Decarcerating America

by Ernest Drucker

  9. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Second Edition (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015).

  10. Christopher Hartney and Linh Vuong, Created Equal: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the US Criminal Justice System (Oakland, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2009), 3.

  11. See Randy Borum, “Assessing Violence Risk Among Youth,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 56, no. 10 (2000): 1263–88; and Jennifer N. Shaffer and R. Barry Ruback, Violent Victimization as a Risk Factor for Violent Offending Among Juveniles (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2002), 6, 8; Kenneth V. Hardy and Tracey A. Laszloffy, Teens Who Hurt: Clinical Interventions to Break the Cycle of Adolescent Violence (New York: Guilford Press, 2005); John A. Rich and Courtney M. Grey, “Pathways to Recurrent Trauma Among Young Black Men: Traumatic Stress, Substance Use, and the ‘Code of the Street,’” American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 5 (2005): 816–24; Erika Harrell, Black Victims of Violent Crime, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, NCJ 214258, 2007.

  12. Beyond Innocence: Toward a Framework for Serving All Survivors of Crime (New York: Vera Institute of Justice and Common Justice, 2015), 1–9.

  13. See Ballotpedia, “California Proposition 57, Parole for Non-Violent Criminals and Juvenile Court Trial Requirements (2016),” https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_57,_Parole_for_Non-Violent_Criminals_and_Juvenile_Court_Trial_Requirements_(2016); and Ballotpedia, “Oklahoma Reclassification of Some Drug and Property Crimes as Misdemeanors, State Question 780 (2016),” https://ballotpedia.org/Oklahoma_Reclassification_of_Some_Drug_and_Property_Crimes_as_Misdemeanors,_State_Question_780_(2016).

  14. See Hal Dardick and Matthew Walberg, “Kim Foxx Declares Win in Cook County State’s Attorney’s Race,” Chicago Tribune, November 8, 2016; Elyssa Cherney, “Aramis Ayala Upsets Jeff Ashton for State Attorney,” Orlando Sentinel, August 31, 2016; Brian Rogers, Margaret Kadifa, and Emily Foxhall, “Anderson Defeated in Harris County DA Race,” Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2016; and Fernanda Santos, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio Loses Bid for 7th Term in Arizona,” New York Times, November 9, 2016.

  15. Leah Sakala, Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity (Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, 2014).

  16. Ryan King, Bryce Peterson, Brian Elderbroom, and Elizabeth Pelletier, “Reducing Mass Incarceration Requires Far-Reaching Reforms,” Urban Institute, 2015, http://webapp.urban.org/reducing-mass-incarceration.

  17. Justice Policy Institute, Defining Violence: Reducing Incarceration by Rethinking America’s Approach to Violence (Washington, DC: JPI, 2016), 4.

  18. Crime victims show much higher incidences of PTSD than people not victimized by crime. Research shows that 25 percent of crime victims experienced lifetime PTSD and 9.7 percent had current PTSD (PTSD within six months of being surveyed), whereas 9.4 percent of people who had not been victims of crime had lifetime PTSD and 3.4 percent had current PTSD; D. Kilpatrick and R. Acierno, “Mental Health Needs of Crime Victims: Epidemiology and Outcomes,” Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2003, 1612. “Studies of children at risk of violence show high rates of PTSD. As many as 100 percent of children who witness a parental homicide or sexual assault, 90 percent of sexually abused children, 77 percent of children exposed to school shootings, and 35 percent of children exposed to community violence develop PTSD”; National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD in Children and Adolescents (Washington, DC: Department of Veterans Affairs, 2004). See also PTSD Alliance, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Fact Sheet,” published by the Sidran Institute (2004), available online at http://www.sidran.org/sub.cfm?contentID=76§ionid=4.

  19. Joseph A. Boscarino, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Physical Illness: Results from Clinical and Epidemiologic Studies,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032 (2004).

  20. T. Mathews, M. Dempsey, and S. Overstreet, “Effects of Exposure to Community Violence On School Functioning: The Mediating Role of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 47, no. 7 (2009): 586–91; S. Kataoka et al., “Responding to Students with PTSD in Schools,” Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 21, no. 1 (2012): 119–33.

  21. M.W. Smith, P.P. Schnurr, and R.A. Rosenheck, “Employment Outcomes and PTSD Symptom Severity,” Mental Health Services Research 7, no. 2 (2005): 89–101.

  22. R. Borum, “Assessing Violence Risk Among Youth,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 56, no. 10 (2000): 1263–88; S.N. Jennifer and R.B. Ruback, “Violent Victimization as a Risk Factor for Violent Offending Among Juveniles,” Juvenile Justice Bulletin, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Department of Justice, December 2002.

  23. According to the Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice, a 2010 study by McCollister et al. offers the most current estimate of victim costs, using the cost-of-illness and jury-compensation approaches. According to the study, the estimated costs related to victimization for aggravated assault are $96,254; $24,211 for robbery; and $1,653 for burglary. Cost-Benefit Knowledge Bank for Criminal Justice, “Victim Costs,” http://cbkb.org/toolkit/victim-costs (accessed June 20, 2014).

  24. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  25. See Mary P. Koss, “Restoring Rape Survivors,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1087, no. 1 (2006): 206–34; Judith L. Herman, “The Mental Health of Crime Victims: Impact of Legal Intervention,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 16, no. 2 (2003): 159–66; American Civil Liberties Union, Responses from the Field: Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence, and Policing (New York: ACLU, 2015), 11–23, 29–31; Rhissa Briones-Robinson, Ràchael A. Powers, and Kelly M. Socia, “Sexual Orientation Bias Crimes: Examination of Reporting, Perception of Police Bias, and Differential Police Response,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 43, no. 12 (2016): 1688–709; and Edna Erez and Nawal Ammar, Violence Against Immigrant Women and Systemic Responses: An Exploratory Study, Kent State University and National Network on Behalf of Battered Immigrant Women, May 2003, available at www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/202561.pdf.

  26. Only approximately 5 percent of federal criminal prosecutions, or 8,612 out of 68,533, go to trial. See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2003, 31st ed. (2005), Table 5.17. And only approximately 5 percent of all state felony criminal prosecutions go to trial. See ibid., Table 5.46.

  27. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, Victimizations Not Reported to the Police, 2006–2010, NCJ 238536, 2012, 1.

  28. Ibid., 5.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid., 7, 8.

  31. See Robert J. Sampson and Janet L. Lauritsen, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States,” Crime and Justice 21 (1997): 311–74; Harrell, Black Victims, 2007.

  32. Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Table 10: “Number of Victimizations and Victimization Rates for Persons Age 12 and Over, by Race, Gender, and Age of Victims and Type of Crime, 1996–2007,” http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/sheets/cvsprshts.cfm (accessed August 13, 2014). When these numbers are broken down by crime type, there are types of crime, e.g., domestic violence, in which other groups are significantly more likely to be victims.

  33. K.F. Parker, Unequal Crime Decline: Theorizing Race, Urban Inequality, and Criminal Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

  34. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Youth Violence: National Statistics,” http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/stats_at-a_glance/national_stats.html (accessed August 13, 2014).

  35. M.S. Eberhardt and E.R. Pamuk, “The Importance of Place of Residence: Examining Health in Rural and Nonrural Areas,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 10 (20
04): 1682–6.

  36. R.W. Kelly, Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City (Jan. 1—Dec. 31, 2015), 1–16, http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year_end_2015_enforcement_report.pdf.

  37. Data Book: State Trend in Child Well-Being (Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2013).

  38. J. Bonderman, Working with Victims of Gun Violence (Washington, DC: Office for Victims of Crime, 2001); M. Govindshenoy and N. Spencer, “Abuse of the Disabled Child: A Systematic Review of Population-Based Studies,” Child: Care, Health and Development 33, no. 5 (2007), 552–58; R.A. Hibbard, L.W. Desch, and the Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect and the Council on Children with Disabilities, “Maltreatment of Children with Disabilities,” Pediatrics 119, no. 5 (2007):1018–25; J.E. Kesner, G.E. Bingham, and K.A. Kwon, “Child Maltreatment in United States: An Examination of Child Reports and Substantiation Rates,” International Journal of Children’s Rights 17, no. 3 (2009), 433–44; Y. Baba and S.B. Murray, Racial/Ethnic Differences Among Battered Women in a Local Shelter (San Jose, CA: San Jose State University, 2003); M.E. Wolf, U. Ly, M.A. Hobart, and M.A. Kernic, “Barriers to Seeking Police Help for Intimate Partner Violence,” Journal of Family Violence 18, no. 2 (2003): 121–29; J.M. Zweig, K.A. Schlichter, and M.R. Burt, “Assisting Women Victims of Violence Who Experience Multiple Barriers to Services,” Violence Against Women 8, no. 2 (2002): 162–80; and L. Langton, Use of Victim Service Agencies by Victims of Serious Violent Crime, 1993–2009 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011).

  39. Some of the most powerful examples in the restorative justice field include Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, in Oakland, California; Community Works, also in Oakland; Impact Justice and its partners nationally; the Community Conferencing Center, in Baltimore; the Community Justice for Youth Institute, in Chicago; and the Insight Prison Project, in San Quentin, California.

  40. Mark S. Umbreit, Robert B. Coates, and Betty Vos, “The Impact of Victim-Offender Mediation: Two Decades of Research,” Federal Probation 65, no. 3 (December 2001).

  41. Caroline M. Angel, “Crime Victims Meet Their Offenders: Testing the Impact of Restorative Justice Conferences on Victims’ Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2005. This study examined restorative justice programs in Australia and the United Kingdom and found that robbery, assault, and burglary victims who took part in the programs reported 37 percent fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress than those who participated in standard court processes.

  42. See Mark S. Umbreit, Robert B. Coates, and Betty Vos, “Victim-Offender Mediation: Three Decades of Practice and Research,” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 22, nos. 1–2 (2004): 279–303; and Scaling Restorative Community Conferencing Through a Pay for Success Model: A Feasibility Assessment Report (Oakland, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2015), 9.

  43. Alliance for Safety and Justice, Crime Survivors Speak: The First-Ever National Survey of Victims’ Views on Safety and Justice (Oakland, CA: Alliance for Safety and Justice, 2016).

  44. Christopher Bromson, Erin Eastwood, Michael Polenberg, Kimberly Sanchez, Danielle Sered, and Susan Xenarios, “A New Vision for Crime Victims,” Huffington Post, November 4, 2016.

  45. Ulrich Orth, “Does Perpetrator Punishment Satisfy Victims’ Feelings of Revenge?,” Aggressive Behavior 30, no. 1 (2004), 62–70.

  46. Gilligan, Violence; Song, Singer, and Anglin, “Violence Exposure”; “Patterns of Violence,” 70; “Perspectives on Violence,” 145; Kennedy et al., “Social Capital”; Caldwell et al., “Racial Discrimination.”

  47. Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Daniel S. Nagin, “Prisons Do Not Reduce Recidivism: The High Cost of Ignoring Science,” Prison Journal 91, no. 3 suppl. (2011): 48S–65S; Paul Gendreau, Claire Goggin, Francis T. Cullen, and Donald A. Andrews, Forum on Corrections Research 12, no. 2 (2000): 10–13; Paula Smith, Claire Goggin, and Paul Gendreau, The Effects of Prison Sentences and Intermediate Sanctions on Recidivism: General Effects and Individual Differences, JS42-103/2002 (Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2002); Patrice Villettaz, Martin Killias, and Isabelle Zoder, The Effects of Custodial vs. Noncustodial Sentences on Reoffending: A Systematic Review of the State of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group, 2006); Daniel S. Nagin, Francis T. Cullen, and Cheryl Lero Jonson, “Imprisonment and Reoffending,” in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 38, no. 1 (2009): 115–200; Cheryl Lero Jonson, “The Impact of Imprisonment on Reoffending: A Meta-Analysis,” Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 2010, 45–65; Anthony Petrosino, Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, and Sarah Guckenburg, Formal System Processing of Juveniles: Effects on Delinquency (Oslo: Campbell Collaboration, 2010); Ted Chiricos, Kelle Barrick, William Bales, and Stephanie Bontrager, “The Labeling of Convicted Felons and Its Consequences for Recidivism,” Criminology 45, no. 3 (2007): 547–81; Michael Mueller-Smith, “The Criminal and Labor Market Impacts of Incarceration,” Department of Economics, Columbia University, 2015.

  48. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, “Reentry Trends in the U.S.,” updated December 2, 2016, www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/reentry.cfm.

  49. See Kennedy et al., “Social Capital”; Caldwell et al., “Racial Discrimination.”

  50. See Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and David M. Kennedy, 2009.

  51. Linda G. Tucker, Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Robert M. Entman and Kimberly A. Gross, “Race to Judgement: Stereotyping Media and Criminal Defendants,” Law and Contemporary Problems 71 (2008): 98, citing Travis L. Dixon and Daniel Linz, “Race and the Misrepresentation of Victimization on Local Television News,” Communication Research 27, no. 5 (2000); M. Rich et al., “Aggressors or Victims: Gender and Race in Music Video Violence,” Pediatrics 101 (1998); and Robert M. Entman, Young Men of Color in the Media: Images and Impacts (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2006).

  52. Opportunity Agenda, Social Science Literature Review: Media Representations and Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys (New York: Opportunity Agenda, 2011).

  53. Toni Schmader et al., “An Integrated Process Model of Stereotype Threat Effects on Performance,” Psychological Review 115, no. 2 (2008); Joshua Aronson and C.M. Steele, “Stereotypes and the Fragility of Human Competence, Motivation and Self-Concept,” in Handbook of Competence and Motivation, ed. A. Elliot and C. Dweck (New York: Guilford Press, 2005); T.A. Rahhal et al., “Instructional Manipulations and Age Differences in Memory: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t,” Psychology and Aging 16 (2001); A. Smith-McLallen et al., “Black and White: The Role of Color Bias in Implicit Race Bias,” Social Cognition 24, no. 1 (2006); Entman, Young Men of Color.

  8

  Minimizing the Impact of Parental Incarceration

  ELIZABETH GAYNES AND TANYA KRUPAT

  America’s incarceration policies have led to the greatest separation of families since the end of chattel slavery and quite possibly the greatest separation of children from their parents in human history.1 Exact numbers are scarce since children of incarcerated parents are rarely counted and do not often choose to advertise their parent’s criminal justice involvement, but estimates are that up to 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration or have had a parent under some form of correctional supervision, and that there are roughly 2.7 million children with an incarcerated parent on any given day.2 Available statistics reveal that more than half of those in prison are parents of minor children, most of them living with their children and/or contributing financial and/or emotional support.3 In a country with thirteen million arrests each year, and a jail and prison population exceeding any other worldwide—mor
e than two million people—it is clear that tens of millions of children have been affected during America’s forty years of mass incarceration. And as is true throughout the criminal justice system, these children will predictably and disproportionately be children from low-income families and children of color. The risk of parental imprisonment for African American children whose fathers did not complete high school is over 50 percent.4

  The fact that most people incarcerated in our jails and prisons are parents to minor children remains largely hidden from public view. This is not surprising given that the criminal justice system responds to individuals in its custody only as criminals, not as parents, sons, daughters, siblings, partners, or members of families or neighborhoods. The discussion of mass incarceration—even among progressives—is typically about individual people who have committed crimes and are being punished for their individual behavior.

  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the endless focus of reformers on “nonviolent drug offenders” versus “violent offenders”—a distinction that is inconsequential to children and loved ones. While it is important that parents take responsibility for their actions and circumstances, apologize for the impact on their victims and their families, and take steps to make amends and change their lives, the violent/nonviolent distinction can be detrimental to children. It is wrong to assume, for example, that the children of “white-collar” or “nonviolent” criminals love their parents more or would experience more trauma from the separation. From a child’s perspective, a parent who was convicted for robbery that turned into assault with a weapon (a violent crime) may be a loving, actively involved parent whose crime was out of his/her children’s view, and a parent convicted of a nonviolent drug offense who was battling his or her own addiction may be an inconsistent or unavailable parent who is still loved deeply by his or her children. This is neither an endorsement of any crime nor a judgment of parents, but rather a rejection of the classification of people and their worthiness as parents based on the classification of a crime, which tells us little about whether a person is dangerous, and nothing about the parent-child relationship or the parent’s importance to his or her children. In any case, the criminal justice system is particularly unsuited to judging the importance of attachment and family relationships. By focusing on punitive measures such as long sentences and harsh prison environments rather than rehabilitative measures that sustain family ties, the criminal justice system bears significant responsibility for the conditions of both these parents and their children.