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The United States incarcerates about 2 million people. That\u2019s the most in the world \u2014 and at the highest rate per capita.<\/p>\n
Is that the right amount? Too many? Too few?<\/p>\n
With violent crime surging<\/a> in major American cities \u2014 and President Joe Biden specifically rejecting<\/a> the progressive demand to \u201cdefund the police\u201d in his March 1 State of the Union address \u2014 the Register asked several experts on the U.S. criminal-justice system those questions and others, keeping in mind Catholic principles of justice, order, dignity and salvation of souls.<\/p>\n Some see the current system as too harsh, making things harder on troubled souls who are made worse and not better by their encounters with the system, and coarsening the society the system is meant to protect. Others see recent attempts to decrease the number of crimes being prosecuted and to circumscribe the activities of police as undermining public safety and justice and, in the process, hurting innocent people who are most vulnerable.<\/p>\n The Catholic Church provides a moral framework for a criminal-justice system in broad strokes.<\/p>\n \u201cLegitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime. The primary scope of the penalty is to redress the disorder caused by the offense,\u201d the Catechism of the Catholic Church states (2265<\/a>). It adds that \u201c\u2026 punishment, in addition to preserving public order and the safety of persons, has a medicinal scope: As far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender.\u201d<\/p>\n But the Church leaves the details to civil authorities.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n More Discretion?<\/b><\/p>\n Cecilia Klingele, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, sees ending minimum sentences and allowing more discretion to judges and other officials in the criminal-justice system as a major step forward.<\/p>\n Klingele thinks the current system is too mechanical and doesn\u2019t allow enough judgment calls. She says that while people who commit crimes need to be held accountable, sentences ought to be proportional to the culpability, the seriousness, and the circumstances of the offense.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd there has to be a pathway to redemption,\u201d Klingele said. \u201cIn the United States, what we have is a gigantic system that tends to process people. They don\u2019t feel seen by our system. They are moved along and treated like widgets. They\u2019re processed and managed. They\u2019re certainly not treated with love. And that is a problem for the legitimacy of the state.\u201d<\/p>\n Klingele has interviewed people who have spent time in custody and probation officers in several states for formal academic studies. She also teaches continuing legal education to judges.<\/p>\n Klingele is a member of the executive board of the Catholic Criminal Justice Reform Network<\/a>, which seeks \u201cthe transformation of our punitive and harsh criminal-justice system through dialogue and change of perspective,\u201d among other things. It\u2019s an initiative of the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Fewer Prisons?<\/b><\/p>\n Klingele wants to see far fewer people incarcerated. As for the existing prisons, she finds them troubling.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that they should be completely rehabilitated. I think the conditions in which we confine people are inhumane and are a scandal. They should be a scandal to people of faith,\u201d Klingele said. \u201cPeople are sent to jail as punishment, not for punishment. And yet the places we send them are unsanitary, often unsafe and almost all of the time hopeless. They do not heal broken human spirits. They instead increase trauma and pain of the people who are there. And that\u2019s trauma and pain that they\u2019re going to bring to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n Kathryn Getek Soltis, assistant professor of Christian ethics at Villanova University, wants to see gradual abolition of prisons, starting with sending fewer people to them and a moratorium on building new ones. She would like to see community partnerships built on principles of restorative justice, which is designed to heal the harm done through crime.<\/p>\n Getek Soltis has spent years volunteering in Catholic chaplain ministry in prisons, including in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. She wants more emphasis on treating inmates with dignity and charity, as opposed to simply warehousing people (or worse) to punish them.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the vast majority of people that I have encountered in the prison system, the social conditions in which they were existing communicated a message that they were not a priority,\u201d Soltis said.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n More Prisons?<\/b><\/p>\n Rafael Mangual, a lawyer and an expert on crime, also sees problems with prisons, but he thinks the right approach is to build more of them to lessen overcrowding. Lowering the prison population shouldn\u2019t be the goal, given the amount of crime \u2014 particularly violent crime \u2014 in the country, he says.<\/p>\n Mangual, who does not identify as religious, is a senior fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City. He cites stark statistics, particularly concerning the likelihood that a convicted criminal will commit crimes again after being released.<\/p>\n Recidivism rates in the United States are high. Estimates vary, but one U.S. Department of Justice study<\/a> found that more than 70% of those released from prison were arrested again within a five-year period. Another study<\/a> put the state-prison recidivism rate at 83%.<\/p>\n Those crimes tend to hurt poor people from racial minorities at a disproportionately high rate. One example: About 91% of homicide victims in New York City in 2021 were Black or Latino, according to the New York Police Department<\/a>. (The breakdown was 67% Black, 23.7% Latino.) Homicide suspects mirrored those percentages: 63.9% Black, 28.5% Latino, or about 92% in total.<\/p>\n Mangual points to a study<\/a> described in 2012 in the Journal of Law and Economics<\/i> that found that between 1991 and 2004, each prison year for a convict in state prison accounted on average for a reduction of eight so-called \u201cindex crimes\u201d (defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as homicide, rape, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, larceny over $50, motor vehicle theft and arson).<\/p>\n \u201cSo for every year that any prisoner is incarcerated, we\u2019re avoiding eight of these felonies, just because they\u2019re not out on the street to commit them,\u201d Mangual said.<\/p>\n Putting people in prison is actually humane, Mangual said, because it helps innocent people who are the most affected by crime.<\/p>\n A study<\/a> released by the Manhattan Institute in August 2021 found that in New York City about 5% of the streets produce 50% of the crime in the city; for violent crime, about 4% of streets during a three-year period produced about 50% of it. Similar findings in other cities show what one study calls<\/a> \u201cmicro-geographic hot spots\u201d for crime.<\/p>\n \u201cAs bad as crime has gotten in some areas, the United States does not have a crime problem. Crime is hyper-concentrated, both geographically and demographically in this country,\u201d Mangual said.<\/p>\n Klingele acknowledges that poor people and racial minorities are typical victims of crime. But putting away their crime-committing neighbors isn\u2019t the right way to address the problem, she says. Instead, a civil society should be trying to fix economic problems and others.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is the poor and marginalized and people of color who are bearing the brunt of violent crime. When we see that violence, it is a sign of deprivation and despair. And as people of faith, our response to deprivation and despair should not primarily or first be, \u2018Let me incarcerate people in your community.\u2019 We should be curious about the causes of that deprivation and despair,\u201d Klingele said.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Prosecute or Not Prosecute?<\/b><\/p>\n A hot-button dispute in criminal justice is whether to prosecute certain misdemeanor offenses.<\/p>\n In 2018, for instance, the incoming district attorney for Suffolk County in Massachusetts (which includes Boston) released a list of 15 crimes<\/a> she wanted her office not to prosecute as standalone charges unless first obtaining special permission to do so. They included trespassing, shoplifting, larceny under $250, receiving stolen property, drug possession with intent to distribute, and resisting arrest.<\/p>\n Rachael Rollins (now U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, selected by President Biden) argued<\/a> that such crimes are often driven by poverty and mental illness and that the community at large doesn\u2019t need prosecution as protection from those crimes. She also contended that people who commit those crimes would be better off without entering the criminal-justice system and getting a criminal record that might prevent them from getting a job in the future.<\/p>\n Supporters say that recent data<\/a> suggests not prosecuting violent crimes doesn\u2019t increase crime overall.<\/p>\n