Prison Madness: United States vs. Finland

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Adam Hochschild is an award-winning journalist and author who has collected (and updated) a number of his articles into the book Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.  These essays provide numerous interesting insights and perspectives on historical and current events.  Here we will discuss an article titled Prison Madness in which he presents a brief summary of the state of incarceration in the United States and provides a startling comparison of what it is like to be an imprisoned criminal in our country and in Finland.  A more detailed discussion of U.S. issues related to incarceration can be found in John F. Pfaff’s book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real Reform.  Pfaff’s work was reviewed in Understanding Mass Incarceration in the United States.

Hochschild provides this perspective on our incarceration practices.

“With a twentieth of the world’s population, the United States has a quarter of its prisoners…If all Americans behind bars constituted a state, its population would be greater than that of fifteen other states, big enough to be entitled to three seats in the House of Representatives.”

What is particularly strange is that as crime levels began to fall, peaking in the early 1990s, the rate of imprisonment continued to rise.  There seems to be no clear consensus on why crime has continued to fall, but it is clear that the rate of incarceration rose until just a few years ago when the whole system became unaffordable.

The standard explanation for such huge prison populations involves the notions that the war on drugs and the biased application of drug laws towards blacks has swelled the prison population with nonviolent offenders guilty of minor crimes.  The statistics suggest otherwise.  More lenient drug penalties and race-neutral application of them would not produce a great change.  And notably, about half the prisoners today were involved in crimes of violence.  The explanation lies elsewhere.

Criminal prosecutions for crimes have always been discretionary.  Roughly 10% of the population is thought to be using illegal drugs.  This number is nearly race independent.  That means over 30 million people should or could be in prison on drug charges alone.  That will not happen because law enforcement decides who they will target for criminal investigations and prosecutors decide who they will try to send to jail.  Most crimes are committed and prosecuted at a local level.  Discretion in enforcement is driven by local attitudes—and those attitudes vary widely.  Lower crime rate rural areas tend to have much higher incarceration rates than higher crime urban areas.  Pfaff suggested that we really have 3,144 legal systems, one for each county in the nation.

The real seat of power (and discretion) resides in prosecutors.  They have many tools at their disposal to threaten the accused with dire consequences if they do not plead guilty, and since they tend to be elected officials they are essentially forced to a “tough on crime” stance if they wish to be reelected.  Popular election of judges supports similar tendencies.  It is not quite clear why, but the number of prosecutors has been rising while the crime rate has been falling.  Pfaff provides these figures.

“….the number of line prosecutors (those who actually try cases) has grown significantly over the past forty years, but in a somewhat peculiar way….Between 1970 and 1990, violent crime rates rose by 100 percent, property crime rates by 40 percent, and the number of line prosecutors by 17 percent.  From 1990 to 2007, violent and property crime rates both fell by 35 percent, but the number of line prosecutors rose by 50 percent—a faster rate of growth than during the crime boom.”

Hochschild refers to a political scientist, Marie Gottschalk, author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.  She suggests that mass incarceration will not be brought down to more reasonable—and affordable—levels until people realize that imprisonment is not a solution to crime.  It solves nothing, is ineffective as a deterrent, and does not prevent prisoners from committing crimes again.  Some other form of treatment is required.  In addition, sentencing decisions must yield shorter prison terms.

“It used to be that a life sentence meant that a well-behaved American inmate was likely to be released after ten to fifteen years—a recognition that merely growing older has far more influence than length of time served on the likelihood that someone might commit another crime.  But U.S. prisons are now full of people serving several consecutive life sentences or life without parole—a punishment that virtually did not exist a half century ago and is almost unknown in the rest of the world.”

So, the U.S. has a big, unique problem.  Hochschild points out, hopefully, that perhaps there is an example to be followed in Finland where the rate of incarceration was once higher than in the U.S. but the legal system was reformed and settled in at a much lower rate.

“In 1950, with a prison system and criminal code that had changed little from their origins under the Russia of the tsars, Finland had a higher incarceration rate than we had in the United States.  In Finland 187 people out of every 100,000 were behind bars, as against only 175 here.  A long series of reforms—not without their hard-line opponents—brought the Finnish rate of incarceration far down, just as our own soared.  Today we have 710 people per 100,000 in prison in the United States, compared to 58 in Finland.”

“’One important idea that emerged’, writes two scholars of Finland’s changes, ‘was that prison cures nobody.  As a result policies were enacted that prison sentences should rarely be used in smaller crimes and other penalty systems should be developed instead’.”

Hochschild was moved to produce his essay after visiting a few Finnish prisons.  It was important to compare the treatment of inmates there with that encountered in our prisons.  From the outside Finnish prisons look as one would expect with “barbed-wire fences, bars on some windows and plenty of locked doors.  He would be provided a tour by its governor (or governess, not warden), a former prosecutor named Kirsti Nieminen.  Her facility housed about 150 men, with features Hochschild found surprising.

“In the greenhouses the inmates raised flowers, which were sold to the public, as were the organic vegetables they grew.  As we walked around the prison grounds, Nieminen pointed out a stream where prisoners could fish, a soccer field, a basketball court, a grain mill, and something she was particularly proud of, a barn full of rabbits and lambs.  ‘The responsibility to take care of a creature—it’s very therapeutic,’ she said.  ‘They are always kind to you.  It’s easier to talk to them’.”

A meeting with several inmates was arranged for Hochschild.  Their crimes were about what one might expect in a U.S. prison.  A few involved violence, including armed robbery, most of the others involved drugs.  Nieminen and another female official provided translation for the communication.

“No armed guards were in sight, and both officials and convicts wore their own clothes, not uniforms.”

“Prisoners are assigned jobs, but most spend much of their day in classes, on subjects including auto repair, computers, welding, and first aid.  A library holds several thousand books—more than you would find in many American high schools—and inmates can use the national interlibrary loan system to order others.  I sat in on a cooking class and then shared a tasty lunch its students had prepared: Karelian stew, which included beef, pork, potatoes, and cranberries.”

Hochschild refers to a book by a Missouri state senator, Jeff Smith, who was convicted of breaking a campaign spending law and sentenced to a year in prison.  He wrote about his experiences in Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America’s Prison Crisis.

“…he hoped that as a Ph.D. who had taught at Washington University in St. Louis, he would be put to work teaching.  Instead…he was assigned to a warehouse loading dock, where he observed and took part in the pilfering of food by both inmates and guards.  A month from the end of his stay he was finally transferred to the education unit—and assigned to sweeping out classrooms.  A computer skills class consisted of the chance to sit at a computer for thirty minutes, with no instruction whatsoever; at a nutrition class, a guard ‘handed out a brochure with information about the caloric content of food at McDonald’s, Bojangles, and Wendy’s, and released us after five minutes’.”

The goal of the Finnish system is to return prisoners to society as people capable of participating as functioning members.

“If you had half your sentence completed and had permission, you could leave Kerava prison on weekends.  Everything possible was done to ease that transition.  The diploma you get on completing one of the classes I saw, for instance, is certified by an outside organization; it doesn’t say you received your training in prison.”

“A host of offerings within the walls addressed the problems that landed the men in trouble in the first place.  There were programs for anger management and drug rehabilitation, as well as both individual and group psychotherapy.  Prisoners could take part in a twelve-step program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous and a class in life skills that met three times a week.  And in an idea copied from Sweden, the prison hosted a series of speakers: former convicts who shared their experiences in readjusting to the world.”

The process of exiting prison is quite different in our country from what is encountered in Finland

“A released prisoner in the United States is frequently barred from voting, public housing, pensions, and disability benefits, and is lucky if he receives anything more than bus fare and, according to Jeff Smith, a routine farewell from a guard: ‘You’ll be back, shitbird’.”

“At Kerava prison in Finland, before an inmate is released, a social worker travels to his hometown to make sure that he will have a job and a safe place to live.”