In his wonderful book, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse, Todd Clear shows that prisoners come overwhelmingly from a small number of communities. These affected communities are then devastated by the effects of this export and stigmatization of the local population.
Now the Pew Center on the States takes the lemons (i.e., this horrible social phenomenon) and suggests making lemonade. In Maximum Impact:Targeting Supervision on Higher-Risk People,Places and Times, the authors argue that states can take advantage of the fact that crime is concentrated in small groups of people, small numbers of communities, and small units of time. This, from the executive summary:
One out of every 45 adults in the United States is under some form of criminal justice supervision in the community. These offenders commit a disproportionate share of the nation’s street crime: recent national statistics indicate that more than half of jail inmates were on probation, parole or pretrial release at the time of their arrest. Among these high-rate lawbreakers, a majority of the serious crimes are committed by a small fraction of people, in a small number of crime-ridden neighborhoods, during the first few months of probation or parole.
This concentration of crime—by person, place, and time—offers extraordinary opportunities for policy makers to improve public safety and save millions in corrections budgets. At a time when states are facing historic budget deficits, state leaders can prevent a large share of the nation’s criminal activity and cut corrections costs by helping probation and parole agencies focus their efforts on higherrisk offenders, in higher-risk neighborhoods, at higher-risk times through a strategy of targeted supervision.
I have mixed feelings about this. Although the language here is very nuanced – claiming only that these offenders commit commit a disproportionate share of street crime – it has potential to buttress the notion that the incarcerated population closely resembles the population of Americans who actually commit crimes. That is a far more questionable claim, particularly with respect to drug offenses. The police arrest a very particular sub-community of drug offenders.
On the other hand, this represents a progressive approach to post-conviction surveillance dedicated to prevention…rather than the revolving door of probation and parole revocation. (The report notes that in some states, 67% of prison admissions are for these revocations rather than new crimes.) As always, progressive criminal justice reform goes down easiest when coated in the language of "budget savings." But hey – we commodify everything in America. Why not social change as well?