does not define us. Humanity is complex.
Prior to our current roles working together at Partnership for Safety and Justice, we both served hundreds — together, perhaps thousands — of individuals and families involved in some way with the criminal justice system. We have known young people and adults who did some terrible things and many more who had terrible things done to them. Yet, in all those years, neither of us has known anyone who could be reduced as a person to a single bad act — or even multiple bad acts — whether done by them or to them.
Every one of them was much more. They had people they loved and who loved them. Those who had caused harm needed and wanted to account for what they did when they made a profoundly regrettable decision. When they were harmed by others, they wanted to know why, to have their suffering acknowledged, and to find a solution so that it would not happen to others. They have all wanted help to change the circumstances that led to the harm they caused or experienced.
For some of the families we each worked with, hearing gunshots outside their homes was normal, but receiving the help they needed was not. If they feared for their own safety after a violent incident down the street, packing up their bags and moving was usually not an option. If their child’s learning disability was not being addressed in their schools, they could not just switch to another school. And when the harm they caused or experienced was generational, they usually lacked resources to resolve their situation.
Often their lives led to circumstances, and circumstances led to decisions that resulted in their causing harm or being victimized — often both, and sometimes repeatedly. The system’s default to incarceration did little to help them or their communities. But the system was extremely effective at consuming the resources that might have made a difference in preventing future harm by or to them. Each time, a good-person-bad-person policy (often called “zero tolerance” in the schools) was the justification for pulling them into the criminal justice system and its default to incarceration.
We have to get past disingenuous attempts to justify the failures of mass incarceration. Solutions to crime and violence need to eliminate the fantasy of “good people” and “bad people” and start focusing on actual causation. Then maybe we can do the work necessary to establish true solutions to the harm we too often cause each other.
Andy Ko is executive director at Partnership for Safety and Justice, a statewide nonprofit advocating for equity, accountability and healing in the public safety and criminal justice systems. He has led on homelessness prevention and efforts to reform drug policy and criminal justice for over three decades.
Babak Zolfaghari-Azar is senior policy manager at Partnership for Safety and Justice. He has been engaged in criminal justice policy work and has served justice-involved youth and families for over a decade.
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