Down the Rabbit
Hole
How the Culture of
Corrections Encourages Crime
Price:
$12.95/softcover, 337 pages
“Down
the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime,” a
penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall
and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a
page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why
is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a
prison sentence?
The multiple answers to this central question are not at all
obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed
his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison
officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts
who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the
experts are more convincing cons than the cons, possibly because prisoners,
many of them victims of programs that do not reduce recidivism rates, are not
credentialed. Most people in prison are graduates of the school of hard knocks,
not Harvard.
McCall and Liebowitz, serious criminals, are mechanics
uniquely situated to answer the question: Why doesn’t rehabilitative
imprisonment rehabilitate?
There are four criminological pillars to incarceration:
incapacitation, punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. The authors find
all four goals defensible, even desirable. However, the thesis of this book,
very hard to dispute, is that only one engine, incapacitation, is pulling the
train.
Punishment, in their view, does not rehabilitate because in
most cases punishment is not viewed by prisoners as punishment: “We witness it
every day. In a nutshell: prisons are often too comfortable; discipline is
frequently too lax, inconsistent and arbitrary; and the staff generally doesn’t
take rehabilitative programs any more seriously than the inmates do.”
The four goals of incarceration can only be met “… if there
is proper implementation. When offenders are allowed to lay back in the
relative comfort of an air conditioned cell watching color TV, listening to
CD’s or playing video games, it can hardly be considered severe enough
punishment to deter anything. Hell, that’s what most of the guys in prison
enjoyed doing prior to their incarcerations. Couple this with the fact that
inmates know that the vast majority of rule violations they commit will be
ignored – even when committed in clear view and with the full knowledge of
institutional staff members –and that effectively there are no performance
expectations placed on them in either their job assignments or the programs
they take – and you have a veritable recipe for failure.”
Young students confronting authority demands engage in what
used to be called, before the collapse of public education, “reality-testing.”
Will the authority figure apply his sanction equably? Will he apply it at all?
If not, the efficacy of the sanction disappears. More destructively, the
failure to apply sanctions will be interpreted as a failure of will and a
sanctioning of illicit behavior. Sanctions unapplied or indifferently applied
are, quite literally, dead.
The book finds that attempts to change rooted behavior in criminals
fail for two principle reasons: 1) the content of the reform is wrong. You
cannot teach dolphins to play pianos; better to teach them how to swim; 2) the
messenger is wrong. Many of the messengers, and prison officials teach every
day through example, are poorly instructed and fatally disengaged in what should
be a primary mission -- changing the culture of prisons.
The authors note that the arc of penology, driven by
perceptions of failure, has in the past moved between deceivingly opposite
poles. “Every twenty years or so,” they write, “the pendulum swings
from an ostensible focus on rehabilitation, with its apparent emphasis on
prison programs, job training and compassion towards offenders, to get tough on
crime policies, which supposedly means longer sentences and harsher prison
conditions.”
This is a false either-or: “Firm condemnation of offenders
and rehabilitative efforts can go hand in hand… punishment and reforms are not
mutually exclusive objectives. In fact, punishment, or the threat of punishment
is crucial to generating the motivation to change.” The culprit in prisoner
reform – the authors assiduously avoid the word “rehabilitation” -- is an
unjust and random implementation of both sanctions and reform efforts. As in the
broader society, culture -- the real-time application of both punishments and
reform efforts -- determines the success of penological programs.
Down the Rabbit Hole, suffused with hope, is remarkably free
of bitterness. Still, an honest review of the tangle of unworkable prison
reforms that do little to reduce the recidivism rate in Connecticut or other prisons -- "Statistics show that 67.8% of inmates released from prison nationwide are charged with at least one serious new crime within three years of their release" -- calls forth this sulfurous appraisal: “During the course of a single prison sentence, the offender can attend a series of programs that convey fundamentally
different and often contradictory ideas about what the cause of his criminality
is and what is required of him to correct it. In one program, he is told that
he is the hapless victim of an inherently unfair societal power structure and
that he simply needs to be open to the benevolent intervention of an
inscrutable cosmic force. Another program teaches that he is the victim of a
pernicious disease that robs him of the ability to choose and induces him to
behave poorly. Still another program informs him that he is really just the
victim of a cruel world that has mistreated him from birth and continues to
fail to acknowledge his innate goodness, thus causing him to express himself
through artificial sub-personalities he was forced to create in an effort to
merely survive… And every once in a while, someone might mention that he needs
to take responsibility and correct his thinking errors – though how exactly
that is to be accomplished puzzles even those offering the admonition.”
The book offers constructive remedies. What is wanting in
the confusing slop of pretend-reform programs is a conversion regimen that will
purge the demons within that thrive on confusion, disorder and despair. There
is life and hope at the end of the rabbit hole. The book, which pulls no
punches and is what politicians might call a “frank and honest” discussion of
life behind bars, is an easy read, free of suffocating academic jargon, though some destructive
reform remedies do not survive the authors’ petri dish.
The audience targeted by the authors is the general public,
and the book itself may best be appreciated as a message in a bottle sent to
the wide world by Robinson Caruso, who is best able to provide the reader with the
clearest understanding of Caruso’s island, from which island
dwellers, hopefully reformed, are regularly shipped to the mainland.
____________________
Questions
on the book should be sent to rabbitholect@gmail.com
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