Abstract
This study surveyed the literature on the expected and unexpected effects of incarceration before (deterrence), during (incapacitation), and after (after-effects) prison confinement occurs, through a selective search that favored the analysis of studies with an empirical focus in the national and comparative literature. Then, based on data provided by the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (INPEC by its acronym in Spanish) and the National Police, the research evaluated the effect that mass incarceration for homicides, kidnappings, theft, and personal injuries had on Colombian criminality between 1994 and 2018 (a time in which the inmate population increased fourfold). The regression results suggested that incarceration decreased the number of homicides and kidnappings but increased theft and personal injuries. At the end, the article presents the theoretical developments that could explain those statistical results and makes recommendations for the strategic use of imprisonment and its deterrent potential in Colombia.
Highlights
The “passion to punish” has existed from the onset of human societies (Fassin 2017)
For theft and personal injury, the variation was positive. These results indicate that the deterrent and incapacitation effects of prison sentences were only associated with homicides and kidnappings since imprisoning more people for theft and personal injuries did not reduce the incidence of those crimes but instead increased it
The main conclusion that emerges from this research is that not all crimes respond in the same way to prison sentences
Summary
The “passion to punish” has existed from the onset of human societies (Fassin 2017). As to why we punish in a penal sense (with the state’s legal legitimacy), criminology manuals cite atonement, reparations, social utility, remediation, crime prevention, and resocialization, as well as other reasons, according to the function of punishment from a philosophical perspective (Banks 2004; Gardner 2007, 103). This research examined the increase in rates of mass incarceration, both in Colombia and globally It analyzed the causes of global crime reduction and reviewed the literature on the effects of prison confinement before, during, and after incarceration. The global prison population has been increasing over the last half-century, without clear evidence that prison is an effective tool to reduce crime. One out of every 37 adults in the country (2.7% of the US adult population) is under some form of prison supervision (NAACP 2015), and every 90 seconds, one person is sentenced to a state or federal prison, totaling about 420,000 people per year (Harding 2019) This trend of incarcerating increasing numbers of people can be observed elsewhere. Non-citizen groups, often rank-and-file workforce for illegal economies, have increasingly replaced those more integrated segments of the population as targets of the criminal justice apparatus (Melossi 2015)
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