Crime and Justice, Volume 46: Reinventing American Criminal Justice

Contents

Front Matter

Preface

Michael Tonry

From Policing to Parole: Reconfiguring American Criminal Justice

Michael Tonry

Reinventing Community Corrections

Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Daniel P. Mears

Dealing More Effectively and Humanely with Illegal Drugs

Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Reuter

Dealing More Effectively with Problematic Substance Use and Crime

Harold A. Pollack

Reducing Firearm Violence

David Hemenway

Mentally Ill Individuals in Jails and Prisons

Edward P. Mulvey and Carol A. Schubert

The Future of Parole Release

Edward E. Rhine, Joan Petersilia, and Kevin R. Reitz

Reinventing American Policing

Cynthia Lum and Daniel S. Nagin

Reinventing American Prosecution Systems

Ronald F. Wright

Making American Sentencing Just, Humane, and Effective

Michael Tonry

Index

Erratum

Jonathan P. Caulkins and Peter Reuter

Front Matter

© 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Preface

Michael Tonry

Bagnaia, Isola D’Elba, November 2016

Almost everyone who has thought about it agrees that American state and federal criminal justice systems could be made incomparably better. They could prevent crime more effectively and, like legal systems in other Western countries, do it more justly, fairly, evenhandedly, and humanely. The problems are well known. Many police departments are demoralized, alienated from the communities they serve, and distrusted by citizens, especially minority citizens. Prosecutors are overly aggressive, often threatening defendants with lengthier-than-deserved prison terms under mandatory sentencing laws if they refuse to plead guilty. Sentencing laws are too severe and send too many people to prison and for too long. Prisons are overcrowded and dehumanizing, and they lack the resources they need to address the problems of their heavily minority, disadvantaged, drug-dependent, and mentally ill charges. Most community corrections programs, underfunded and overstretched, are unable to marshal the resources needed to make serious efforts to help offenders achieve satisfying, law-abiding lives. Parole release systems are moribund.

Nearly everyone agrees. Newspapers publish interchangeable editorials decrying the system, condemning its excesses, and regretting what it has done. The Soros Foundation, on the left, and Koch Industries, on the right, fund major criminal justice reform initiatives aiming to repeal severe laws and facilitate offenders’ reintegration into mainstream society. Conservative organizations such as the Manhattan Institute, Justice Fellowship, the American Enterprise Institute, Right on Crime, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation more often than not find common law reform cause with liberal organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Open Society Institute, the Sentencing Project, and New York University’s Brennan Center.

The challenge is to rebuild American criminal justice systems into something of which Americans can be proud. If they are to reestablish their legitimacy, they must be remade so that they reinforce basic norms of right and wrong; treat people charged with or convicted of crimes fairly, justly, and humanely; and prevent crime. No one would expect anything less if they or their children or loved ones were suspected, charged, or convicted. The ultimate tests of a criminal justice system are its legitimacy in citizens’ eyes and minds and whether people affected by it believe they are treated fairly and respectfully. Everyone wants that for themselves. Everyone should want it for others.

In past times, in the 1930s and 1960s, when criminal justice systems were in disrepute and seemed to be on the cusp of major reconsideration, the federal government sought guidance from national commissions specially appointed to survey current knowledge and formulate recommendations. Efforts to create a national commission for our time failed, despite sustained efforts by former US Senator James Webb and others. As a next best, Dan Nagin and I convened a national commission for three days. We asked America’s leading experts on a wide range of subjects to identify what needs doing and why and subjected their ideas to searching scrutiny by heads of federal agencies and law reform organizations, a wide range of senior practitioners, and well-known senior scholars. We sought subsequent critical assessments from subject matter experts. This book reports what was learned. If and when legislators and other policy makers decide to unwind mass incarceration and build just and effective criminal justice systems, proven tools are available.

American citizens and voters are ready for change. Countless public opinion surveys show that Americans no longer consider crime or drug abuse to be major problems and would rather that public money be spent on treatment programs than on prisons. California voters enacted referendums that greatly narrow the scope of that state’s three-strikes law, with retrospective application, and require diversion of many drug-dependent offenders to treatment. Voters in eight states and the District of Columbia approved marijuana decriminalization. Voters in many states approved referendums legalizing medical use of marijuana. In the end, though, voters and referendums will not rebuild American criminal justice systems. Only legislators can do that. So far they have failed.

The essays in this book explain what needs to be done, and why, and on what evidence. This volume followed the standard Crime and Justice developmental process. Essays were commissioned from well-known, widely respected senior scholars. A conference to discuss and illuminate the drafts was attended by the writers, scholarly specialists, public officials, and heads of law reform groups. The drafts were later distributed to paid referees for critical reactions and suggestions for improvement. All were substantially rewritten.

The May 2015 meeting in Minneapolis was coordinated and managed by Alessandro Corda. Besides the writers, the attendees were Mariel Alper (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Alfred Blumstein (Carnegie-Mellon University), James Burch (Police Foundation), Phillip J. Cook (Duke University), Alessandro Corda (University of Minnesota), Richard S. Frase (University of Minnesota), Ted Gest (the Crime Report), Rhys Hester (University of Minnesota), Candace Kruttschnitt (University of Toronto), Marc Mauer (the Sentencing Project), Ojmarrh Mitchell (University of South Florida), John Monahan (University of Virginia), Rossella Selmini (University of Minnesota), Julian Roberts (Oxford University), William Sabol (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Vincent Schiraldi (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University), Kate Stith (Yale University), Richard Stroker (Center for Effective Public Policy), and Nick Turner (Vera Institute of Justice).

Dan Nagin and I have been partners in this enterprise from its inception. Writers endured a long, arduous process with remarkable patience and goodwill. Meeting participants did their reading ahead of time and offered useful advice and challenging criticism. Referees prepared reports substantially more detailed and reflective than is common; writers took the reports seriously. Alessandro provided indispensable help behind the scenes. Dan and I are enormously grateful to them all. Readers will decide for themselves whether the effort was worthwhile.

© 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0192-3234/2016/0046-0010$10.00

From Policing to Parole: Reconfiguring American Criminal Justice

Michael Tonry

No one would have purposely created criminal justice systems like those that now exist in the United States. Few informed people would disagree with the following litany of problems:

American state and federal criminal justice systems could do incomparably better. They could prevent crime more effectively and, like many other Western countries, do it more justly, fairly, evenhandedly, and humanely. In this essay I offer nine propositions, applicable to different parts and facets of the system, that should guide that effort. They are derived from as many essays in which experienced senior scholars propose fundamental changes in how American justice systems go about their business. In past times, in the 1930s and 1960s, when criminal justice policies seemed to be on the cusp of major reconsideration, the federal government sought guidance from national commissions specially appointed to survey current knowledge and formulate recommendations. Efforts to create a national commission for our time failed, despite sustained efforts by former US Senator James Webb and others. As a next best, we convened a national commission for three days. We asked America’s leading policy specialists on a wide range of subjects to identify what needs doing and why and subjected their ideas to searching scrutiny by heads of federal agencies and law reform organizations, a wide range of senior practitioners, and well-known senior scholars. We sought subsequent critical assessments from subject matter experts.

This essay describes what was learned. The first section describes some of the widely recognized major problems that bedevil American criminal justice systems and places them in comparative context. Many countries’ criminal justice systems operate more successfully and effectively. The second section places current problems in historical context and discusses the work, recommendations, and influence of the three most important national crime commissions. The third presents and justifies the nine propositions for refashioning American criminal justice systems to meet the needs of a no longer new century.

I. American Criminal Justice in Comparative Perspective

Criminal laws should declare and reinforce basic social norms about right and wrong. Criminal justice systems should express and embody fundamental Enlightenment values of justice, fairness, equality, and human dignity. It is hard to imagine that anyone, anywhere, in developed Western countries disagrees in principle with either of those statements. No one would expect less if they or their loved ones were charged with crimes. Criminal justice institutions cannot fully live up to those aspirations, but they do it much better in some other countries than in the United States and, within the United States, in some states than in others.

No informed person would describe American criminal justice systems as just, fair, evenhanded, and respectful of human dignity, despite the best efforts of many decent, well-motivated people who work within them. Contemporary systems are in many ways less admirable than those in other countries with which the United States would ordinarily be compared. Violence by and against the police is much less common elsewhere, and police relationships with members of racial and ethnic minority groups are less troubled. Except for a handful of exceptions in Switzerland, only the United States among Western countries elects judges or prosecutors or selects them according to political criteria. Everywhere else, including in other English-speaking countries, judges and prosecutors are career civil servants, are selected on the basis of merit, and are resolute in the belief that their actions and decisions should not be influenced by the media, public opinion, political considerations, or the preferences of elected officials.¹

Only in the United States are most cases resolved by plea negotiations, with the results almost always rubber-stamped by judges—when the judge’s hands are not tied by mandatory minimum and similar sentencing laws. Nothing comparable to American plea bargaining exists in any continental European country. English judges reward guilty pleas with sentence reductions, but English law does not allow charge or sentence bargains. Nowhere else is a guilty plea enough by itself for a conviction; a judge must determine the facts, decide whether the defendant is guilty and of what, and impose a sentence. Most countries operate extensive programs of pretrial diversion, and most have established wide ranges of community penalties that are meant to be used, and are used, in lieu of prison sentences. American prosecutors, by contrast, are loath to divert people charged with nontrivial crimes from prosecution, and American judges are reluctant to divert otherwise jail- or prison-bound offenders to community penalties. For 40 years, most rigorous evaluations have concluded that alternatives to incarceration are more often used to toughen community punishments than to lessen use of imprisonment (e.g., Morris and Tonry 1990).

Most western European countries use imprisonment sparingly. Sentences are short by American standards: terms longer than a year or two are rare. Imprisonment rates average 100 per 100,000 residents, one-seventh the American rate. Many prisons in European countries hold 50–200 inmates, almost unimaginably few by US standards; treat prisoners respectfully as citizens behind bars; and provide extensive programming meant to increase their odds of living successful, law-abiding lives later on. That costs money. Not surprisingly, European prisons cost much more per person to operate (so do prosecution and judicial systems). American prisons are overcrowded, often holding 20–60 percent more inmates than they were designed for, disrespectful of inmates’ privacy and human dignity, and resource-poor. We know how many unskilled, poorly educated, mentally ill, drug-dependent, and alcoholic people are in prison. We also know from surveys that only small percentages in each category receive the services they need.

In the United States in 2017 there was much talk, though less action, concerning fundamental rethinking and remaking of American criminal justice policies and practices. Mention is often made of a left/right consensus on the need for major changes, evidenced by the emergence of conservative law reform initiatives like Right on Crime that on many issues find common ground with liberal organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, and of the coincidence of large-scale law reform investments by liberal organizations like the Soros Foundation and conservative organizations like Koch Industries. Many hundreds of small-scale changes have created narrow exceptions to severe sentencing laws for first and minor offenders, narrowed grounds for parole and probation revocation, and provided new treatment opportunities. Prison reentry programs have proliferated as have drug, mental health, and other problem-solving courts. The challenge is to move beyond these small steps that may be auguries of major changes to their realization.

II. American Criminal Justice Reform in Historical Perspective

Much of what is said in Section I about American institutions and problems could have been said 50 or 80 years ago.² We know this from the reports of the Wickersham commission, formally the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (1931), appointed by President Herbert Hoover; the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967), appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson; and the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (1973), appointed by President Richard M. Nixon’s administration. Two of these, it warrants emphasis, were appointed by Republican administrations. Justice, fairness, equal treatment, and human dignity are not and should not be partisan issues.

The problems the three commissions describe are strikingly similar and are strikingly similar to contemporary problems. Mostly the details differ. The commissions described brutality, the third degree, racial bias, and political influence as major police problems in their times. Most observers today would describe zero tolerance and similar street-level tactics, racial profiling, militarization, and excessive use of force. The commissions described overworked and underfunded prosecutors, judges, and parole board members who had little alternative but to operate assembly lines that barely observed the forms and seldom achieved the substance of just, fair, equal, and respectful case processing. The best contemporary participant observation studies show that things are not very different now (e.g., Bogira 2005). Plea bargaining mostly operated behind closed doors in those earlier times but was less common. What is different today is the coercive force of threats to apply mandatory minimum, three-strikes, and life without possibility of parole laws unless defendants plead guilty. Unlike now, few in those earlier times would have written as the late Harvard Law School professor William Stuntz did that outside the plea bargaining process, such threats would be deemed extortionate (2011, p. 260). Nor would many have said, as federal court of appeals Judge Gerald Lynch did of our times, that the prosecutor, rather than a judge or jury, is the central adjudicator of facts (as well as replacing the judge as arbiter of most legal issues and of the appropriate sentence to be imposed). Potential defenses are presented by the defendant and his counsel not in a court but to a prosecutor, who … decides the charge of which the defendant should be adjudged guilty. Mitigating information, similarly, is argued not to the judge but to the prosecutor, who decides what sentence the defendant should be given (2003, pp. 1403–4). Police brutality and prison conditions were, on average, probably worse in those earlier times, racial bias more explicit, and police and corrections management less professional; but crowding, inadequate programming, and disrespect for prisoners’ human dignity were much the same as now. Solitary confinement was much less common, and supermax prisons had not been invented. Probation and parole programs then as now were underfunded, insufficiently expert, and grossly inadequate to their purposes.

The three historic commissions each made bold proposals that sought to make the justice system fairer, more just, and more effective. The Wickersham and President’s commissions proposed step-by-step changes meant to make things better without requiring major institutional changes. The National Advisory Commission chaired by Republican Delaware Governor Russell W. Peterson was bolder. It set concrete crime reduction goals to be achieved by 1983 and proposed the elimination of plea bargaining, merit selection for judges, creation of unified state corrections systems, closing of all juvenile prisons, and a moratorium on construction of adult prisons.

The commissions’ ambitions were not small, but none of them had the transformative influence they hoped for. The Wickersham commission was organized in 1929 primarily to study and propose changes to enforcement of the prohibition laws although its scope was much broader. When the report was released, media and political attention to Prohibition overshadowed everything else (Walker 2013). The Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in due course was repealed, and the succession of the Great Depression, World War II, and postwar recovery moved criminal justice reform to the national back burner. A third of a century passed before criminal justice again became a focal issue.

The President’s Commission, all accounts agree, was precipitated by Republican Barry Goldwater’s emphasis in the 1964 presidential election on crime in the streets. Newly elected President Johnson appointed the President’s Commission in 1965 and charged it to report its findings in January 1967. It met the deadline, proposed an ambitious range of reforms, and recommended a massive federal role in funding and technical assistance. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) was established in 1968 to catalyze that expanded federal role with budgets that dwarfed prior levels of federal spending on state and local criminal justice. Pilot and demonstration projects on many reform ideas were established, funded, and evaluated in every state. State planning agencies composed of state and local officials were created to oversee expenditure of the federal money. Huge investments in training of criminal justice practitioners, especially police, motivated colleges and universities across the United States to establish criminal justice programs and departments. Things were humming (Cronin, Cronin, and Milakovich 1981).

President Nixon supported LEAA and the Standards and Goals Commission. The President’s Commission emphasized research, analyzing data, surveying existing knowledge, and sponsoring major new research initiatives.³ The Standards and Goals Commission sought to be hardheaded and practical and offered concrete proposals, strategies for achieving them, and measures to confirm their realization.

The efforts of both commissions fizzled out. The President’s Commission had some long-term influence: the creation and survival of the National Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics and their programs, the entrenchment of a national network of college and university criminal justice programs, professionalization of senior police and correctional management, and stimulation of major and ongoing research initiatives on police effectiveness, victimization, criminal careers, and other subjects. But as with the Wickersham commission, it would be difficult to identify anything transformative attributable to either of the later commissions.

In retrospect their influence was so modest because Barry Goldwater’s law and order crime control approach won out. Herbert L. Packer (1964, 1968) had written influentially in the 1960s about differences between crime control and due process paradigms for thinking about crime. To crime controllers, the fundamental question is whether the criminal justice system maximally prevents crime. To people who emphasize due process, the fundamental question is whether alleged offenders are treated justly, fairly, and evenhandedly. The crime control paradigm gives primary emphasis to aggressive law enforcement and severe punishment. The due process paradigm emphasizes criminal justice processes that respect human dignity, social programs that address root causes of crime, and treatment programs that foster successful reintegration. Crime prevention and due process are, of course, not opposites; both are essential in a civilized society. Unfortunately, they were often seen as irreconcilable. Crime control won out.

The President’s and Standards and Goals commissions sought to reconcile crime control and due process. The fundamental conclusion of the President’s Commission was that a significant reduction in crime is possible if certain things were done:

First, society must seek to prevent crime before it happens by assuring all Americans a stake in the benefits and responsibilities of American life, by strengthening law enforcement, and by reducing criminal opportunities.

Second, society’s aim of reducing crime would be better served if the system of criminal justice developed a far broader range of techniques with which to deal with individual offenders.

Third, the system of criminal justice must eliminate existing injustices if it is to achieve its ideals and win the respect and cooperation of all citizens.

Fourth, the system of criminal justice must attract more people and better people—police, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, probation and parole officers, and corrections officials with more knowledge, expertise, initiative, and integrity.

Fifth, there must be much more operational and basic research into the problems of crime and criminal administration, by those both within and without the system of criminal justice.

Sixth, the police, courts, and correctional agencies must be given substantially greater amounts of money if they are to improve their ability to control crime.

(President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967, p. vi)

The President’s Commission’s first, most fundamental, aspiration was to assure all Americans a stake in the benefits and responsibilities of American life. The core proposals do not call for prosecuting cases more aggressively, increasing the certainty or severity of punishment, enacting tougher sentencing laws, or sending more people to prison. Except for strengthening law enforcement, the main proposals are to improve programming for offenders, eliminate injustices, attract better-qualified personnel, conduct better research, and allocate substantially greater amounts of money. The Standards and Goals Commission built on those proposals, developed them in greater detail, and offered action plans to achieve them.

It was largely for naught despite the establishment of federally supported pilot projects and new initiatives in the 1970s. Some, for example, concerning bail reform, victims’ programs, policing innovations, and sentencing reforms, laid foundations for efforts that were seldom conspicuously successful but that continue today. Overall, though, momentum toward development of humane, evidence-based, rational, and effective policies fizzled out. The Wickersham commission’s impetus had been smothered by the Depression and the war. The proposals of the President’s and Standards and Goals commissions drowned in the fundamentally changed politics of crime and criminal justice.

Conservative intellectuals in the 1970s condemned policies aimed at addressing crime’s root causes and called for more aggressive policing, severer laws, and harsher punishments (e.g., Fleming 1974; van den Haag 1975; Wilson 1975). Politicians listened. A notable illustration is provided by President Gerald Ford’s early 1975 meeting with the neoconservative political scientist James Q. Wilson, author of an influential book, Thinking about Crime. Historian Samuel Walker describes the aftermath: The President ‘thought his ideas made a lot of sense,’ and his staff circulated chapters within the administration. Drawing on Wilson’s crime control proposals, Ford said it was important to change ‘the way we thought about crime’ (Walker 2012, p. 347).⁴

From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, when Democrats eventually adopted President Bill Clinton’s strategy of not letting the Republicans get to his right on crime, crime and crime control policy became central issues in partisan politics and ideological conflict.⁵ Rationality, evidence, and respect for human dignity largely disappeared from policy making. The most severe new laws—mandatory minimum, three-strikes, truth-in-sentencing, sexual predator, career criminal, and modern life without possibility of parole laws—were mostly enacted between 1984 and 1996. The available evidence on the effects of sanctions did not justify them then and cannot justify them now. That this is so was shown by the recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration (Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014, chaps. 1, 3, 5).

In 2017, it is not controversial to assert that the crime prevention effects of mass incarceration were much less than many people expected or supposed, that there is little or no reason to believe harsher punishments have greater deterrent effects than milder ones, that locking up many people for long periods to incapacitate them is ineffective, or that being in prison makes many offenders more, not less, likely to reoffend. The NAS committee reached all those conclusions and explained the evidence justifying them.

The committee’s conclusions are not novel, though they are based on much more, and scientifically more rigorous, evidence than was available in earlier times. NAS reports in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s surveyed the evidence then available on deterrence, incapacitation, sentencing, criminal careers, and violence and reached the same conclusions.⁶ The tough-on-crime laws of the 1980s and 1990s were based on political considerations, ideology, and emotion. They were not based on evidence. The recent NAS committee observed that consideration of social science evidence has had little influence on legislative policymaking processes concerning sentencing and punishment in recent decades (Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014, p. 90).

Americans need to do better. We know how to do better. Many of the proposals of the three national commissions remain as pertinent as when they were offered. Research findings of the past four decades provide the knowledge necessary to achieve just, fair, and effective criminal justice systems in the twenty-first century.

III. American Criminal Justice in the Twenty-First Century

Some of the structural causes of the inadequacies of American criminal justice may be irremediable in any foreseeable future. Election and political selection of chief prosecutors and judges is one. Few informed people would disagree that prosecution priorities and policies are often influenced by election returns, media views, and public opinion. The evidence is overwhelming that officials’ behavior changes when elections loom and that their political beliefs and ambitions affect their decisions (e.g., Gordon and Huber 2007; Bandyopadhyay and McCannon 2014). The obvious solution is for officials to be appointed on merit and insulated from political influence, but as that would require constitutional amendments, it is unlikely any time soon.

The balkanization of criminal justice policy is another. In most countries, including others with federal political systems such as Canada and Germany, criminal codes, criminal procedure, and sentencing laws are everywhere the same. Every American state and the federal government, by contrast, have their own laws and procedures. Key institutions such as prosecution, corrections, and court systems are usually organized at national levels in other Western countries and in a handful at regional levels. Nowhere except in the United States are major components of policy making and administration devolved to local levels. In the American States, the integrity, efficiency, decency, and day-to-day management of key institutions and the initial handling of individual cases are the responsibility of county officials. The jail can be no better than the elected sheriff wishes, community corrections no better than elected county boards want and will pay for, and court processes no fairer, more just, or more humane than local judges decide. Like election of justice system officials, those structural features of American government can usually be changed only by constitutional amendments.

Some things, such as criminal laws, state prison systems, and, where they exist, state parole and probation systems, can, however, be changed by legislators and state officials. So can myriad policies and practices at local levels. The downside of this is that backwaters will long remain backwaters, and dreadful local institutions, policies, and practices will long endure. The upside is that states can change their laws and institutions and local officials can change what happens in their counties.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis observed long ago in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932), that in the decentralized American federal system a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. State and local officials who want to create and operate criminal justice systems that are just, fair, evenhanded, and effective, within the scope of their authority, can do so if they wish. The following nine propositions are for their consideration.⁷

Proposal A. Police: Police culture and incentives systems must be reoriented to advance two bedrock principles: first, crimes averted, not arrests made, should be the primary measure for assessing police effectiveness; second, citizen perceptions of the police and their tactics for preventing crime and disorder matter independently of police effectiveness.

Police culture and performance evaluations prioritize arrests over crime prevention and provide no material incentives to leaders or individual officers for securing citizens’ trust and confidence. These are fundamental flaws. Training and organizational incentives must be overhauled to develop systems that measure police effectiveness in preventing crime, and not primarily in generating large numbers of arrests or summonses for minor offenses.

The evidence is overwhelming that police activities can more effectively prevent crime than can changes in sentencing patterns and policies, but also that police often overemphasize the importance of stops and arrests made and by doing so diminish their legitimacy in the eyes of the communities they serve. This is unfortunate because it distracts police from more important crime prevention work, lessens citizen cooperation, and, perhaps most importantly, undermines citizens’ trust and confidence.

Current practices in many departments, especially in big cities, disproportionately affect disadvantaged minorities, particularly young men, and impose large social and economic costs on those who are targeted. This exacerbates long-standing distrust and hostility toward the police in minority communities.

Systems must be developed and deployed to measure citizen reactions to the police in general and to specific tactics. These measurements must be made part of performance evaluation systems at every stage—for the department at large and for police personnel from senior executives to officers on the beat. Police organizations must develop and use stronger accountability systems that incorporate greater transparency about data and monitor policies related to police-citizen interactions, especially involving the use of force (Lum and Nagin 2017).

Proposal B. Prosecution: More effective legal, institutional, and cultural constraints must be established to help prosecutors respond ethically and appropriately to criminal behavior, public safety priorities, and input from other criminal justice officials.

Prosecutors must do more than evaluate the legal sufficiency of individual cases, solicit guilty pleas, obtain convictions, and seek punishments; they must do justice. Exercise of their powers must occur within systems of institutional checks and balances, be guided by democratic priorities, and result from more than just the chief prosecutor’s personal morality, ideology, and political interests (Wright 2017).

Prosecutors have much more autonomy than do other criminal justice officials. They are accountable only to the electorate; their decisions can rarely be appealed to the courts. The US Supreme Court in Bordenkircher v. Hayes, 434 U.S. 357 (1978), and Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), effectively made their discretionary decisions immune from judicial review. That power is used responsibly in many cases and policy areas. In other contexts, however, prosecutors produce troubling results in individual cases, illustrated by William Stuntz’s observation in 2011 that many plea negotiation practices would be viewed as extortion in other contexts. They have also produced noxious trends in the criminal justice system as a whole. Their charging and plea negotiation practices are major causes of mass incarceration. Recent Supreme Court decisions declaring mandatory sentences of life without parole unconstitutional for crimes by minors, for example, would not have been necessary had prosecutors not chosen to file charges under those laws against many thousands of juveniles.

Kenneth Culp Davis (1969), at the time America’s leading administrative law scholar, long ago decried both the absence of legal controls on prosecutorial decision making and the regular occurrence of unreviewable abuses of prosecutorial power. That power is far greater in 2017 than it was 50 years ago. Innumerable efforts have been made to limit judges’ sentencing discretion but almost none to constrain prosecutors. This could be done in many ways, including by repealing harsh and mechanical sentencing laws, establishing statewide rules and guidelines for prosecutors, making decisions in individual cases appealable to the courts or within prosecutorial offices, or having judges assert their inherent powers to review, accept, or reject proposed plea bargains. What is in the end fundamentally important, as Davis would have put it, is that prosecution be made subject to the rule of law.

Proposal C. Sentencing: Repeal all mandatory minimum sentence and similar laws and establish sentencing commissions directed to promulgate presumptive sentencing guidelines.

Sentencing in American states and the federal system suffers from a form of institutional schizophrenia. In every jurisdiction, mandatory minimum sentence, truth-in-sentencing, three-strikes, career criminal, and life without parole laws specify overly rigid, overly severe punishments. Often they are circumvented by practitioners who believe the sentences they mandate are inappropriate and unjust. Equally or more often they are applied, sometimes despite practitioners’ beliefs that they are unjust. As a result, gross disparities occur in the handling of comparable cases. The prosecutor’s personality and beliefs, or whether a defendant accepts a proposed plea bargain, determines whether individual offenders serve a few years in prison or a lifetime.

At the same time, in all but a few jurisdictions, judges have nearly unfettered discretion in handling of cases not governed by mandatory minimum and similar laws. Thus for some cases, sentencing decisions are guided by rigid, overly severe laws that judges are directed to apply mechanically, and for other cases they are guided by nothing except their own idiosyncratic beliefs, ideology, and intuition. Judge Marvin Frankel (1973) long ago condemned what he called lawlessness in sentencing, by which he meant that no legal standards existed to guide judges’ decisions or to provide criteria for appellate courts to use in deciding whether particular sentences should be upheld or overturned. In no other legal context, including accident, business, property, and family laws, he noted, are judges given such broad discretionary power.

The solutions are for legislatures to repeal all mandatory minimum sentence and similar laws, thereby empowering judges to impose just and appropriate sentences in every case, and to enact legislation to establish sentencing commissions directed to promulgate presumptive sentencing guidelines. Guidelines have been shown in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Washington State to reduce racial and other unwarranted disparities and to enable legislatures and corrections agencies to plan and manage facilities and budgets. They should be adopted in every jurisdiction (Tonry 2017).

Proposal D. Community Penalties: Community corrections programs must be made credible, well managed, adequately funded, and data-based if they are to serve effectively as freestanding punishments for some offenders and as prison alternatives for others.

Probation and other community corrections programs have long been the orphans of American criminal justice, despite having responsibility for many more offenders than do jails and prisons. Their leaders are appointed by elected officials and typically lack the autonomy, the resources, and the political clout to be bold innovators. In recent decades, state community corrections programs have been inadequately funded in large part because of the immense costs of mass incarceration. County programs have been limited by their dependence on local funding, which is seldom adequately provided by county boards, and by perverse incentives for judges to sentence offenders directly to state-funded prisons or indirectly following revocations of local probation. Counties are effectively freeloaders, transferring costs and responsibility for local residents, who will almost invariably in due course come home, from the county to the state.

In most European countries, only 3–10 percent of convicted offenders are sentenced to confinement (Aebi et al. 2014, tables 3.2.3.1, 3.2.7.1). The rest are sentenced to many types of community programs or to monetary penalties, either of which the vast majority of offenders satisfactorily complete. A number of things make these fundamentally different approaches possible. For one, all corrections programs are funded by the national government. For a second, imprisonment rates in Europe are one-fifth to one-tenth that of the United States, which means that total corrections budgets are much lower. For a third, community programs are conceived of not primarily as surveillance initiatives to ferret out misconduct but as social programs intended to foster successful reintegration.

State prisons cost vastly more per inmate to operate than do adequately funded local correctional programs per client. This is the premise of the—so far—only nominally successful Justice Reinvestment programs that operate in many states. In principle, they aim to reduce state prison populations and reallocate the money saved to community programs. In practice that seldom happens (Austin et al. 2013; La Vigne et al. 2014). If community corrections programs are ever to play the roles they should, means need to be found to increase their funding substantially and to remove perverse incentives for counties to transfer costs to the state. The know-how exists to run successful programs that reduce reoffending and crime victimization by facilitating offenders’ successful reintegration into their communities. Someone must pay for it to be used appropriately and effectively (Cullen, Jonson, and Mears 2017).

Proposal E. Parole Release: Parole release must be professionalized, made accountable to rules, and insulated from direct political influence if it is to perform the functions for which it was conceived: setting release dates, tailoring and managing postrelease conditions, and operating as a safety valve when necessary to avoid prison overcrowding.

The parole board was intended to be the linchpin of the criminal justice system. Under indeterminate sentencing, its was the principal voice in deciding when people were released from prison. By design it was meant to be staffed by medical, psychological, and social work professionals who would base their decisions on clinical judgments about individuals’ likelihood of living law-abiding lives in the community. When necessary, boards were expected to adjust their practices to help avoid prison overcrowding, and for many decades they did. In practice, parole boards often were composed of unqualified political appointees and were poorly managed, unprofessional, and capricious. Nonetheless, they operated in every state and the federal system until 1975, when Maine became the first jurisdiction to abandon discretionary parole release (Rothman 1971, 1980).

In the 1980s and 1990s, boards became overly cautious and risk averse, and they became a major contributor to the rapid increase in the number of prisoners. Fewer were released, and later. Steadily increasing numbers were released only when their terms expired. These trends were influenced by the abolition of parole release in some jurisdictions and the enactment of truth-in-sentencing laws, but primary responsibility rests with the parole boards.

Parole boards if reconstituted could play the roles for which they were designed. Many are beginning to try. Better understanding of the operation and effectiveness of rehabilitative programs, and better understanding of ex-prisoners’ needs after release, provide information to inform decisions. Parole boards themselves, however, need to become the bodies they were meant to be. This will require that appropriate minimum professional credentials be required for members, that structural arrangements to insulate boards from political influences be devised, and that rules, guidelines, and procedures be established to assure that boards operate fairly and effectively (Rhine, Petersilia, and Reitz 2017).

Proposal F. Mental Illness and Crime: The overall priority for improvement of the treatment of mentally ill suspects and offenders is to establish the training, programming, and facilities needed to take mental illness seriously at every stage of the criminal justice system.

Mental illness is not a defense to criminal charges except in the tiny fraction of cases in which the legal requirements for an insanity defense are satisfied. Often, though, mental illness may be a good reason to divert cases from prosecution to treatment. It is always a reason to make informed decisions about how best to respond to the mental health needs of individual suspects, defendants, and convicted offenders (Mulvey and Schubert 2017).

Because of the fragmented nature of the criminal justice system and inadequate funding of mental health treatment, mentally ill suspects, defendants, and convicted offenders are seldom well served. Disproportionately large numbers of people held in jails and prisons are mentally ill, as are a large percentage of people killed and injured by police. Existing approaches for dealing with mental illness are woefully inadequate and can be improved only by training personnel at every criminal justice stage from arrest to postrelease supervision to recognize and respond appropriately to mentally ill people. Responding appropriately will often require referral to clinicians for diagnostic support and development of individualized plans for controlling and treating the conditions identified. Sometimes it will require diversion to the mental health system. Other times it will necessitate the creation of new treatment programs and facilities in jails, prisons, and community corrections systems. All of this will cost money.

Mental illness is sadly common. Most people in their private lives do whatever they can to support and protect mentally ill relatives or loved ones. As a society, we are ethically obligated to do no less for other people’s loved ones.

Not only do mentally ill individuals suffer from the failure of criminal justice system personnel to recognize and respond appropriately to their conditions. Their families suffer vicariously. Society as a whole bears the social and economic burdens of crimes, especially avoidable crimes that are in full or in part attributable to mental illness, and must pay the costs incurred when mentally ill people cycle repeatedly and unnecessarily through the criminal justice system.

Proposal G. Drug Control: American drug enforcement, emphasizing supply-side efforts by the criminal justice system, has largely failed; enforcement instead should be viewed as preventive, with a main goal of reducing drug abuse and related harms, and it should be designed for sustainability.

American drug policy is predicated on the faulty premises that illicit drug use is best understood as a moral failing and that use and distribution can effectively be suppressed by aggressive street-level enforcement and harsh mandatory penalties. For more than four decades, American drug policy has presumed that it is possible to punish our way out of illicit drug use and trafficking. That is not what happened. The results instead have been to exacerbate prison overcrowding and racial disparities, undermine police legitimacy, and subject many tens of thousands of minor drug offenders to punishments more severe than are received by people convicted of serious violence.

Those realities have been widely recognized for at least a quarter century. In 1990 James Q. Wilson, then America’s most influential conservative crime scholar, admitted, Significant reductions in drug abuse will come only from reducing the demand for those drugs. The marginal product of further investment in supply reduction is likely to be small. … I know of no serious law enforcement executive who disagrees with this conclusion. Typically police officials tell interviewers that they are fighting either a losing war or, at best, a holding action (p. 534). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another leading neoconservative, similarly wrote, Interdiction and ‘drug busts’ are probably necessary symbolic acts, but nothing more (1993, p. 362).

Robert Stutman (2000), special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Agency for New York City during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, observed in a Frontline interview, Dollars we spend on treatment and prevention give us a far greater return than dollars we spend on enforcement. The general point is that we have never adopted the strategy that a lot of people think is truly a winning strategy. No one has yet demonstrated that enforcement will ever win the war on drugs.

There are three major problems: harmful consequences of drug use, drug markets, and drug enforcement; erosion of the authority of the criminal justice system in many urban communities; and overuse of imprisonment. No policy approach can end the drug problem, but drug policy can be made much more evidence-based than it now is and more in accord with generally accepted conceptions of justice (Caulkins and Reuter 2017).

Proposal H. Drug Treatment: Get substance use disorder treatment right by building necessary institutional infrastructure and linking it to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), Medicaid, and private insurance so that drug- and alcohol-abusing offenders can obtain the treatment they need.

Nearly a quarter century has passed since the President’s Commission on Model State Drug Laws (1993) emphatically announced that Treatment works! Fundamental to that conclusion was a shift from an earlier view that success should be measured in terms of complete cessation of drug use following treatment to a view that drug dependence, like alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and overeating, is a chronic relapsing condition in which repeated treatment failures are to be expected. Immediate cessation is seldom a realistic goal. Relapses are normal, but if people can be kept in treatment, it is realistic to expect relapses to occur less often and intervals between them to lengthen until abstinence is achieved. By those measures many well-funded, well-managed, and well-targeted drug treatment programs had been shown by 1990 to be effective. Other research showed that as drug use declined, so did offending by drug users (Anglin and Hser 1990). Increased investment in drug treatment is a self-evidently sensible thing to do.

Many policy changes flowed from recognition that well-run drug treatment programs can be effective. These include the drug court movement, initiatives to increase treatment availability in prison, and increased investment in community treatment programs.

Unfortunately, sufficient funding has never been available to meet more than a fraction of the need. This is a bigger problem in the United States than in countries that have government-run or government-mandated universal health care systems. Private medical insurance and Medicare, which few drug-abusing offenders have, cover substance abuse treatment. While in prison, offenders are ineligible for Medicaid.

The enactment of the Affordable Care Act together with Medicaid, however, potentially makes drug treatment in the community much more widely available. What are needed now are services to assist offenders to apply for and obtain coverage and well-run facilities to meet the increased demand (Pollack 2017).

Proposal I. Firearms and Violence: The objective of firearms policy should be to reduce deaths and injuries, without substantially reducing the number of civilians with firearms, by making it difficult for violence-prone, anger-prone, or other at-risk people to shoot and kill; promising approaches include making guns safer, making it harder for at-risk people to obtain them, and requiring owners to use and store them safely.

The United States has enormous public health and public safety problems related to firearms. They are ubiquitous. Well-organized political resistance to reducing their availability makes material reduction in numbers in circulation infeasible and would probably make reduction efforts ineffective. Policies that focus instead on keeping firearms out of the hands of individuals who may misuse them or that make weapons less likely to be misused, or safer, have more promise. Examples include universal background checks for firearm purchases and universal licensing for gun owners. New weapons can be made safer by personalization that renders them unusable except by the owner and by magazine disconnects that reduce the chances of unintentional shootings. Safe storage requirements can make unauthorized and accidental use of firearms less likely (Hemenway 2017).

Similar efforts focusing on design and technology have dramatically reduced automobile accidents and deaths. Motor vehicle deaths per mile driven have fallen more than 85 percent since the 1950s, primarily by redesigning cars and roads to make it harder for drivers to make mistakes or behave inappropriately and by reducing the likelihood of severe injury when they do. The success was not primarily due to changing drivers but to making cars and roads safer. Firearms and firearm use could likewise be made safer.

The knowledge exists to build much better criminal justice systems and to treat suspects and people convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and respectfully. What has been lacking is the political will to do it. Only time will tell whether the recent seeming consensus in support of fundamental changes generates the political will. If that happens, the essays in this volume explain what needs to be done.

¹Sources supporting statements in this and the following paragraphs about differences between the United States and other countries can be found in Tonry and Frase (2001) and Tonry (2004, 2007, 2012, 2016a, 2016b). Sources concerning prosecution, court, and corrections systems in the contemporary United States are exhaustively discussed in Petersilia (2008), Travis, Western, and Redburn (2014), and Petersilia and Cullen (2015). Concerning contemporary American policing, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) and Lum and Nagin (2017) survey problems and solutions.

²With the important differences 50 and 80 years ago that sentencing laws were much less severe, imprisonment rates were comparable to those of other Western countries, and rehabilitation of offenders was the paramount, if inadequately realized, goal of the sentencing and corrections systems (Rothman 1971, 1980).

³These included sponsorship of the first systematic participant observation studies of policing, the first representative national victimization studies, and development of the first comprehensive mathematical models of the justice system.

⁴Wilson (1975, p. xv) was emphatic that proposals to address root causes had no place in crime control policy: I am sometimes inclined when in a testy mood to rejoin ‘Stupidity can be dealt with only by attacking its root cause.’ I have yet to see a ‘root cause’ or to encounter a government program that has successfully attacked it.

⁵Clinton famously declared during the 1992 presidential campaign that I can be nicked on a lot, but no one can say I’m not tough on crime (Mauer 2006, p. 69). It remains a mystery why criminal justice policies became much more severe in the United States than in other Western countries, all of which experienced steep and rapid rises in violent crime between the late 1960s and early 1990s (Tonry 2014). That it happened and how it happened were described in detail at the time and shortly afterward by journalists (e.g., Edsall and Edsall 1991; Anderson 1995; Gest 2001) and historians (Windlesham 1998). Many efforts have been made to explain why the United States responded to rising crime rates in the way it did (e.g., Garland 2001; Tonry 2004; Simon 2007; Lerman and Weaver 2014; Murakawa 2014; Gottschalk 2015). There is sharp and wide disagreement.

⁶The 2014 committee’s conclusions on the effects of sanctions are consistent with the findings of earlier NAS panels on deterrence and incapacitation (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978), sentencing including mandatory penalties (Blumstein et al. 1983), and criminal careers (Blumstein et al. 1986), and other recent assessments (e.g., Nagin 2013). An NAS report on violence offered similar conclusions (Reiss and Roth 1993).

⁷The propositions are painted in broad strokes. The nine essays in this volume provide detailed proposals and the evidence that underpins them. For essentially boring reasons, there is no essay on prisons. The relevant issues concerning prisons and proposals for change are discussed in detail in the report of the NAS Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration (Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014, chaps. 6, 13).

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