High Imprisonment Rates Could Fuel Crime

[Kirsten Neilsen]

High Imprisonment Rates Could Fuel Crime 

                  By Michael A. Fletcher
                  Washington Post Staff Writer
                  Monday, July 12, 1999; Page A01 

                  TALLAHASSEE –– Things were looking up in Frenchtown.
After years of spiraling out of control, crime had been declining
sharply in this neighborhood of rickety frame houses and tumbledown
carryouts that forms the historic hub of this city's African American
community.
                  Observers credited a variety of aggressive police
tactics, including more and longer prison sentences for offenders.

                  But in 1997, the declining crime rate in Frenchtown
began to level off, failing to keep pace with drops in similar
Tallahassee neighborhoods. And researchers analyzing crime trends here
have fingered an unlikely culprit: the high number of Frenchtown
residents sitting in prison cells.

                  Research here supports a controversial theory being
advanced by an increasing number of criminologists, who have concluded
that although high incarceration rates generally have helped reduce
crime, they eventually may reach a "tipping point," where so many people
in a given neighborhood are going to prison that it begins to
destabilize the community and becomes a factor that increases crime.

                  "Until recently, nobody has really thought about
incarceration in the aggregate," said Dina R. Rose, one of the
researchers studying the relationship between incarceration and crime in
the Frenchtown area. "Many people assume that incarceration reduces
crime. But when incarceration gets to a certain density, that is when
you see the effects change."

                  Rose, a sociologist at New York's John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, found that in high-crime Tallahassee neighborhoods
that were otherwise comparable, crime reductions were lower in those
with the greatest number of people moving in and out of prison. With
high incarceration rates, she argues, prison can be transformed from a
crime deterrent into a factor that fuels a cycle of crime and disorder
by breaking up families, souring attitudes toward the criminal justice
system and leaving communities populated with too many people hardened
by the experience of going to prison.

                  Frenchtown provides abundant evidence for the thesis.
There are few men  available to volunteer in the youth programs at the
Fourth Avenue Recreation Center. And every day, dozens of men line up in
front of a soup kitchen run out of a small frame house in the heart of
Frenchtown.

                  Robert J. Roeh, who runs the soup kitchen, estimates
that four out of five of those who show up for the free meals have some
type of prison record. "Going to prison keeps you locked up without bars
for the rest of your life," he said. "We need to look at some other
sanctions for people."

                  Dale Landry, a former police officer and Marine who
heads Tallahassee's Neighborhood Justice Center, an alternative
corrections program, said the volume of people going to prison has
reached the point where it hurts the very communities it is intended to
help.

                  "When a crime is committed, an offender should be held
accountable,"  Landry said. "But the way we do it now, when a crime
happens there is a damaged relationship between people who live in this
community. We need to work on fixing these relationships. But when we
send people away, those relationships remain broken, but we are left
with a false sense of security that the prisons are working."

                  It is a problem recognized by local police, who have
increasingly turned to community policing in an effort to mediate some
of the social problems that often arise in conjunction with crime.

                  "We are looking at a lot of these issues," said Maj.
George Creamer, head of the Tallahassee police operations bureau. "But
if you are trying to clean up these neighborhoods and you don't arrest
people who are breaking the law, then what do you do with them?"

      In examining the impact of high incarceration rates in
Tallahassee, researchers collected 1996 statistics on prison releases
and admissions as well as demographic data from 103 Tallahassee
neighborhoods. They also collected crime statistics for 1996 and 1997.
The data then were mapped in order to compare incarceration rates with
crime while controlling for socioeconomic factors.

                  While crime dropped in virtually all of the
Tallahassee neighborhoods examined in the study, the rate of the decline
in Frenchtown was one-third lower than in surrounding neighborhoods. The
most telling difference between the neighborhoods, the researchers said,
was that Frenchtown  had a higher incarceration rate.

                  Other researchers caution that it is too early to come
to definite conclusions. Bert Useem, a University of New Mexico
sociologist who is embarking on a national study of incarceration rates
and crime, said "it remains to be seen" whether taking a relatively
large number of people out of a community has the effect of increasing
crime.

                  "On the one hand, you have to be concerned about the
number of people going into prison," he said. "But on the other hand,
communities can become ravaged by crime. And the recent experience
nationally has been these increases in incarceration rates and decreases
in crime."

                  In any case, notes William J. Sabol, a researcher at
the Urban Institute, "now you are getting many more people who
previously were unconcerned asking about the unintended consequences of
incarceration."

                  Those consequences are likely to grow with the surging
incarceration rate.  Swollen by increases in drug offenders and longer,
mandatory prison  sentences, the nation's prison population has risen
every year since 1973 and has tripled since 1980.

                  This wave of incarceration has had a disproportionate
effect on black neighborhoods. Justice Department statisticians project
that more than one in four black males born this year will enter state
or federal prison at some point during their lifetimes, compared with 16
percent of Hispanic males and 4.4 percent of white males.

                  "When you say that [almost] 30 percent of black males
are projected to go to prison, that is a fact that no person who
believes in freedom can be comfortable with," said Todd R. Clear, a John
Jay criminologist working with Rose on the Frenchtown study.

                  The effect of high incarceration rates is intensified
by the fact that they are often concentrated in relatively compact
communities. A study in Hudson County, N.J., found that in 1995, one in
15 children experienced the trauma of having a parent go to jail for at
least six months. In sections of South Central Los Angeles, an estimated
70 percent of the young men are in the clutches of the criminal justice
system.

                  Researchers have found that men who have been in
prison are less likely to marry, get good jobs or develop productive
relationships with family members once they are back on the street. A
broad survey done as part of the continuing study of the effects of
incarceration in Frenchtown found that people who knew people who went
to prison typically held lower opinions of the criminal justice system
than others.

                  "Areas that have low crime rates are that way because
people who live there do the job of providing social control," Rose
said. "But people typically come back from prison more damaged and with
less ability to contribute to society."

                  Clear said the social impact of high incarceration is
most profound for the children and families of those sent to prison. "At
some point, having some involvement with the prison system starts to
look like part of their destiny," he said.

                  That's exactly what Frenchtown resident Laura Anderson
is worried will happen to her 6-year-old son Xavier. His stepfather,
John L. Anderson, is in prison for armed robbery; his biological father
is in jail awaiting trial.

                  After her husband's arrest, Anderson and her son
tumbled into homelessness and were forced to move in with friends and
double up with in-laws. Finally, they settled in a dingy garden
apartment back in Chattahoochee, her sleepy hometown located 40 miles
west of Tallahassee. Xavier transferred to three different schools
within a matter of months. He was left back in first grade. His teachers
said he wouldn't concentrate in class.

                  But mostly Anderson worries about how her son will
come to view the specter of prison. Once, when Xavier got into an
argument with some young friends while playing in the breezeway, he came
inside sobbing, fearful that the police were going to get him, she said.
His mother said it is more than a childish fear.

                  "His biological father is incarcerated. His stepfather
is incarcerated," she said. "If somebody does not come along as a mentor
or something and show him a different way, he is going to think that
jail is the place where  he will ultimately be too."


                               © 1999 The Washington Post Company