Prisons Don’t Prevent Crime

They increase it by creating populations without rights.

Image: underground solitary torture cell at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia

One common justification for imprisonment in the era of mass incarceration is incapacitation. Incapacitation means, just what it sounds like; if a person is in prison, that person can’t commit crimes. Deterrence is difficult to prove; how can you know for sure that someone would have committed a crime without the threat of prison? But incapacity seems straightforward; put a bank robber in prison and, at least as long as they’re in prison, they can’t rob banks. Hard to argue with that. It seems like common sense.

As is often the case when talking about prison, though, common sense is warped by prejudice and stigma, and is therefore a very poor guide to policy or understanding.

Incapacitation Doesn’t Work

In the first place, the consensus of researchers is that incapacitation just doesn’t work to prevent much crime in the way it is supposed to. As this recent summary explains, people convicted of serious violent crimes—the crimes we would most like to prevent—are not very likely to convict crimes again once released from prison. That means imprisoning them doesn’t prevent much in the way of crime.

Similarly, imprisoning young people until they are old has very diminishing returns, since older people are unlikely to commit crimes. In addition, imprisoning people tends to make them more likely to offend in the future—because they make criminal connections, because prison is brutalizing and tends to alienate people from social networks, because a prison record makes it much more difficult to get legitimate work. The result is that any incapacitation effect achieved by locking people up is likely cancelled out by the increased chance of committing crime when they are released.

Crime Inside Prisons

I think the biggest reason to be skeptical of incapacitation though is that it overlooks the fact that people in prison—not least guards and administrators—can still commit crimes.

This is not really a secret. On the contrary, people often relish the fact that prison is itself a nexus of crime and violence because they see that crime as part of the punishment justly inflicted upon bad people. People will often make “jokes” about prison rape. These jokes are an acknowledgement that far from preventing crime, putting people in prison incentivizes and normalizes horrific abuse.

Somewhere between 4 percent of prisoners are raped or sexually assaulted each year. Ultimately, around 10% of prisoners are assaulted during their time behind bars. Around half of these assaults are perpetrated by guards or staff members. That means around 200,000 people a year are sexually assaulted in prison. Given the difficulty of reporting in prison, this is almost certainly an understatement—and further, many people assaulted are almost certainly victimized more than once.

Researchers estimate there are about 430,000 victims of sexual assault in the entire country each year, which means that prisoners, at .7% of the US population, may account for close to half as many sexual assaults as occur in the entire unincarcerated population. That’s not incapacitation. That’s escalation.

Other crimes also occur regularly behind bars. Drug use in prison is rampant, as are overdoses. Non-sexual violence is common too; 19% of male inmates have been assaulted by other inmates; 21% have been assaulted by prison staff.

And then there are crimes that aren’t considered crimes because prison authorities have the power to violate the rights of their charges with impunity and without consequences. The UN has designated solitary confinement as torture, and has said there should be an “absolute prohibition” on holding someone in solitary for more than 15 days. Yet in 2023 a report found that 122,000 prisoners were held in solitary. If you think torture is a crime, then 122,000 people on any given day in prison are victims of the crime of torture.

Sexual assault, physical assault, torture—prison does not reduce these crimes by incapacitating prisoners. It ramps them up by stripping prisoners of rights and placing them in an environment where they can be brutalized by fellow prisoners, and especially by prison authorities, with virtually no recourse.

People Like Prisons Because Prisons Cause Crime

Again, this isn’t news to most people—everyone is aware that prisons are violent and dangerous places. Proponents of imprisonment don’t downplay this or hide it; on the contrary, they tend to revel in it, and push back against efforts to, say, eliminate solitary, or to protect prisoners in any way.

This suggests that incapacitation, as a justification is not just misguided, but is an excuse for incarceration offered in bad faith. Incarceration does not reduce violence or prevent violence. It directs violence at particular marginalized or disfavored people. The goal is not to remove dangerous individuals as a public threat; the goal is to use the resources of the state to create monstrously dangerous conditions for those the state has decided to terrorize.

If prisoners were seen as human beings who can suffer and have crimes committed against them, it would be instantly obvious that “incapacitation” is nonsense, since more people in prison obviously increases the likelihood of crime and violence, rather than decreasing it.

Nor is it only prisoners who are put at risk by these arguments. When we say that we are safer when certain people are stripped of rights, we undermine the fundamental assumptions of equality and dignity that make democracy possible. When we separate people into those who can be harmed and those who can’t, when we accustom ourselves to ignoring or cheering on violence against a certain class or group, we’re cultivating, cosigning, and practicing fascist logics. And if you want to know where those logics lead—well, we are, unfortunately, living it.