Cruel and unusual

Via Yglesias, Jim Webb calls for prison reform. There's the obvious point that marijuana should be decriminalized (if you don't agree, put down the crack pipe). There's the obvious point that prison overcrowding is bad. And then there's this very interesting and very non-obvious point:

Sentence lengths should be better-calibrated to reflect actual research on preventing crime rather than pure moralistic outrage. Keeping a person who’s likely to commit violent crimes in prison is an effective crime-control tactic, but we need to focus on people who are actually likely to commit violent crimes. Many people in prison have already aged out of the period at which violent crime is likely.

A very good point, and one that deserves more analysis. Do our sentencing lengths make sense, from an effectiveness standpoint?

Take some 22-year-old guy who robs a store. It's his first offense, and it's a violent offense. What do we do with him? Do we put him in prison for 10 years? Think about it. When he gets out, he'll be 32 - plenty young enough to commit plenty more violent offenses. He's now basically unemployable for life. And he just spend a decade of his life doing nothing but hanging around a bunch of hardened criminals. What is his social network now? What kind of life opportunities does he see for himself? This guy may have started out just as an over-aggressive young thug or a poor desperate shmuck, but after 10 years in prison he's a hardened career criminal.

So consider this alternative sentence: We put him in solitary confinement for 2 months. Not the dungeon-like solitary that we use for punishing inmates, but a clean, quiet cell with decent vegetarian food and plenty of books (maybe even an internet terminal?) - and zero human contact. If this guy can be "scared straight" by a taste of what it's like to lose his freedom, 2 months should be plenty. And a bit of quiet solitary time to himself may calm him down; it will certainly isolate him from bad influences. If he gets out and commits more violent crime, then we can lock him up for decades (preferably in he same kind of solitary environment). Would this kind of sentencing policy result in more or less violent crime? Think carefully.

My point is this: either we get a criminal off the street permanently, or we try to reform him into a law-abiding productive member of society. There is no middle ground. Putting a guy in prison for 5 or 10 years tries to do both and ends up doing neither.