Tough on Crime Is Well-intentioned Ignorance

This is not the wild west. Gunslingers seeking bounty and maverick, overly aggressive politicians should not define American justice. The phrase “tough on crime” is nothing more than political cowardice fueled by ignorance and a desire to win the race-to-the-bottom that defines American elections. Instead of addressing the root causes of crime or any kind of meaningful reform, politicians and lobbyists pretend as if three vacuous words offer the solution to human suffering by creating more suffering. This thinking is exactly why the United States has the most people incarcerated on Earth.

Florida, of course, has again delayed addressing our criminal justice system problems by temporarily relying on the National Guard.  Our state chooses to deploy soldiers for an issue they label as “a staff shortage crisis” rather than take responsibility for having one of the highest incarceration rates per capita of any State. In Florida, incarceration is intended to destroy people who made poor choices for the perceived benefit of others — as if more violence could help.

The question becomes do our tough policies amount to reduced recidivism or crime rates? The short answer is “no.” They are not causally linked. Dozens of countries and states–such as Texas and Georgia–have already proven that harsh sentencing is not required to reduce crime.  In fact, abusive criminal justice systems may be fueling crime through cyclical poverty, homelessness, low educational attainment, and inadequate healthcare.

Ignorance and fear mongering misdirect voters so that policymakers can continue to sit back and do nothing or–worse–support legislation which creates more harm in the long run. It’s no wonder that the National Guard has been called in to Florida’s prisons. Correctional officers are leaving in droves. FDC expects to lose another 3,000 employees by the end of 2022. This staffing crisis is a direct result of a working environment that is counter-productive because tough on crime policies harm staff, inmates, and communities.

Given that the incarcerated mortality rates are 2.5 times higher than Medicaid recipients, what rational person would stay at a job that is designed to harm others?  Florida’s correctional officer shortage might not exist if the State did not require officers to participate in senseless cruelty for the sake of political chest pounding.

Sure, a short prison sentence of a few years might seem insignificant. But, the externalities are enormous. To be arrested is to lose everything; not to mention, to be kidnapped and trafficked into permanent social exclusion, financial incapacitation, shattered family dynamics, and – of course — the resulting physical and emotional trauma of being held captive in a terror-driven prison environment.

The results of lengthy incarceration are so profoundly negative that if lawmakers or judges even spent a few days behind bars, they would never use the phrase “tough on crime” again.

Unfortunately, though, almost none of the policymakers in our country have any experience with the criminal justice system except in a theoretical sense. Yes, scores of prosecutors, public defenders, and former law enforcement officers run for political office, but almost none of these people have experienced the direct results or impact of incarceration.

We might as well make it a requirement for new pilots to have never been in a plane or, perhaps, hospitals might be better with doctors that have never seen a sick person before. Just because a prosecutor may have spent decades putting people in prison does not mean that he or she has any concept of what living through such a sentence entails.

At best, tough on crime policy is well-intentioned ignorance–as if a downstream punishment could have any impact on an upstream problem. The notion is absurd. We tried the same thing with public housing projects for poor people, only to conclude that socially isolating desperate people together was a terrible idea.

The data shows that prison sentences of over three years have almost no correlation to recidivism. So, what are we really doing here? Every time we buy into the faulty logic of bad criminal justice policy, we are actively supporting harming people further for no apparent reason other than cruelty. Hang ’em high, pilgrim. Tough on crime sounds nice. The words have a nice ring to them, like a catchy advertising jingle. But, in this case, that jingle is the subtle thud of a public gallows and another life lost.

Chris Salamone, incarcerated in Florida, is an advocate for criminal-justice reform.