Crime not whole problem, punishment not best answer

News headlines seem to be everywhere documenting the recent spike in violence in urban areas.

“Baltimore killings soar to level unseen in 43 years,” one of them read.

Predictably, there has been much concern expressed by local leaders. Part of the response in Baltimore included the firing of the police commissioner.

Baltimore is not alone in this trend of increasing U.S. urban violence — Houston, Milwaukee, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago have seen murders spike this year.

Baltimore is also not alone in responding to this increase in violence as a “fight against crime,” which naturally places the responsibility for addressing it on the criminal justice system. Local police, the front line in the fight against crime, are the primary agents tasked with fixing the problem.

But police can’t fix it because policymakers and public officials have failed to see the bigger picture. The problem is that the violence is a symptom, and the current criminal justice system can fix neither the symptom nor the underlying disorder.

For the past 50 years, we have thought of crime as largely a matter of criminals making bad choices and hanging out with the wrong people. A substantial element in this way of thinking about crime is that offenders act out of some kind of free will.

That assumption has guided our responses to crime — punish offenders severely so that they change their decision-making and make better choices.

Although there is some truth to this, it tragically misses a vitally important reality. Offenders engage in crime for a variety of reasons and under a variety of circumstances and constraints.

More than 40 percent of criminal offenders who end up in the justice system have a diagnosable mental illness. Eighty percent of offenders have a substance abuse problem.

Many suffer the neurodevelopmental consequences of growing up in poverty, exposure to violence, living in households characterized by abandonment and chaos, and physical brain trauma, among many others.

Moreover, large segments of the offender population have substantial educational and employment deficits, which severely limit opportunities and viable alternatives to crime.

Citing this evidence about criminals and their characteristics is not to excuse bad behavior. No matter the underlying causes, crime has profoundly negative consequences for victims, families, neighborhoods and larger communities.

The point is to highlight the futility of continuing on our well-trodden path of crime policies centered on tough punishment.

Punishment doesn’t work because it doesn’t do anything to change these underlying conditions, disorders and deficits that characterize the vast majority of criminal offenders.

This is not just a failure of the American criminal justice system.

There are many others involved, including inadequate public mental health and substance abuse treatment; failed public education, especially in the poorest areas in urban America; unrelenting poverty; absence of adequate neurocognitive and neurodevelopmental interventions; and lack of employment training and jobs.

For a variety of reasons, the justice system has been the default repository for the consequences of many of these institutional failures, and unfortunately, with recidivism rates north of 80 percent, we just seem to make the situation worse.

The good news is that we have the tools today to effectively change behavior.

We need to change sentencing laws to provide for much greater diversion, bring the necessary clinical expertise to the table, make judicial and prosecutorial decision-making much more collaborative, and change how we think about crime and punishment.

For example, drug courts are effective at reducing substance abuse and recidivism. And they are much more cost-efficient than punishment alone.

But although there are approximately 3,000 drug courts in the U.S., their capacity is sufficient to address only about 10 percent of the need.

Some offenders, such as the truly violent and habitual criminals, need to be incarcerated. The rest require our best efforts at behavioral change.

If we continue to fail to adequately address the reasons people commit crime, why should we expect the situation to change?

William R. Kelly is professor of sociology at The University of Texas at Austin.

This story was originally published August 11, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Crime not whole problem, punishment not best answer."