Across the United States there is one standard, overwhelming policy in the alleged effort to combat the public’s fear of crime: build more and more prisons and fill them with more and more people. By the end of 1997, the United States held one and a half million people in prisons and jails. And, money that is being spent on this massive incarceration binge is often taken directly from human services. For example, California's most recent state budget for the first time allocated more money for prisons ($2.8 billion) than for education ($2.6 billion). According to Prof. William Chambliss, former president of the American Society of Criminology, "We’re trading textbooks for prison cells" (San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, 1994, pages B1 and B2).

Does this "crime fighting" policy make sense? Does putting these young men in prison make them better people? Does it prevent them from committing more crimes when they come out of prison? Does imprisonment prevent more crime than programs that improve people’s quality of life — increasing their chances at gaining meaningful jobs, educations, and better living conditions?

Finally, there is now a definitive study of these kinds of programs and their impact on crime (Diverting Children from a Life of Crime: Measuring Costs and Benefits, Peter Greenwood et al., Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 1996, $15.). The study was carried out by the very influential, conservative Rand Corporation think tank. Rand, which gets many millions of dollars each year to write position papers on many different topics, is a government favorite since Rand evaluations so often parrot what the government wants and needs. This time, however, even Rand could not avoid the truth.

The researchers at Rand started with four programs that have been used in the past for, among other things, crime prevention. The four programs are:

1. Home visits by child care professionals, both before birth and extending for two years after birth;

2. Training for parents and therapy for families with children who are found to be at high risk for getting involved with the criminal justice system;

3. Incentives to induce high school students to stay in school and graduate;

4. Monitoring and supervising high school students who have already exhibited delinquent behavior.

The impact of these four programs were compared with California’s new three strikes law, one of the most severe imprisonment policies in the country, to determine which of these five programs would prevent the most crime. To produce comparable findings, computations were made for each program to show how many serious crimes (defined as homicide, rape, arson, robbery, aggravated assault, and residential burglary) would be prevented if a million dollars were invested in each program. The table below shows the results:

Program Serious Crimes Prevented

Home Visits 11

Parent Training 157

Graduation Incentives 258

Delinquent Supervision 72

Three Strikes 60

As you can see, three of the four programs are more effective than California’s three strike policy at preventing crime; high school graduation incentives are more than four times more effective. And not even included in these calculations is the amount of money that would be saved by diverting these young people from prison so that the state would not have to pay the costs of incarceration. In fact, the authors write: ". . . a million dollars spent on graduation incentives should result in a savings to the criminal justice system of $600,000 to $1.1 million. In other words, over the long term the program would probably save enough money to cover most of its costs" (page 28).

Furthermore, these are not the only human service programs that are available. For example, another recent study found that "every $1 invested in solid drug treatment saved $7 in future costs of crime and incarceration" (New York Times, July 3, 1995, pages 1 and 9). This is certainly more than can be said of the imprisonment binge.

So, as the song says, "whoomp, there it is."

Even the harshest imprisonment policies do less to prevent crime than many programs that strengthen families and provide human needs. And imprisonment is more costly than the other programs. Interestingly, this is the position taken by many people who put forward the slogan that we should "fund human needs, not prisons." This should be more than just a slogan. It is the road that will lead to reduced crime in our society, a road clearly illuminated by these research findings. To the extent that the U.S. refuses to follow this road, we can only conclude that it is not interested in preventing crime, but is using this massive imprisonment binge for some other purpose.