It seems somehow fitting on this MLK day to highlight David Kennedy's innovative approach to reducing crime by applying less severe punishments but with greater speed and certainty, which is the topic of this "Prisoners of Parole" piece in the New York Times Magazine, 1/10/10. For those not familiar with David Kennedy, one of the speakers at last year's EDCA annual conference, his empirical programs are based on classic deterrence theory that
the threat of a mild punishment imposed reliably and immediately has a much greater deterrent effect than the threat of a severe punishment that is delayed and uncertain. . . . Recent work in behavioral economics has helped to explain this phenomenon: people are more sensitive to the immediate than the slightly deferred future and focus more on how likely an outcome is than how bad it is. . . . . At its core, the approach focuses on establishing the legitimacy of the criminal-justice system in the eyes of those who have run afoul of it or are likely to. Promising less crime and less punishment, this approach includes elements that should appeal to liberals (it doesn’t rely on draconian prison sentences) and to conservatives (it stresses individual choice and moral accountability). But at a time when the size of the U.S. prison population is increasingly seen as unsustainable for both budgetary and moral reasons — the United States represents 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population — the fact that this approach seems to work may be its biggest draw.
How does this work in practice and can it be implemented in the EDCA? Well, it has worked elsewhere. The NYT Magazine article notes that one Hawaii judge's test on his own probationers reduced positive drug tests for those in the project by 93%.
The N.D. Illinois U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's version of Kennedy's approach reduced the average monthly homicide rate in the neighborhood where the approach was tried by 37%.
Kennedy’s efforts to rethink deterrence have also inspired one of the most powerful recent models for national parole reform, which comes from Tracey Meares, a law professor at Yale. (Unlike probation, which involves a sentence instead of prison, parole involves supervision after part of the prison sentence has been served.) In 2002, Meares, who was then a law professor at the University of Chicago, was asked by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, to analyze how best to address crime in the city. She concluded that they should begin on the West Side, in West Garfield Park and the surrounding area, where rates of murder and gun violence were more than four times the city average. Fitzgerald suggested that they might implement a version of Project Exile, a controversial program in Virginia that sought to deter gun violence by threatening federal prosecutions — and a five-year mandatory minimum sentence — for repeat offenders convicted of illegal gun possession. But Project Exile had experienced only mixed success: federal prosecutors could prosecute only a small proportion of the gun cases submitted by the Richmond police. The threat of a severe sentence was, in effect, something of a bluff.
Meares told Fitzgerald that threats of zero tolerance wouldn’t work because they simply weren’t credible. Instead, Meares argued that law-enforcement officials should concentrate on specific groups of wrongdoers in ways they could accept as both reasonable and fair. Using Operation Ceasefire in Boston as a model, Meares identified everyone who had committed violent or gun-related crimes and had been released from prison and recently assigned to parole. She gathered them in random groups of no more than 20 for call-in sessions in what Meares calls “places of civic importance” — park buildings, local schools and libraries — where they sat at the same table as the police in order to create an egalitarian, nonconfrontational atmosphere. They then heard a version of Kennedy’s three-part presentation. The results of the program were drastic: there was a 37 percent drop in the average monthly homicide rate — the largest drop of any neighborhood in the city. Violent crime in Chicago today is at a 30 year low. “All these strategies are a way of signaling to groups of people that government agents view them with dignity, neutrality and trust, which is the best way of convincing them that the government has the right to hold them accountable for their behavior,” Meares told me.
Want to read more:
Download Hawaii Hope Program Summary1/2010 and Download Hawaii Hope Probation Program Full Report
Download DOJ Report Boston's Gun Project Operation Ceasefire
Books Cited in NY Magazine article (available at Amazon):
David Kennedy, Reducing Gun Violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire
Mark Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
Paul Butler, Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
Randoph Roth, American Homicide