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| Looking back to move forward |
| By Sarah Etter, News Reporter |
| Published: 11/20/2006 |
The history of corrections in the United States spans centuries, getting its early beginnings from William Penn's reform initiative in the late 17th century. From religious, conservative beginnings based on penitence at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary
to more liberal concepts, like direct supervision, corrections has, and continues to, dramatically impact society as the field attempts to reform itself. According to Dr. Frank Williams, a criminal justice professor at the University of Houston and writer of a number of books and articles on corrections, the field's history is a series of related events that hinge on the rest of society. “Everything operates in a social context,” he explains. “If you take a microscopic view of the last year of corrections, you miss the other things occurring in the big picture. Everything we do in corrections is part of a larger social movement, one way or the other. It's good to look at how outside factors are pushing or pulling on your particular organization or facility in a larger sense.” Corrections.com: What kind of progress has the field made in the last few decades? Williams: The perceptions of severe punishment rise and fall through the years, particularly over the decades. We started to get very tough on crime in the 1970's. I think that was largely in reaction to the progressive era of corrections, which lasted from the 1930's to the 1960's, where we focused on education and therapy. In the 70's, we began to move away from a liberal corrections mindset to a conservative one. CC: Many people would attribute that move to President Nixon's use of the phrase “war on drugs” and the Reagan administration's related campaign. Would you agree? Williams: You cannot understand a theory without understanding the context in which it arose. Nothing in corrections is a unique event by itself; it's a product of other things going along with it. People get confused with the 60's and 70's being a societal point for flower children and that sort of thing, but the dominant mode of society was moving towards conservatism, especially in corrections. Although lots of people would tend to look at the war on drugs as a turning point, they miss other important things. In the late 70's, Bob Martinson published a report about what works in corrections, based on research in New York. Lots of people were afraid what he had to say would be repressed by the government, so his work was basically whittled down to say that nothing works to rehabilitate offenders (“What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform,” Martinson 1974). In the report, Martinson and his associates actually found that some things worked in corrections, but most things we were trying hadn't been evaluated very well. What he meant to say, in the larger report which was 600 pages, was that programs like education didn't work for everyone, but for some who needed it those programs might work pretty well. However, it was published in a shorter version for people to read, and everyone that saw the brief assumed research indicated that rehabilitation was futile. I think the Martinson report had more of an impact on corrections than say the Reagan administration or the war on drugs, even though it wasn't as widely publicized. CC: How do you think the Attica riots impacted corrections? Many say it was a turning point towards education as a mode of rehabilitation. Williams: In one sense, I'm not really sure the Attica riot was the defining moment. We had already dealt with riots in prison. It would be hard to find a time period when there were no prison riots. The riot itself wasn't the critical issue. The critical issue was how it was handled. But even there, you will find riots through out corrections history were handled very similarly. That was a point when society was ready for a change, but the Attica riots were a catalyst for that change. CC: What direction do you think the field is headed now? Williams: I see lots of small pieces of evidence that we are moving away from a conservative criminal justice system, and back towards some of the ideas we've had in the not-so-distance past. I think the most telling is that we have states using the terms “rehabilitation” and “treatment” in their corrections systems again. I would say this change has been happening over the last 15 years or so. Pennsylvania was on the forefront of this. Some states started talking about increasing our ability to do interventions for drug users. 
William PennTwenty years ago, intervention would have been considered a bad word. The terminology is an excellent indication of where corrections is headed. You can follow California's corrections system, and you will see rehabilitation even in their title. Pennsylvania, Canada and even Texas are starting to incorporate the concept back into their systems again. In a sense, what I'm describing here is a pendulum effect. Once you get too far out to the left or right the pendulum swings back. We spend most of our time between the two extreme points of liberal and conservative treatment. I think we've been swinging back towards a liberal approach for some time. We are moving away from the concept of warehousing people. CC: What other factors influence this change in direction? Williams: Well, I was doing research with the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation several years ago, and at that point California was very conservative in a sense. Their version of parole was mandatory and offenders were required to spend one or two years minimum under supervision. You didn't max out in prison and go on your merry way. You came out of prison and went on parole. That was a form of surveillance. Even at that point they were talking about keeping people out of prison because it was an economic issue. By the 1990's, it became common to look at new ways of dealing with criminal activity, based on fiscal conservativeness because we wanted to decrease the amount of money we were spending on corrections. Another part of that concept is to incarcerate fewer people, if possible, to save bed space. Even in Texas, they are discussing reinstating treatment as an alternative to incarceration and they are one of the most conservative states. We're seeing legislature looking at decreasing recidivism and increasing treatment so it doesn't cost as much. CC: What changes will we see in the future? Williams: I think we will continue to see a move towards treatment rather than incarceration. The new movement towards this is certainly based on some conservative principles, at least fiscal conservative principles and lowering the absolute cost of incarceration. We're seeing a lot of reports from organizations like the National Institute on Drug Abuse that recommend treating drug abusers rather than putting them into the criminal justice system. Of course, for our purposes, that means not incarcerating them. I can't imagine that 15 or 20 years ago, people would have said “Let's treat these people.” We're going to see more and more drug treatment creep back in. CC: Is there a philosophy is behind these changes? Williams: We're looking at a viewpoint from a short frame of time during this conversation. But if you look even further back, you have philosophies that say crime is a product of the devil and sin. So anything we consider treatment was based on the idea that inmates needed to get right with God. Penitence is the quintessential American corrections invention. We didn't invent the buildings, the prisons themselves, but we invented the concept of the penitentiary. Then we argued about the concept of penitence and that philosophical argument led to architectural differences in prisons. What we now call modular or modular construction is very reminiscent of the octagon prison that was constructed back around the 1800's. Anything we do now is in part reaction of what we did before, even if we don't always realize it. Sometimes that reaction is wrong, but we don't do things in a vacuum. I don't think you can understand corrections unless you have a bigger picture and then you have to apply things within that. Related Resources: Remembering Attica, 9/18/06 NIDA breaks the cycle, 7/26/06 |
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