Each year more than 700,000 ex-offenders will leave prison to return to their communities, but most will not arrive home transformed into law-abiding citizens. These offenders will have served their sentences in overcrowded prisons where they are exposed to the horrors of violence (including rape), isolation from family, and despair. The very skills they are forced to develop to survive inside prison will make many of them anti-social and prone toward deviant behavior when they are released. And sadly, more than half of the 700,000 released will wind up back behind bars within only three years.

Given these dismal statistics, it’s easy to see why maintaining the status quo in our correctional policies is not an option. The system just isn’t working. If we as Americans hope to see safer communities and fewer victims, our current approach to crime must undergo drastic reform. But as we evaluate where we should go from here in our crime policies, it’s imperative that we look at where we’ve been to discover where along the way we went astray.

The Incarceration Experiment

Marc Mauer, a well-known and respected leader in sentencing policy and the director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., offers an excellent compilation of America’s criminal justice failings in his insightful book, Race to Incarcerate. Having spent more than 30 years working with criminal justice policy, Mr. Mauer provides a unique and proficient assessment of the nation’s approach to crime and criminal justice through an in-depth examination of the historical groundwork behind America’s use of incarceration.

As Mauer recounts, eighteenth-century Quakers were responsible for the first of two prominent “incarceration experiments” in American history. Stirred by the belief that criminal behavior was the product of a bad moral environment, the Quakers introduced imprisonment as deterrence to criminal behavior by removing offenders to an isolated “place of penitence” where they could reflect upon the error of their ways. Their penological model emphasized the rehabilitation of offenders and became so widely regarded it remain unchanged until the mid-twentieth century.

But in the 1960s a major shift occurred in the nation’s approach to crime policy. Mauer identifies several sociological events—including a rise in crime rates and the first of three major drug epidemics—that fueled a growing apprehension concerning the effectiveness of the corrections system in controlling crime. As a result, crime control and the need for “law and order” became a core issue in American politics.

Policymakers particularly ardent to stop the flow of drugs in America began imposing harsh new sentencing laws demanding mandatory prison terms for various drug offenses. Their efforts were primarily motivated by the prevalent belief that public safety could be achieved only through the incarceration of offenders. And here is where we went wrong.

Says Mauer, “…punishment of the offender, rather than efforts to prevent the emergence of new offenders or to reform those who were apprehended, became the policy of choice.”

The ensuing explosion in incarceration rates quickly became a burden on America’s penological system. While it had taken 160 years for the nation to incarcerate its first million offenders, it took only 12 years to incarcerate the second. But as Mauer identifies, “for the first twenty-five year period of rising incarceration there was no dramatic decline [in crime rates], despite the unprecedented increase in the number of prisoners.” The fact is that America’s use of incarceration on a massive scale did little to create safer communities with fewer victims. Indeed, Mauer notes that these “tough” policies have both failed “to provide sufficient safety [and] to substantially reduce… crime.”

Dismal Consequences

America’s over-reliance on incarceration and its obsession with tough-on-crime sentencing has fueled a growing crisis. The vast size of corrections departments has made them an economic powerhouse, consuming large percentages of strapped state budgets. Nevertheless, correction facilities still battle with overcrowded conditions. As Mauer concludes, “At best, world-record incarceration has had a modest, and increasingly diminishing, effect on crime rates. At the same time, the costs incurred through these [tough-on-crime] polic[ies]…have been dramatic, both in fiscal and human terms.”

Hopeful Solutions

Race to Incarcerate offers readers a valuable overview of the history of incarceration and answers the pressing question as to how America arrived at its current corrections crisis. Now, as the nation wrestles with the consequences of past actions, it’s important to consider effective nonpunitive solutions to the problem of crime. Alternative corrections practices that require offenders to take responsibility for their actions—such as the practice of restorative justice or the use of drug treatment programs—are very effective at reducing crime and recidivism.

In addition, vigorous reentry programs that prepare inmates for a successful transition back to society are very important. Mauer applauds these practices and recognizes the valuable relief they can bring to America’s overtaxed system.