At what point does more punishment reduce rather than enhance public safety?
I teach a couple of courses on the sociology of punishment and I usually end them with some variant of the above question. There are a number of answers to it — punishment policy with respect to sex offenders is an obvious example. I gave this lecture a few nights ago and was deeply saddened to see this story this morning. A young girl was allegedly assaulted and killed by a homeless sex offender living in a field near her home. What could we have done to prevent this?
We could have required him to register as a sex offender so that the girl’s parents knew his whereabouts. We could have monitored him with a GPS tracking unit. We could better assess the likelihood that he was dangerous and monitored him more closely. We could pass a law restricting where sex offenders can live and work to keep them away from children.
Except… all of these things were done.
Darrin Sanford, who has reportedly confessed to the crime, was registered as a Level 3 sex offender (denoting him most likely to re-offend). He was listed as homeless in the sex offender registry. The young woman’s parents were aware of the transients spending time in the field nearby and had warned her of the danger, specifically highlighting sexual assault as a risk. Sanford was required to check in daily with a probation agent (and did so in the days surrounding the girl’s murder). Perhaps most disturbing, Sanford was wearing a GPS monitor when he committed the crime.
Sanford was subject to all of the punishment and control we heap on sex offenders. But, really, what do these sorts of policies do? Do they make us any safer?
GPS tracking is notoriously difficult to implement and, while it may help convict offenders after a crime has been committed, there is not a lot of evidence that it prevents crime in the first place. Laws restricting where sex offenders can live have been successful in increasing the number of sex offenders who are homeless and concentrating them in particular apartment buildings. Homeless sex offenders are harder to monitor and, at the very least, a bunch of sex offenders living together is not a good strategy for public safety. What of the public registries? There is good evidence that sex offender registries are filled with inaccuracies because law enforcement has too few agents and too few dollars to keeps tabs on so many sex offenders. I also worry that our emphasis on labeling sex offenders publicly makes it more likely that they will re-offend.
All of this adds up to the illusion of control over sex offenders, not control itself, and a public that merely feels more safe in the presence of such policies. Feeling safe is good — being safe probably a bit better.
Comments 8
slamdunk — March 13, 2009
Good post Sarah.
I have struggled with your question as well. In contrast, your argument and the case example could also be used to justify the need for more punishment strategies—specifically incarceration. As you state, monitoring and other types of sanctions have serious loopholes in that they can fail to fully restrict the ability of violent offenders to prey on new victims. It could be said that by locking-up those convicted, even for only a short time, the public can be 100% sure that an individual will not be involved in violent crimes in the community since they are in prison/jail.
From a policing perspective, it was difficult for me to accept the arguments for strategies such as rehabilitation over sanction-based approaches. When I was a patrol officer, I was concerned more with the short-term and was interested in removing problem individuals in my zone from the streets for the year, month, week, or simply just for the shift. If the offender was arrested and then jailed, he was not going to cause the citizens of my jurisdiction problems during his monitored stay.
Likewise, it is easy for officers to simply say “imprison all offenders forever.” Unfortunately, a lock’em strategy leaves society with unbearable costs and the uncomfortable fact that the vast majority of persons incarcerated reenter communities more prone to reoffend rather than as changed individuals ready to become law-abiding citizens. Further, the empirical literature overwhelmingly shows that the best long-term approach to lowering recidivism is through specific rehabilitation efforts.
In sum, I believe that, after hearing about the tragedy that you discuss in Washington, most citizens will support policies in the opposite direction—not looking at the failings of punishment through sanctions, but pushing for greater use of stronger punishments in the form of incarceration for all offenders regardless of the long-term drawbacks.
slamdunk — March 13, 2009
Sara: My apologies for the name misspelling in the above post.
sara — March 13, 2009
good comments, slamdunk. i totally agree with you that cases like these generally push us towards more, rather than less, punishment. my post got a bit long so i left this out but... my students often say, in response to these kinds of issues, "well, why didn't we just lock him up forever?" leaving aside the issue of the fairness of long sentences for first or second time offenders, i also think there is a lot of error in predicting who will re-offend so we're still stuck having to choose between locking everybody up forever (untenable, as you say) or accepting being wrong a lot of the time (and ending up with cases like the one in washington).
i also worry about the burden on supervising agents -- my state of CA is in a terrible mess because it supervises almost everybody post-release. it doesn't do much to prevent crime but the prison population has exploded in part because of the large number of people cycling in and out of prison because of technical violations. there is a lot of talk here about developing better risk assessments to figure out who to supervise more closely -- i sometimes listen to these conversations and feel like risk assessments are just another illusion.
no worries on the h/no-h -- i'm more than used to it ;)
Just enough time and energy to link to… « New Soc Prof’s Weblog — March 13, 2009
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Jay Livingston, PhD — March 13, 2009
Crimes like this are horrible. But if you judge a policy in binary categories -- success or failure -- and if any one crime means that the policy failed, you're doomed to failure. The question is not whether these policies (registatration, GPS, etc.) prevent all crimes but whether they reduce crime, by how much, and at what cost.
slamdunk — March 16, 2009
That makes sense Sara. I remember there being quite a few researchers trying to improve the risk assessment tools used.
I also recall hearing my professors discussing how they had started to separate parole violator stats (those that reentered the system for technical violations versus those offenders who had committed another crime), and they saw this as a critical issue in program planning and evaluation as well.
With JL's comment--I understand the argument that programs should be evaluated by merit (though the measurements of success and failure in relation to crime reduction and estimating costs are tenuous and far from exact sciences), but since we are dealing with violent crime and dangers to society, I don't believe performance will ever serve as the litmus test.
In Sara's post, I initially thought she was referring to this recent murder case in Ohio: Teen Murdered while Running.
The reality is that programs are judged with a "1" or "0." If a program is associated with ten, five, or even one person who fails and then commits a violent crime, the public is unconcerned with the initiative's 95% success rate. The program's good historical record, is quickly forgotten as the many will advocate for its demise (as is being done with the Ohio program described in the article).
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