Incapacitation, Essay Example

Incapacitation is the third basic leg of the crime control model. According to their thinking, it stands to reason that if more criminals are sent to prison, the crime rate should go down. Because most people age out of crime, the duration of a criminal career is limited. Placing offenders behind bars during their prime crime-committing years should lessen their lifetime opportunity to commit crime. The shorter the span of opportunity, the fewer offenses they can commit during their lives; hence crime is reduced.

Seems logical, but does it work? The past 20 years have witnessed significant growth in the number and percentage of the population held in prison and jails; today more than 2.4 million Americans are incarcerated in prison or jail. Crime control people love it and consider the increase in prison populations one of the reasons for the decade-long decline in the crime rate.

While this argument is persuasive there are flaws in the reasoning.  The prison population expanded during another period of time, 1972-1993, while there was little if any drop in crime rates. And there may be other equally logical explanations as to why the crime rates have declined as the prison population increased such as the threat of tough new mandatory sentences, a healthy economy, and tougher gun laws.

What appears to be an incapacitation effect may actually reflect the effect of some other legal phenomenon and not the incarceration of so many criminals. If, for example, the crime rate drops as more people are sent to prison, it would appear that incapacitation works. However, crime rates may really be dropping because potential criminals now fear punishment and are being deterred from crime. What appears to be an incapacitation effect may actually be an effect of general deterrence. Similarly, people may be willing to build new prisons because the economy is robust. If the crime rate drops, it may be because of economic effects and not because of prison construction.

It is also possible that incarceration can have a short-term effect that diminishes as more and more people are put in prison and the incarceration benefits of each new inmate decreases. Think of it this way: If the country had only a single prison cell and only one person could be locked up at a time, chances are that person would be the nation’s most dangerous, violent chronic offender. The crime reduction benefit of locking up just that single person would be significant. If we could only incarcerate two, the second inmate would be slightly less dangerous. Each time a person is added to the prison population, the crime reduction benefit is somewhat less than the inmate who came before. We now have 1.4 million people behind bars. The millionth-plus inmate is far less dangerous than the first, and the incarceration benefits of locking him up are significantly less, yet the cost of incarcerating each new inmate remains the same as the first! Thus, by definition, using incapacitation to reduce crime rates always brings diminishing returns.