To End Mass Incarceration, The Country Needs Community Policing

         The United States has a severe problem on its hands. It is not the budget deficit or even the skyrocketing unemployment rate. It is the corrections system that has devolved into more of just a mass incarceration system. Today, nearly 1 percent of the American adult population is imprisoned and $68 billion is spent on the country's various corrections systems annually. Many people are finally starting to ask why the number of American adults who are imprisoned has risen so high when the crime rate has not, and why many of the imprisoned are repeat offenders of nonviolent crimes. The nation must find some way to help solve this problem before the rates grow even higher.
         Right now something in the corrections system is not working, though it is hard to know what. It is not difficult to figure out, however, that "ending mass incarceration and reducing crime rates are not mutually exclusive goals" (Rebecca Ruiz, The American Prospect). The overall crime rate continues to drop, but the populations of the prisons only increases. In 2008 the prison population had grown by 708% since 1972. It is possible to lower both the prison population and the crime rate at the same time, but smarter crime-control strategies must be put in place.
         Smarter crime-control strategies that are know to work include a "tipping" model, and programs like Project HOPE. "Many crimes are attractive to offenders only when others are also doing them, diluting the risk of punishment. This creates a dynamic in which both high crime rates and low crime rates tend to be self-sustaining. It turns out to be possible to "tip" behavior from high-violation to low-violation without using a lot of punishment; the key is issuing specific and credible threats directly to the people whose behavior you want to change" (Mark A.R. Kleiman, The American Prospect). In the early 1990s the New York City Transit Police labeled a number of subway cars as "clean." If these cars were ever vandalized or defaced, they would never leave the yard until they were cleaned. The taggers quickly learned it was a waste of time and money to tag a "clean" car, because it would never be seen by an audience. The police then added to the number of "clean" cars until they made of a whole fleet of "clean" cars. Another program that has been proven to work is Project HOPE-- Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement-- illustrates how strict and consistent sanctions for probation violators can truly improve behavior of repeat-offenders while saving money. It has clear rules and monitoring, as well as quick, predictable and unpleasant punishments for every mistake. The hey to these types of programs are that sanctions happen every time and right away. Both of these programs are proof that there are effective ways of reversing mass incarceration with a community-based policing and corrections system. Now, these programs just need to spread to reach more of the hot-spots for crime in the United States to prove if they can truly help the nation's problem of mass incarceration.