Prisoners Today, Neighbors Tomorrow

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San Quentin State Prison, an infamous maximum-security facility built in 1852 along the San Francisco Bay, is going to make a break from its past.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that the prison, one of the oldest in the country and home to the nation’s largest death row, would soon focus on helping prisoners transition back into society. It will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

“This system isn’t working for anybody,” Mr. Newsom said last Friday on a visit to San Quentin.

The movement to de-emphasize punishment has been gaining momentum around the world, and in a new book, “What’s Prison For?”, Bill Keller explains how American prisons can better educate and rehabilitate the people who, with the exception of a few, will once again become our neighbors.

Mr. Keller is the founding editor in chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers criminal justice in the United States, and a former executive editor of The New York Times. We asked him about his book. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

How many Americans woke up this morning behind bars, and where does that number stand in our history? How about our rate of incarceration?

As with most data pertaining to criminal justice, it depends what you count and when. As of 2022, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, almost two million people were incarcerated in 1,566 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,510 juvenile correctional facilities, 186 immigration detention facilities and 82 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals and prisons in the U.S. territories.

This number has been slowly declining since it peaked in 2008. There was a sharp drop in the incarcerated population in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 — 15 percent in prisons, 25 percent in jails — but that didn’t reflect humanitarian releases or policy changes. The main reason was that the pandemic shut down many courts and clogged the pipeline.

Our incarceration rate per 100,000 population — which includes adults serving time in state and federal prisons, and those awaiting trial or doing short time in county jails — is roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times England’s, six times Canada’s, nine times Germany’s and seventeen times Japan’s.

How did we become a worldwide leader of imprisonment?

The “war on drugs” that began in the ’70s was a major factor. A rise in violent crime, combined with waves of protest against the war in Vietnam and for Black empowerment, stirred public anxiety. Opportunistic politicians from both parties pandered to the fear, enacting draconian mandatory sentences. Sensational news coverage fueled the sense of a country in upheaval.

Why are these prisoners disproportionately Black and brown?

Black and brown Americans are more likely to live in communities where desperation, fed by poverty and lack of opportunity, leads to high rates of crime and clashes with the police. Beyond that lies the legacy of Jim Crow, in the making and enforcing of laws. To cite one major example, crack cocaine, which is sold in cheap doses in poor neighborhoods, was punished much more harshly than powder cocaine, the drug of more affluent users.

How much of this is driven by a profit motive, and who is profiting?

Prisons operated by for-profit companies like the GEO Group and CoreCivic house only about 8 percent of America’s incarcerated population, but that understates the role of profit in the prison industry. Prisons run by state and federal governments contract out many services to private firms — like health care, transport, meals, telecommunication, commissaries and uniforms. Since most of the private prison sector is paid based on occupancy, they have no incentive to prepare those prisoners for release.

Explain how Black and brown neighborhoods are both overpoliced and underpoliced.

The overpolicing is obvious in the long litany of Black people killed in encounters with the police, in policies like stop-and-frisk and in patterns of racial profiling. It is sometimes overlooked that communities of color are also disproportionately victims of crime. They need the protect-and-defend services of law enforcement. But the police often write off these neighborhoods as enemy territory or lost causes.

You write that 95 percent of prisoners will be released, and share an anecdote in which prison guards tell them “see you in a few months.” Some research, you note, suggests that prison makes crime more likely. To take your title, then, just what are prisons for?

Criminologists talk about four justifications for prison — punishment, incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation. In practice, all are imperfectly realized.

Punishment is the way society enforces its norms, but it should be in proportion to the offense. By the standards of other developed societies our sentences are extreme, and come with collateral torments — violence, isolation, mental illness, self-harm.

Incapacitation? Sure, an offender who is locked up isn’t a danger to the public at large — though they may be a threat to prison staff and fellow prisoners — but eventually the person will be released, and recidivism rates are high.

Deterrence assumes that crime is a considered choice, but much crime is impulsive, opportunistic; the offender doesn’t always pause to consider the consequences. Research suggests that prison renders many people more antisocial.

That leaves rehabilitation, including behavior management courses, education and job skills training, and substance abuse therapy. But rehabilitation programs cost money and can be portrayed as coddling.

Here’s how I frame the question of what prison is for: Every year, upward of 600,000 prisoners are released back into society, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Do we want them to leave prison alienated, brutalized, stigmatized and lacking in employable skills? Or do we want them to have a chance of being good neighbors, taxpayers, citizens?

Your book takes readers inside humane prison models, in places like Germany and Norway, but also in Connecticut, North Dakota and Oregon. In Chester, Pa., there were dorm-style units and kitchen use. What are the prospects of these states replicating and scaling the innovations?

Sadly, the deck is stacked against innovative pilot programs. The innovators retire or move on. The prison officers’ unions resist. Budgets get cut. In Germany and Scandinavia, the per-prisoner costs are much higher, but those societies understand that this is an investment in public safety. The heroes of my book are the reformers inside and outside of the system who are trying to change the culture from the bottom up. It’s a heavy lift.

What was the biggest misconception you’ve corrected since leading The Marshall Project for five years and writing this book?

I wouldn’t claim that we’ve corrected it, but probably the biggest misconception in criminal justice is that prison makes us safe, and more prison makes us safer.

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