Alternatives to Prison


syrakusos

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Preface: This is the beginning of a long discussion. Below is an out-take from a longer essay

Community Corrections

The Midtown Manhattan Community Court opened in 1993. The Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn opened in the summer of 1998. Red Hook’s success has served as a model for many other efforts. Greg Berman invested two years of daily work, laying the social foundation for the center before it opened. He met with groups. He met with individuals. His salary came from a grant by the New York City Housing Authority to the Center for Court Innovation and the King County District Attorney’s Office.

The Red Hook court brings offenders and victims together. The usual harms are domestic violence and shoplifting. They also get public indecency cases when men are caught urinating in an alleyway. Their theory on that is that there is no such thing as a victimless crime. Every transgression harms the community and hurts everyone.

In cases of personal crime, perpetrators confront their victims, apologize, and make whatever restitution is possible. For offenses against the public order, the guilty apologize to an appropriate authority, acknowledge the harm they caused, and perform community service work.

House rest with electronic tethering is a common judicial sentence, especially for otherwise non-violent offenders such as the habitual drunk driver. Community programs find work for them. Their whereabouts are monitored. It costs less for us, and keeps them integrated to the community.

Self-Awareness

That assailants are also victims is a fact of crime. In the first place, a police investigation often reveals that the victim was only the last person to get hurt the most. Whether a fight in a bar or a feud between neighbors, they had a personal interaction that played out over time. Either one could have withdrawn completely, but neither did.

Domestic assault is different than that. There, a lifelong violent offender finds a lifelong victim of violence. Typically, both grew up in abusive homes, as did their parents. That is how they learned their roles. To them, it seems perfectly normal.

Moral Reconation Therapy is one of the most successful treatment programs for domestic and drug abuse cases. Not surprisingly, they go together, especially with the drug of choice is alcohol; and MRT is also employed for treating drunk drivers. MRT is the work of Gregory L. Little and Kenneth D. Robinson. Launched in 1988, it was based on five years of research in the Tennessee prison system. Research continues across problem areas and the many multi-year follow-up studies on recidivism place it high on the list of evidence-based therapies.

The process is simple. Following a tested and proven workbook, counselors direct clients in small groups to explore their own attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. For them self-awareness is a new experience. Ayn Rand most cogently pointed out that the root of all evil is the failure to choose to think. Thinking is not automatic. It is volitional. People blank-out, evade, and repress unpleasant thoughts, especially about themselves. For a child, it does not take many years for them to become fogged into a reactive life of the immediate present. Non-violent people become dysfunctional neurotics. The violent ones become aggressive criminals. Self-awareness cures that in about half the cases.

For over thirty years, MRT and other evidence-based practices typically have success rates in the mid-fifties percent. The National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov) is part of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (http://www.samhsa.gov).

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Reintegrative Shaming was developed by John Braithwaite based on his experience as an administrative regulator of pharmaceutical firms in Australia. It was quite simple. If you go in with a warrant, you only meet the lawyers. If you sit down for tea with the plant manager, you gain voluntary compliance. “Sitting down for tea” meant getting the manager to acknowledge out loud that he knew about the violation, and knew that it was wrong. Then, he would promise to fix it, and usually did.

Braithwaite followed those encounters with research into the anthropology of offense. He found many examples from history and modern first peoples where the offender was brought back into the community after admitting the transgression and apologizing to the victim, making restoration where possible.

Sometimes, it is not possible. An Eskimo man killed his wife; and–when he complained about that–her brother. So, his friends invited him to go hunting. Four went out; three came back. (Hoebel, E. Adamson. 1967. The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.). Usually, the outcomes are better for everyone because most harms are smaller than murder.

Even though less than homicide, assault is a violent crime. Victims suffer multiple traumas, deeper than the physical wounds and scars. Howard Zehr is a photographer. He created Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims (Good Books, 2001). Zehr presented the portraits and the stories of 39 courageous victims of violent crime. Not all of the encounters brought closure. In two, the attackers continued to mock their victims. In one, the subject was a man whose son was killed in prison. For three dozen other cases, both the victim and the offender found that they could overcome their suffering.

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On the subject of alternatives to prison:

the story of Jack the Scratcher

notes:

'obs' is obligations, what you owe.

'kill some obs' means pay some debts.

'Terra' is planet Earth.

The story happened on a planet where they don't have government.

A 'scratcher' is a person who doesn't kill his obs.

--- quote ---

‘This Idle Jack came from Terra as a baby, grew up in our new world, gained an understanding of our economic system and thought he’d be mighty smart. He decided to become a scratcher.’

‘What’s a scratcher?’ asked Gleed.

‘One who lives by accepting obs but does nothing about wiping them out or planting any of his own. One who takes everything that’s going and gives nothing in return.’

‘We’ve still got ’em,’ said Gleed.

‘Up to age sixteen Jack got away with it all along the line. He was only a kid, see? All kids tend to scratch to a certain extent. We expect it and allow for it. But after sixteen he was soon in the soup.’

‘How?’ urged Harrison, more interested than he was willing to admit.

‘He loafed around the town gathering obs by the armful. Meals, clothes and all sorts for the mere asking. It wasn’t a big town. There are no big ones on this planet. They are just small enough for everybody to know everybody—and everyone does plenty of gabbing. Within a few months the entire town knew that Jack was a determined and incorrigible scratcher.’

‘Go on,’ said Harrison impatiently.

‘Everything dried up,’ responded Seth. ‘Wherever Jack went people gave him the, “I won’t.” He got no meals, no clothes, no company, no entertainment, nothing. He was avoided like a leper. Soon be became terribly hungry, busted into someone’s larder one night, treated himself to the first square meal in a week.’

‘What did they do about that?’

‘That must have encouraged him some, mustn’t it?’

‘How could it?’ asked Seth with a thin smile. ‘It did him no good. Next day his belly was empty again. He was forced to repeat the performance. And the next day. And the next. People then became leery, locked up their stuff and kept watch on it. Circumstances grew harder and harder. They grew so unbearably hard that soon it was a lot easier to leave the town and try another one. So Idle Jack went away.’

‘To do the same again,’ Harrison prompted.

‘With the same results for the same reasons,’ Seth threw back at him. ‘On he went to a third town, a fourth, a fifth, a twentieth. He was stubborn enough to be witless.’

‘But he was getting by,’ Harrison insisted. ‘Taking all for nothing at the cost of moving around.’

‘Oh, no he wasn’t. Our towns are small, as I said. And people do plenty of visiting from one to another. In the second town Jack had to risk being seen and talked about by visitors from the first town. In the third town he had to cope with talkers from both the first and second ones. As he went on it became a whole lot worse. In the twentieth he had to chance being condemned by anyone coming from any of the previous nineteen.’ Seth leaned forward, said with emphasis, ‘He never reached town number twenty-eight.’

‘No?’

He lasted two weeks in number twenty-five, eight days in number twenty-six, one day in twenty- seven. That was almost the end. He knew he’d be recognized the moment he showed his face in number twenty-eight.’

‘What did he do then?’

‘He took to the open country, tried to live like an animal feeding on roots and wild berries. Then he disappeared-until one day some walkers found him swinging from a tree. His body was emaciated and clad in rags. Loneliness, self-neglect and his own stupidity had combined to kill him. That was Idle Jack, the scratcher. He wasn’t twenty years old.’

‘On Terra,’ remarked Gleed virtuously, ‘we don’t hang people merely for being shiftless and lazy.’

‘Neither do we,’ said Seth. ‘We give them every encouragement to go hang themselves. And when they do it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.’

--- end quote ---

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