When Have We Punished Enough?

Abstract

Today's criminal justice system is in a state of crisis over prison crowding. Even though national prison capacity has expanded, it has not kept pace with demands. While capacity in state prisons grew from an estimated 243,500 bed spaces in 1978 to 365,817 bed spaces by 1983, state prison populations had grown from 270,025 to 399,072 inmates.' National attention has focused on prison crowding. But the common cry among corrections professionals is not a need for more prisons but a need for alternatives to incarceration. The search for alternatives to prison is curious inasmuch as public sentiment calls for more punishment. Recent legislative changes to penal codes in the form of mandatory prison terms for drunk drivers and for gun crimes, plus calls for the abolition of parole boards, argue for more prison space. Yet many professionals resist, arguing that prison construction is too expensive and does little for the reduction of crime.2 Do we need more prisons or more alternatives to prison construction? Before such questions can be answered, we need more information on both the costs and benefits of punishment. Since so many elements of the sentencing decision, such as victim harm, justice, and public fear, defy quantification, any picture will be necessarily incomplete. Nonetheless, the data assembled here quantify many of the missing benefits of prison capacity and thereby contribute to debate over prison crowding and alternative sentencing. Significantly, even discarding the emotional and psychological costs mentioned, the data strongly support the need for more prison capacity. Subsequent sections of this paper apply the social cost-benefit framework to alternate uses of scarce prison space and the choice of alternatives to incarceration. These sections are less prescriptive because research findings are less definitive. They are sufficient, however, to offer at least some recommendations for policy makers.