Title: Prisons Research at the Beginning of the 21st Century.
Author: Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia
Published: National Institute of Justice
Subject: Corrections
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Prisons Research at the Beginning of the 21st Century

By Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia 

-----------------------------

This essay was the introductory chapter of Prisons, edited by Michael Tonry
and Joan Petersilia, released in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press. The
publication is volume 26 of Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, an NIJ-
sponsored series that for 20 years has presented essays on topical issues in
crime and criminal justice by prominent scholars in criminology and related
fields.

-----------------------------

The effects of America's contemporary experiment with mass imprisonment will
be clearer 25 years from now. The answers to some important questions,
however, including whether vastly increased use of imprisonment has
substantially enhanced public safety, will never be clear. The problem is that
changes in things that appear to be related to each other may not be related at
all, but instead may both be causally related to something else. In some
northerly regions, for example, robins return from their winter vacations in
February, their eggs hatch in April, and apple blossoms appear in May. It
happens every year. However, robins' vacation or reproductive predilections
have nothing to do with apple trees. Both respond to changes in ambient
temperature and climatic conditions. Apparent relations between crime and
punishment may be similarly misleading.

Rising crime rates may affect imprisonment rates, or rising imprisonment may
affect crime rates, or both may be caused by something else. If, for example, a
broad-based, long-term change in social norms toward greater personal
responsibility and respect for the interests of others were underway, it would be
reasonable to predict that crime rates would fall (fewer people would choose to
behave irresponsibly) and imprisonment rates would rise (many people would
be more intolerant of wrongdoers and thus more inclined to punish them
harshly). Observers might well infer that increased imprisonment reduced crime
rates. They might be right, or wrong, or partly right and partly wrong. The
absence of a causal relationship between the activities of robins and the
blossoming of trees is well understood; we understand and know how to
measure changes in temperature and climate. Unfortunately, we don't
understand what makes crime and punishment patterns change.

The world keeps changing and it is often impossible to know why things happen
when they do. The rapid increase in the 1990s in the numbers of people
confined in prisons and jails coincided with falling crime rates. A cross section
of lay people, public officials, and scholars believes that the deterrent and
incapacitative effects of increased imprisonment caused crime rates to fall.
Other cross sections of those groups believe that changes in policing strategies
(e.g., community and problem-solving policing) and tactics (e.g., zero-tolerance
and misdemeanor policing) deserve substantial credit. Still others credit the
robust and record-length economic expansion of the 1990s and related low
unemployment rates, or deeper, more fundamental, but more elusive social-
structural changes that produced falling crime rates throughout the Western
world in the 1990s irrespective of the content or severity of countries' penal
policies (Mayhew and van Dijk 1997). There are plausible cases, and plausible
refutations, to be made for each of these claims. Each, no doubt, has some
merit but we will never know how to apportion credit among them, or which
deserve primary credit.

Likewise, we are unlikely in 2025 to know how the coming quarter-century's
imprisonment policies, whatever they prove to be, have affected crime rates.
Imprisonment rates and numbers may continue to rise, or stabilize, or decline,
or fluctuate. The current economic expansion will end, as all economic
expansions do, and economic cycles will continue, as they always have.
American social welfare policies will continue to be less generous than those of
other Western countries, or they will move more toward the mainstream, or
they will move in each direction at different times. Criminal justice policies,
practices, and laws will become harsher or less harsh or will alternate. The
movement toward privatization of prisons will continue, or slow, or contract,
and private prison operators and employees will or won't become effective
lobbyists for creation or maintenance of high-prison-use policies. And if deeper
social-structural changes in American (or Western) society are primary
determinants of crime-rate trends in recent years, those changes may continue
or may alter direction. And something will happen to crime rates, and thoughtful
people will disagree deeply about what caused what.

Nor, looking backwards, is the relation between penal policy and crime rates
and patterns any clearer. There is wide agreement among historians, for
example, that crime rates, especially violent crime rates, fell steadily in many
Western countries from early in the nineteenth century until the middle of the
twentieth century, after which they began steep rises. Historians refer to this
pattern as a "U-curve" or, sometimes, a "backwards J-curve," to make the
point that twentieth century violence rates never regained their early nineteenth
century heights. There is likewise wide agreement that crime posed vastly
greater dangers to residents of early nineteenth-century cities than to residents
of twentieth-century cities. But there the agreement ends.

There is no agreement on why crime rates fell for more than a century. Some
argue that the increased bureaucratization of modernizing, industrializing, and
centralizing countries changed socialization patterns and in effect trained people
to conformity (Lane 1992; Gurr 1989). Some claim that religious revivalism and
a moral reawakening in the nineteenth century affected basic beliefs and values
and with them the socialization people received in families, schools, churches,
and communities (Wilson and Hernstein 1985). Some claim that the decline
was the result of a general, much longer-term, "civilizing process" that has
affected at least all Western societies, and in which the increased crime rates of
the 1960sB1980s are simply a short-term anomaly (Elias 1978). Most
strikingly, virtually no one attributes the long-term decline to changes in
sentencing policies or to criminal justice innovations, even though all the
institutions of modern American criminal justice systems (professional police,
imprisonment as the modal punishment, probation, parole, the reformatory,
indeterminate sentencing, the juvenile court) were created between 1830 and
1900 and were ubiquitous by 1930 (Friedman 1993).

All this is a pity, because prison and jail populations of the past quarter-century
result from conscious policy decisions by Federal and State law-makers,
premised on propositions about the crime-preventive effects of harsher and
more certain punishments. The validity of those propositions is the fundamental
question to be answered about the wisdom of modern penal policies.

Even if the answers to first-order questions about aggregate behavioral effects
of imprisonment policies on crime rates are probably unknowable, much more
is knowable about second-order questions concerning effects of imprisonment
in general, and of various prison regimes and programs, on prison staff,
prisoners, their families, their communities, and public spending. Surprisingly
little is known, but much is knowable.

Imprisonment policies beginning in the 1970s leapt far ahead of knowledge
about prisons and prisoners. Until then, the largest bodies of systematic
empirical research concerning prisons consisted of a sizable but highly variable
body of studies on the effectiveness of correctional treatment programs (Lipton,
Martinson, and Wilks 1975), a smaller body of recidivism studies (e.g., Glaser
1964), and a sociological literature on inmate socialization and subcultures (e.g.,
Sykes 1958). Since then, as a result of the proliferation of criminal justice and
criminology programs in colleges and universities created in the wake of the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the number of researchers
interested in prisons increased greatly, but the absence of sustained commitment
of research funding from government agencies and foundations frustrated efforts
to build a vital prisons research community. Foundations for many years
exhibited little interest in research on the adult criminal justice system, including
prisons and prisoners, and until recently federal research-funding agencies
focused nearly all their attention on other subjects.

Important work nonetheless has been done on many prison and prison-related
issues. On some topics, for example, the effectiveness of correctional treatment
programs (Canada) and prison regimes (England), much of the most important
recent work has been done outside the United States. Prudent policy makers
and practitioners presumably want to make their decisions on the basis of
evidence, and there are many areas where better evidence could aid in
development of better policies.

I. Collateral Effects of Imprisonment

People are sent to prison and jail partly because of moral ideas about deserved
punishments: people who do certain things, it is widely believed, deserve to be
punished. However, utilitarian ideas about public safety provide at least as
strong reasons for imprisonment: Sending people to prison enhances public
safety, it is widely believed, by incapacitating them, by rehabilitating them, by
deterring them and others, and by reinforcing basic social norms about right and
wrong. Put differently, when "just deserts" ideas are set aside, people sent to
prison are being used as means to achieve public ends. For both moral reasons
(can using people in particular ways be morally justified?) and practical reasons
(how much does using people in this way cost, does it do more good than
harm, are there unintended side-effects?) we should want systematically to
understand the effects of imprisonment practices and policies. Earlier we
mentioned crime control effects of imprisonment. Here the subject is the
collateral effects.

The literature on collateral effects is fragmentary. At least six kinds of collateral
effects can be identified. First, what are the effects of imprisonment on
prisoners' later lives? Sizable economic and smaller ethnographic literatures
(Fagan and Freeman 1999) convincingly show that imprisonment reduces ex-
offenders' subsequent incomes and employment. A policy literature shows that
various State and Federal laws deny ex-offenders the right to vote or hold
office in some places, the opportunity to engage in certain occupations in some
places, and the right to receive various public benefits and services in some
places (Fellner and Mauer 1998). Various literatures show that imprisonment
often leads to the breakup of families and social relationships and to less
parental involvement with their children (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999).

Second, what are the effects of imprisonment on prisoners' later physical and
mental well-being? A psychological literature on coping and adaptation in
prison concludes, probably contrary to many lay people's intuitions, that even
long-term imprisonment appears to have few lasting mental health effects (e.g.,
Adams 1992), though some researchers doubt this (Liebling 1999). It would be
surprising if established adverse effects on income, employment, and family
functioning were unrelated to former prisoners' mental and physical health.
However, a serious longitudinal study of ex-offenders' lives is needed to answer
such questions, and none has been done.

Third, what are the effects of imprisonment on offenders' spouses or partners,
and their children? On this subject, the literature is especially thin and
fragmented, as Hagan and Dinovitzer (1999) show, and the most pressing task
is to pull together existing knowledge in order to formulate plausible hypotheses
and develop systematic research agendas. Hypotheses would presumably at
least address the effects of imprisonment on the financial and social stability of
prisoners' families while they were in prison and afterwards, on the maintenance
of prisoners' relationships with families, and on the short- and long-term well-
being and social functioning of prisoners' children. These would, of course, not
be simple hypotheses. No doubt sometimes families and partners benefit from
the removal of abusive, disordered, or dysfunctional parents and spouses.
However, given the strong negative effects on children's well-being of being
raised in disadvantaged, single-parent households (Loeber and Stouthamer-
Loeber 1986), the effects of imprisonment on spouses and children often are
likely to be negative.

Fourth, what are the effects of imprisonment on prisoners' later crime
involvement? According to findings of criminal careers research (Blumstein et
al. 1986), the negative effects on ex-prisoners' incomes, employment
prospects, and family involvement predict increased offending probabilities. In
addition, for centuries, at least since the time of John Howard, the great
eighteenth century English prison reformer, the proposition has been put
forward that prisons are "schools for crime," that younger and less experienced
prisoners are socialized into antisocial and oppositional attitudes and as a result
exit the prison more likely to commit crimes than when they entered. No
informed person doubts that this sometimes happens, and at least partly offsets
any crime-reductive effects of imprisonment. Many European scholars accept it
as proven that prison is criminogenic and that prison terms should for crime-
prevention reasons be avoided whenever possible (Albrecht 2000). American
research on the effects of penalties typically focuses on crime-reduction, and
only sometimes treats crime-enhancing effects as an offset. If the criminogenic
effects of imprisonment are large, contemporary research may be overlooking
an important part of the crime and punishment puzzle.

Fifth, what are the collateral effects of imprisonment on the larger community?
Plausible hypotheses can be offered about effects of recent prison expansion on
the allocation of public resources (which are transferred from higher education
particularly, but also from other public programs and services, to prisons), on
economic development (transferred from inner cities to the usually rural
communities where prisons are built), and on community cohesion (in many
disadvantaged minority communities, large proportions of the young men are or
have been in prison and are thereby disabled from working, parenting,
marrying, or otherwise becoming contributing members of the community).
Imprisonment may have become so common an experience in some
communities that it may no longer carry a stigma, and thereby may lose
whatever deterrent effects it would otherwise have (Nagin 1998), or may even
cause prison styles and values to be exported to the outside community (Fagan
and Wilkinson 1998).

Sixth, what are the immediate effects on prisoners while being confined in
prison? This is the one collateral effect on which there are sizable literatures: on
coping and adapting generally, measured in terms of prisoners' physical and
mental health (Adams 1992) and in relation to housing arrangements (Gaes
1985), and specifically on prison suicide (Liebling 1999).

II. Crime Control Effects of Imprisonment

Research on the collateral effects of imprisonment suggests that policy makers
have been flying blind, making decisions costing billions of dollars and affecting
millions of lives without adequate knowledge of the nature and costs of
unintended side effects. A response might be that the primary goal has been to
enhance public safety and, possibly regrettably but understandably, that single-
minded concern has been the reduction of crime through the deterrent,
incapacitative, and rehabilitative effects of increased imprisonment. The relevant
literatures, however, are inconclusive, small, and for the most part old. Four
questions appear particularly relevant.

First, has increased use of imprisonment reduced crime rates through
deterrence and incapacitation? Presumably most people would conclude a
priori that a quarter-century's quintupling of the prison and jail population must
have reduced crime rates. There has, however, been relatively little research in
recent years on deterrence and incapacitation, and most authoritative reviews of
both subjects conclude that while such effects exist, they are probably modest
(Nagin 1998). So also concluded the most famous examination of the subject,
the 1978 report of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Research on
Deterrent and Incapacitative Effects (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978).
Similar conclusions were reached in successive decades by National Academy
of Sciences Panels on Criminal Careers (Blumstein et al. 1986) and
Understanding and Control of Violence (Reiss and Roth 1993), and by an
exhaustive recent survey of research on deterrence effects commissioned by the
Home Office of England and Wales (von Hirsch et al. 1998).

Second, can prisons deliver treatment programs that will enhance public safety
by reducing prisoners' later recidivism? The pessimism associated with the
"nothing works" findings (wrongly attributed to Robert Martinson's famous
1974 article [Martinson 1974]) appears to have dissipated, and there are
grounds for cautious optimism about the positive effects, under some
conditions, of some cognitive-skills, drug-treatment, vocational training,
educational, and other programs in adult prisons (Gaes et al., 1999). The
conditions, however, are stringent: most notably, program eligibility must be
carefully matched to prisoners' needs and risks, programs must be well
implemented and adequately funded, and compatible aftercare programs in the
community must sustain treatment. The grounds for optimism concerning
programs for young offenders and in the community are somewhat stronger.

Third, in the aggregate (without distinguishing among prison's deterrent,
incapacitative, and rehabilitative effects), does increased use of imprisonment
reduce crime rates in general, and have the increases of recent years in
particular led to crime reduction? The most commonly accepted answer
appears to be yes (Spelman 2000), but the literature, much of it by economists,
is highly technical and inaccessible to nonspecialists, dates largely from the
1970s, and suggests that effects are much more modest than is widely
understood.

Fourth, in cost-benefit terms, is increased imprisonment worth it? This is the
smallest and most primitive of the prison crime-prevention effects literatures,
and as yet provides few policy-relevant findings. Except for a small literature
that tries to compare alternative crime-prevention programs in cost-benefit
terms (e.g., Greenwood et al. 1996), the work to date is useful largely for
methodological reasons, by showing how not to pursue such inquiries. For
example, the most widely publicized recent work greatly exaggerates the costs
of crime by means of inflated imputed costs of victim "pain and suffering," and
takes no account whatever of suffering by offenders or pains of imprisonment
borne by their partners, children, or communities. It may be that gross cost-
benefit assessments of the effects of imprisonment require weighing inherently
incommensurable values, and have reached a dead end. Recent efforts to
compare the cost and benefits of alternative crime prevention policies may offer
more promise (Welsh and Farrington 2000).

III. Prisoners and Prison Staff

Thirty years ago, the largest and best-known body of scholarship on prisons
was the sociological literature on prison subcultures and the socialization of
inmates into prison life. That is no longer the case, as much because of the
waning of that literature as because of the growth of others. Prisons have
changed a great deal in the past 30 years, inmate and staff subcultures and
interactions between them have changed, and the learning of earlier times may
or may not still be valid but at least needs augmentation. Compared with earlier
times, many prisons are much larger, inmate populations and staffs are more
disproportionately black and Hispanic, many more line and management staff
are women, gangs are larger and their influence more pervasive, more prison
staff are unionized, a large and growing fraction of prisons is under private
management, and the possibility of judicial oversight and intrusion is greater.
The sentencing policy changes of the past quarter century and especially the
past few years have produced larger fractions of prisoners serving very long
sentences and with them have come increased demands for medical care and
other services for the aging and elderly.

The direct causes of the past quarter century's increase in imprisonment are
becoming clearer. Changes in sentencing and parole policies and practices, not
changes in crime rates and patterns, are the principal cause of the vastly
increased numbers of people in prison and of substantially increased
percentages of members of minority groups among prisoners. Over the past
two decades, drug policies premised on incarceration of drug dealers and
increased probabilities of imprisonment of those charged with crimes have been
the major contributors to prison population growth (Blumstein and Beck 1999).
More recently, increased sentence lengths have become a major contributor.
Changes in parole policies have also increased prison populations through the
abolition of parole in some jurisdictions, tighter release standards that have the
effect of lengthening time served, reduced tolerance for parole condition
violations, and greatly increased rates of revocation and readmission to prison
(Petersilia 1999).

Behavioral, cultural, and social changes in society at large inevitably impinge on
life inside prisons. AIDS and HIV, for example, are more prevalent inside the
prisons than out. The proportions of mentally ill and defective prisoners, never
small, have grown as a result of the 1960s and 1970s movement to
deinstitutionalize many mentally ill people. The civil rights and women's
movements have importantly affected prisons, as has the political conservatism
of recent years. Programs premised on restorative justice ideas are beginning to
appear inside prison walls.

The mission for scholars of prison life is to reinvigorate that once robust subject
by examining new subjects, re-examining old ones, and incorporating new ideas
and theoretical perspectives. Recent work in England (Sparks, Bottoms, and
Hay 1996), for example, has focused on the effects of different management
regimes from the procedural justice perspective, among others. In this
perspective, people who believe themselves to have been treated fairly and
their interests to have been fairly considered are more likely to perceive the
involved institutions and processes as legitimate, and accordingly to be orderly
in prison.

Studies of women prisoners and life inside women's prisons continue
conspicuously absent. There is a small, quality literature (e.g., Zedner 1995),
but the recent paucity of research on life inside prisons generally has had an
even more impoverishing effect on traditionally understudied subjects. Although
the ratio of women to men in State and Federal prisons remains small (men
outnumbered women by 15 to 1 as of June 30, 1998), the number of women
prisoners has for nearly 30 years been growing faster than the number of men,
and the absolute number (82,716 as of June 30, 1998) is considerably larger
than the entire prison populations of France, Germany, or England.

IV. Prison Management

Prison managers, like any other managers, need systematic knowledge if they
are effectively, ethically, and sensitively to do their jobs. In an important sense,
the sociological and other literatures on life inside prisons, and the psychological
and other literatures on how people adapt to the experience of being prisoners,
are management literatures. The English work on legitimacy and order
maintenance in prison (Bottoms 1999), which deals with prisoners, prison staff,
and their interactions, all in the interest of understanding how order can be
maintained in prisons, for example, is centrally concerned with management.

In practice, however, writing on management tends to be done by professional
managers and management consultants rather than by social and behavioral
science researchers. Chase Riveland (1999) provides an account of the major
challenges that prison managers have dealt with during the past 25 years and
how they have changed over time. Contemporary prison managers have faced
many important challenges in addition to those already mentioned. Examples
include the growing privatization of institutional corrections; the maturing
movement for professional accreditation of prisons and prison systems;
oversight of the rapid expansion in the numbers of prisons, prison staff, and
prisoners; and handling of the problems created inside prisons by modern drug
use patterns and policies. Douglas McDonald (1999) has examined the
nettlesome problem of health care provision inside prison and illustrates the
complex lattice of management, resource, and political frameworks within
which prison managers must operate.

V. The Political Economy of Prisons

No one can know what people 100 years from now will find interesting,
important, or cautionary about prisons and punishment at the 20th century's
end. From our chronocentric perspective, the most striking and distinctive
feature of American punishment polices, both historically and comparatively, is
the past quarter century's expansion in imprisonment. Older literatures
attempted to explain the functions and purposes of imprisonment (Garland
1990), as have some works by historians, but only a small contemporary
literature tries to explain why contemporary prisons policies have developed as
they have (e.g. Caplow and Simon 1999). 

The political economy of the American prison has changed enormously over the
past 25 years. By and large outside partisan politics before 1960, prisons and
punishment policies have been political staples since the middle 1960s. By and
large immune from judicial oversight under the "hands-off" doctrine before
1970, nearly every detail of prison management has come under intense and
often critical scrutiny by Federal judges. Almost entirely under the authority of
public officials and employees (except for minor contracted services) before
1975, prisons are now often managed by private corporations that operate
hundreds of institutions and provide comprehensive services, such as medical
care systems. Although prison administrators needing to build new facilities
were often before 1980 stymied by not-in-my-backyard movements,
communities now compete for new prison construction as a local economic
development initiative. Thirty years ago, there were no labor unions for prison
guards; today in at least one State, the prison guards union is a major
contributor to electoral campaigns and an active lobbyist for particular penal
policies.

Private-sector analysts commonly speak of the stakeholders in private
businesses--managers, employees, customers, sometimes the general public. In
the prisons business, where a quarter century ago the stakeholders were
principally public officials and employees, prisoners, and a nebulous sense of
the public interest, the stakeholders today include these but also voters; labor
unions; private for-profit corporations; communities housing prisons; and the
politicians, lobbyists, and political organizations that represent all these interests.

We are too close to our own times to be able to look behind crime rates and
punishment policies to explain why so many people are held in American
prisons and why some of them are held for so long. Whatever the true
explanations, they are much more complicated than allusions merely to rising
crime rates, law-and-order politics, or a vengeful public might suggest. 

Researchers from many disciplines using many methods study prisons, and
many more of them should do so in the future. Adding up the numbers of
people admitted to or held in prisons and jails, the people who work in those
institutions, the members of both groups' families, and the residents of
communities housing penal institutions, tens of millions of people are directly
affected by prisons. Any social institution affecting so many people should
receive much more attention from scholars than prisons now do. Norval Morris
has often said that prisons are a microcosm of society and that if we study them
we will learn about ourselves. That is another, perhaps the best, reason for
increased investment in prison research.

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-----------------------------

Michael Tonry is Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of
Cambridge, and Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of
Minnesota Law School. Joan Petersilia is Professor of criminology, law, and
society, School of Social Ecology, University of California at Irvine.

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NCJ 184478