Joan Petersilia gives the keynote address at the 2012 NIJ conference as attendees look on. Image: CrimeDime
At the recent NIJ conference, Joan Petersilia served as the keynote speaker. Petersilia’s work is well known throughout the field, and her long experience as a criminologist makes her uniquely suited to comment on the issue of reducing incarceration.
Petersilia, who was given free reign in her discussion topic, contextualized the current move to reduce our reliance on incarceration as a primary criminal justice strategy. Having been through the ebb and flow of criminological fad before, she expressed her concern that we might just wind up repeating our mistakes of the past – namely, net-widening.
Yet Petersilia was fundamentally hopeful that we can approach the problem of getting sensible about incarceration with science and the promise of success.
Petersilia’s lecture was sophisticated, but boiled down, she gave five reasons this can work:
- science has gotten better, more rigorous
- practitioners and researchers are working more closely together
- researchers are doing better, with general support for performance and evidence based work
- we have never closed prisons before, we have never been here before
- public opinion is with us
What do you think?
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thehurtfactory
July 23, 2012
I think we need to ask what functions prison is serving. On the surface it’s for punishing naughty people, but it is also about SHOWING that naughty people are being punished.
Simplistically, we know that crime could be massively reduced by addressing the causes – by reducing deprivation and need, developing community cohesion etc. If people can satisfy their needs legitimately they are less likely to commit crimes. But in reality we continue to be ruled and steered by self-serving interests who only want to protect and grow their own money and power.
Prison is an easy way of APPEARING to be addressing crime while not actually doing anything expensive or difficult to REDUCE it.
As long as the interested powers can still have a way of APPEARING to address crime, prison numbers can be reduced. This would require public education as well as alternatives to incarceration.
Secondly, no replacement for prison will work much better than the prison until society has a place for ex-cons. While a prison-record excludes people from work and normal life, they will continue to be pushed into further crime. Again this means a holistic approach looking at crime and society, not just crime and criminals.