The SECOND CHANCE
Replacing our Poisonous System of Incarceration
(Development ongoing)
June, 2008 – Puerto Indio, Rio Sambu, Darien.
The adults weren’t paying much attention, though here and there one would glance at the boy and then return to his conversation. Some of the younger children looked on in awe while an adolescent from another village walked up to the boy and smirked.
I was inside the giant open Bohio trying to convince Betanio Chiquirama, Cacique (chief) of the Comarca of Sambu, not to rely too heavily on the much-touted craft economy for the future of his people—but I couldn’t help being distracted by the drama attending the 13 year old boy sitting outside in the full glare of the tropical sun. Both of his legs were trapped between the two heavy logs of the Cepo, the Emberá’s legendary version of the stocks used in colonial America.
The boy stared at his knees and tried to ignore his smirking visitor.
He’d had caused quite a commotion an hour earlier when his antics during one of the speeches triggered a chase by the Zarra, the group of young men entrusted with order at this annual Emberá Congress. A thousand people inside the enormous circular thatch-roofed Bohio had turned to watch and shout and urge them on as the boy raced and ducked and twisted in full view and was finally captured.
“The Cepo is kind to our people” my friend Bolúngo had confided to me when I first saw it used years earlier, “It doesn’t poison them like the Latino jails do. And our mothers can use it to help us teach our children what is right.”
He went on to describe the way Cepo punishment can be calibrated from mild to harsh.
“An hour in the Cepo is enough to stop foolish pranks but not enough to stop serious crime. If someone is cut or seriously hurt, the person responsible is placed in the Cepo and showered with rotten fruit to attract the fire ants. Killers are left for up to a day.”
I’d come to this Darien Rainforest naively determined to show the inhabitants how to protect themselves from the coming future, but this was one of many instances when I gained in wisdom far more than I ever gave.
In this case I saw that the indigenous use of the Cepo seemed to be a very effective, scalable and uniform way to employ social pressure to control misbehavior. It was used in mild ways by mothers to punish children and adolescents, and in harsher ways by leaders to punish adults.
And in contrast to our system of incarceration, it cost almost nothing – and it didn’t systematically breed criminal sub-cultures either.
I was curious why colonial America, and indeed the rest of the word, had abandoned this practice for expensive systems of incarceration which were so destructive for the participants, and when I returned to the States, I spent some time in the local library researching the issue. It was very enlightening.
History
I learned that Stocks and Pillories have been used in parts of Europe more than 1000 years, probably much longer in Asia, and certainly before reliable records began. The earliest recorded reference to stocks in Europe appears in the Utrecht Psalter, the Dutch masterpiece which contains psalms and other texts, and which dates from around 820 AD.
They were used sometimes alone, and sometimes in conjunction with lashes and other forms of more severe punishment. Jails were used primarily to hold individuals awaiting actual punishment.
In France, time in the pilori was usually limited to two hours before it was finally abolished in 1832. The last person to be pilloried in England was Peter James Bossy, who was convicted of "willful and corrupt perjury" in 1830. He was offered the choice of seven years' penal transportation to Australia or one hour in the pillory, and chose the latter.
Who wouldn’t?
And I discovered that the Cepo used by my indigenous friends in the Darien didn’t originate with them at all, but was adapted back around the time of the Conquistadores from the type of pillory called the Bilboes which was used on board Spanish ships.
And finally I found that, like most of humanity’s imperfect crime prevention solutions, the use of these shaming practices often had unintended and even counterproductive results.
Sometimes its dependency on social pressure fueled by crowd dynamics would trigger reactions so cruel as to have no relationship at all to the crime - even result in a death sentence as mob mentality escalated into murderous rage and ended in rock throwing or other lethal activity.
And occasionally the punishment would even backfire and defeat its own purpose as when Daniel Defoe, political satirist and author of Robinson Caruso, was supposedly pelted with flowers in England in 1703.
And this latter consequence reveals another major drawback. These episodes often became rallying points for the oppressed subcultures which were most victimized, so that the punishment itself ended by strengthening their unity. In these cases, offenders were not shamed at all but raised instead to hero status.
And another unintended consequence of public shaming was that, by making it easy for the general public to identify past offenders, it made it easy for the general public to avoid them entirely and to turn them away from employment so that offenders were left with no remaining option but to join criminal gangs.
Aware of these weaknesses, Judges nevertheless saw stocks and pillories as the lesser of two evils, and sentenced offenders with great frequency in order to avoid other extreme and more likely fatal, or near fatal punishments.
But the drawbacks of public shaming ultimately led reformers in the nineteenth century to call for the complete elimination of the practice, lobbying instead for imprisonment because it would allow judges to have greater control over the severity of punishment by varying the length of prison terms.
Unfortunately these reformers seemed to have been completely unaware of the unintended consequences of imprisonment itself.
And in America, as towns and their governments grew and multiplied and their treasuries swelled enough to build jails and hire sheriffs, and as mobility increased, the social pressure upon which the shaming system was based became less effective. The requirement that individual citizens participate in the process became more burdensome than the simple delegation of responsibility to professionals trained in the matter who could simply place the troublemakers out of sight and mind.
And where stocks were still used, they became less and less effective since troublemakers could now simply move a few towns over to escape notoriety.
Current Trends
With passing years our system of incarceration grew bigger and bigger along with the criminal subculture it housed. Feeble attempts to address this latter problem came and went as it became easier and easier to toss trouble makers out of the way.
Meanwhile as they multiplied and became society’s only solution, the penal institutions gained in political power and influence until their proponents became the unchallenged gurus of punishment in America and the unquestioned repositories of all answers regarding improvements to our penal system - just like the Healthcare professionals.
And of course they have always maintained that our system is basically the best it can be (given the nature of the beast).
But The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world (743 per 100,000 population), Russia is a distant second (577 per 100,000), followed by Rwanda (561 per 100,000).
By comparison the incarceration rates in most of the world are from another universe entirely: in England and Wales in October 2011 only 155 people per 100,000 residents were imprisoned; the rate for Norway in May 2010 was 71 inmates per 100,000, and for the Netherlands in April 2010 was 94; Australia in June 2010 was 133 per 100,000; and New Zealand in October 2010 was 203.
At year-end 2007 the United States had less than 5% of the world's population and 23.4% of the world's prison and jail population (adult inmates).
A 2008 New York Times article pointed out that:
(The) Incarceration rate in the USA for federal and state prisons in 2007 was the highest in the history of the country. It was 5.5 times greater than the sharp peak that occurred during the Great Depression at 137 per 100,000 in 1939.
How can our solution possibly be the best it can possibly be (given the nature of the beast)? It seems far more appropriate to say that our beast is the best it can possibly be (given the nature our solution).
But these are only the numbers and fail to elicit the gut-wrenching reaction to the real and individual tragedies that proliferate within the system.
The truth is that our self-perpetuating penal system provides the world’s preeminent education in criminality for millions and brutalizes both the keeper and the kept. Our prison subcultures support the perspectives and morays of some of society’s most violent and ruthless individuals - the worst of the inhabitants, not the best - and within this world newcomers will either sink or swim - but will most likely be scarred forever in either case.
It wastes $80 billion annually on a structure which unnecessarily destroys lives, depletes the positive energy driving our nation’s future, and weakens our country in a thousand obvious and not so obvious ways.
This sum represents almost half of the total sum our nation spends on secondary education and more than half the total state and national budgets for highway and bridge maintenance combined. It is both a vast waste of wealth and the fuel driving the destruction and the corruption of much of our citizenry.
And all the education and counseling and other curative methods we use to try to mitigate this fundamental consequence cannot entirely cancel it.
And the system only grows bigger and we citizens do little or nothing.
Of course part of the problem lies in the fact that we incarcerate hundreds of thousands for crimes which might better be dealt with in other ways—so-called victimless crimes, which by some estimates constitute over 80% of the Federal prison population.
But movements which have long been underway to change the nature of the punishment for these crimes have met with little success. Some Judges, frustrated with a punishment structure which fails America every day, have attempted to take matters into their own hands by prescribing innovative punishments sometimes involving shaming - but such punishments are helter-skelter and are often overturned by higher courts.
But whether or not sentencing laws change, we must act on our system of incarceration itself because that system, big or small, is poisoning the future of our society.
But wait! My own perusal of penal history had convinced me that humanity had searched relentlessly for solutions to this problem for thousands of years—and had finally come up with the one we have.
Was anything better even possible? Was I foolish to try to fix this?
Would it actually be possible, for example, to devise a punishment that retained the effectiveness of the Cepo as I’d seen it used in the Darien, yet eliminate its unpredictable and sometimes cruel and/or socially unacceptable consequences?
The Second Chance
There were two factors that persuaded me that today there is finally hope for healthy change:
I was still convinced that social pressure is the ideal means to control deviant behavior - all my efforts to understand the evolution of systems of punishment and the very real problems with shaming systems like pillories and stocks did not erase my conviction that what I had seen in the Darien had not been cruel at all—and that it had been very effective. All societies including ours utilize social pressure to move their young from savagery to citizenry. The process is as hardwired as the pack instinct among wolves or the schooling among fishes and it is there because a million years have shown that it benefits us. Perversely it is the very effectiveness of social pressure that fuels the problems in our penal system itself, as it moves inmates inexorably toward more severe forms of criminality.
I saw that that emerging technologies can give us the tools to eliminate the unintended consequences of prior attempts to harness social pressure - that though we no longer have the simplicity and immobility of colonial or indigenous society which made social pressure so effective then, we do have new technologies which if properly used may well allow us to use it to control criminal behavior even more effectively now.
Factors in our design:
In defying 1000 years of penal evolution, we must move with great caution. Whatever our solution, we must begin with the most innocuous cases and move gradually step by step toward more serious cases, tuning and adjusting as we go, so that by the time we get to violent offenders five or ten years into the process, the worst kinks in our system will have been ironed out and the level of risk will have been minimized.
Our solution, which we’ll call The Second Chance or TSC, must incorporate the following understandings:
We must aim for a solution that doesn’t bring large groups of criminals together but which, on the contrary, tends to isolate them from each other
We will employ both negative social pressure (shaming) and positive social pressure (rewards) to accomplish our ends.
We will use our latest technology to frame and modulate social pressure.
Depending on the crime, we may need to begin with strong shaming tactics, but our principle focus will be positive social pressure.
History has shown that the shaming tactics cease to be effective when they continue so long that offenders become inured, but history also shows that they can be very quickly effective. That Bossy case in England balanced 1 hour in the pillory vs. 7 years in a penal colony. Experimentation will determine the proper balance.
The relationship between act and consequence must be crystal clear.
Punishments should be like tunnels with bright lights at the ends in order to allow offenders to take clear and positive action designed to carry them to that light as soon as possible.
Technology
There are four technological factors that open the door to a much better system.
Global Positioning Satellites
Supercomputers
The omnipresence of internet accessibility
The miniaturization of complex electronic components
Our TSC system would fit offenders with GPS-enabled communications (GPS Locks) in the form of anklets or bracelets or necklaces (depending on crime) which would communicate with a supercomputer loaded with data concerning the offenders’ cases and tasked with continuously tracking their precise locations (within inches) 24 hours a day and enforcing the specific elements of the punishment. The GPS locks would allow for two-way communication and be capable, depending again on the crime, of continuously recording all offender dialogues for the duration stipulated in the sentence. These dialogues would be stored on both the GPS locks and the supercomputer though not accessed unless events dictate the necessity.
After conviction and depending on the sentence, the offender’s allowable movement could be strictly limited to essential locations and activities such as home, school and work, and prohibiting locations relating to the crime committed, or any contact with other offenders within the system or any known location where offenders are likely to congregate. But the restrictions would gradually be lifted over a period of days or weeks or months depending on the nature of the sentence involved so that the offender would always be drawn forward by ongoing compliance.
By continuously processing the offender’s GPS location in real time and comparing it with its internal map and other information, the supercomputer could certify that the offender was in continuous compliance with his sentence. Non-compliance would trigger loud warning beeps from the offender’s GPS Lock alternating with instructions giving the offender time to return to compliance.
If the offender ignores the beeps, however, and the violation continues, he would be considered in active violation and the GPS Lock would emit increasingly piercing beeps. Local authorities would simultaneously be notified and continuously apprized of precise position which would appear on their own hand-held tracking tablets.
If, on the other hand, the violation is corrected in time, it will be noted but no action will be taken.
Every active violation, however, would throw the offender back to the beginning of the process and reinstate his original restrictions. Repeated active violations would mean increasing levels of restrictions until possible incarceration.
Offenders with these GPS Locks will be reluctant to commit new crimes since their precise whereabouts will be known at all times, and their conversations will be retrievable. Associates of offenders will be reluctant to conspire with them for the same reasons.
Here are some answers to the objections that immediately arise regarding this approach:
This sounds like Orwell’s 1984, a police state where nothing is sacred.
Technology is a double-edged sword and we need to be certain that we do not unintentionally create the kind of police state envisioned in Orwell’s “1984”. But technology, properly used, can actually diminish this possibility by throwing sunlight on its own actions and harnessing society itself to ensure its proper operation. A system that can alert us all with warning bells when it is being abused is far better than our current system which features remote prisons that hide their abuses from the world.
These punishments apply only to those whose actions have always been sanctioned in one way or another by most societies.
What’s to stop the offender from removing the GPS Lock?
Physical construction of the GPS Locks would involve the toughest materials known and require special machinery to mount and dismount making it extremely difficult or impossible to remove them without equivalent machinery.
Any abnormal stress to the GPS Lock would trigger circuit interruption and very loud beeps and would alert the supercomputer which would instantly issue a police bulletin triggering a chase starting at last known location.
Unauthorized GPS Lock removal or blockage will cause the offender to either be moved to violent offender status and consequent incarceration, or subjected to increased restriction using an additional and more secure necklace version of the GPS Lock, depending on the specific nature of the circumstances and the individual.
How can the dialogue between the supercomputer and the GPS Lock maintain integrity within an open internet space?
The dialogue will employ continuously morphing encryption technology.
How can we be sure that the GPS Locks are charged and in working condition?
The super computer will continuously evaluate GPS Lock condition. If low battery or any anomaly occurs, it will issue a command to the offender to go to the nearest recharge/repair terminal or find himself in non-compliance. If contact to the Supercomputer is lost, the GPS Lock itself will issue the same command when its charge falls below a certain level.
At the terminal, the GPS Lock would be recharged and evaluated and if necessary repaired or replaced in minutes.
Engineers are currently working on wireless charging technology which may become another solution.
What happens when GPS signals are interrupted in subterraneous structures like subways for example?
In addition to GPS positioning, the GPS Locks will access cell phone and internet technology to locate offenders. Punishment map routes will avoid communication blackout locations where possible, but if blackouts become suspicious through recurrence or length, the offender would be notified via his GPS Lock and possibly sanctioned and his location alternatives changed accordingly
During communications blackouts, the GPS Lock would nevertheless continue to operate locally and issue beeps and record conversations.
Doesn’t the law prevent listening in on private citizens?
The benefits of this feature of TSC are substantial since fellow criminals will not want to associate with walking recorders. The effect will be significant crime deterrence.
Nevertheless, though laws against the use of listening devises are intended to protect the rights of free citizens, they may also create barriers to use on convicted offenders.
If this is the case we might obtain the permission of the offenders themselves by allowing them to decide whether they want TSC or incarceration.
Free citizens might object to being recorded without their permission, so the use of the system should be general knowledge. They might also be signaled when they are being recorded with audible beeps from the GPS Lock.
How can we handle the inevitable escapee?
Local law enforcement will receive significant incentives to recapture escapees.
On recapture, offenders would be moved to violent offender status and consequent incarceration, or subjected to increased restriction and fitted in addition with the necklace version, depending on the nature of the circumstances and the individual.
Social Pressure.
Social pressure is implicit with the use of the GPS Lock but we should also make it explicit. There are several of ways we might do that that come to mind:
For Social disincentives
Use of television radio, internet, and other communications technologies to highlight offenders’ fall from grace in ways and degrees varying with the offense.
The punishment enforced by the specific mapping algorithms may require the offender’s presence at public shaming locations tailored to the crimes committed.
The method and amount of shame vs. positive incentive necessary for the structure to work optimally will be hard to calculate initially, but with use precise formulations appropriate to the crimes committed should become more obvious
For Social Incentives
Offenders should be incorporated into healthy working communities. All public contractors involved with infrastructure maintenance or other government projects, for example, might be required as a condition of the contract to hire (at existing wage levels) some percentage of their labor force from the body of offenders processed by our system, and instructed to utilize them as much as possible according to their talents.
To make this attractive to contractors and their employees, incentive dollars (perhaps up to a third of what would otherwise have been spent on the offender during incarceration) would be split during the punishment period between the enterprise itself, and the co-workers who volunteer to “sponsor” the offenders at their new positions. Sponsors could be trained with one week courses at local junior colleges (which might be financed for perhaps $1000 per trainee).
In order to incentivize the offender in his work, employer and sponsor satisfaction would be factors in loosening the restrictions enforced by the overall TSC software.
This structure would help propel the offender towards social acceptance and work viability until the offender finishes his sentence - at which time his performance may well have won him a permanent position.
If this rehabilitation method proves successful, talented offenders might also be made available to the business community in general using the same incentive structure.
With these tactics we can begin to shift the cultural attitudes that have helped straight-jacket our society into the current counterproductive structure, but there is another even more outside-the-box possibility which, though it may sound crazy at first, might be just the cultural medicine necessary to shift us permanently into a far better crime and punishment future.
The idea was sparked by my long-time interest in the psychology underlying and propelling Panama’s National Lottery:
Though gambling was generally considered a form of corruption in America during the years I was in the Peace Corps, it was considered a pleasurable form of taxation in Panama. In subsequent years however, it gradually became mainstream in America and this third-world belief that luck was as important a compensation as hard work began to permeate our culture.
For many years I decried this shift and even refused one internet entrepreneur’s offer to combine environmental conservation incentives involving my Kaimókara project with an internet lottery. But in spite of my scruples, gambling and lottery sites have proliferated and many have been justified by their creators with humanitarian and environmental conservation links - and the people love them.
And since I could see that they tapped into human qualities that were here to stay, I began to think how we might use this form of cultural energy to power healthy cultural shifts.
And I thought about how this “lottery psychology” might help shift our attitudes about crime and punishment and create a more positive and more constructive social dynamic: I began to consider the creation of a subsidized TSC lottery system that bets on successful rehabilitation of offenders.
Significant prizes would be awarded to TSC lottery players who bet that specific offenders would attain high marks in completing their court imposed sentences and courses of rehabilitation. The prize spread would be as wide as possible with up to 25% of offenders yielding moderate monthly winnings and with a quarterly big pot of $1,000,000+ to grab attention.
A $1 Billion subsidy using the tax dollars already saved, when coupled with a $10 lottery ticket price, could provide a powerful incentive to participate.
The objective of these incentivization structures including this last - which may seem extreme and counter intuitive at first glance - is both to replace the structures that have proven poisonous for our society, and to harness the positive energy of the rest of society to voluntarily help to reclaim the souls it might otherwise lose.
Powered by these or similar structures, the current social attitude regarding criminals as throwaways would shift towards one of criminals as opportunities, and this attitude would eventually infect employers, the citizenry, and the offenders themselves.
And in this way a majority of our penal costs, instead of perpetuating a serious problem for our society, would help it maintain the health of our infrastructure while improving the quality of our citizenry.
The exceptions
Of course some percentage (say 5%) of those within our system will be recalcitrant and refuse to work at all.
These might be sent to boot camps along the lines of those that so successfully indoctrinate and prepare our military personnel for active duty, and then, depending on level of improvement, they would be offered again for employment on public projects or assigned to simple tasks in their locality.
Army bases with their drill sergeants might prove ideal for boot camp locations, and might be paid $5,000 per offender.
In spite of our best efforts, however, there will always be those who refuse to cooperate in any way, and we will be forced to re-classify them as violent offenders and to incarcerate them.
Overall Cost of TSC:
The computer system and the GPS Locks and other components of TSC might be developed using the Humanity’s Brain development methodology described in Tiller for Tomorrow. In this case, the cost of development will thus be borne by its creators until the system and the components are operational, at which time they will be compensated annually with a tiny percentage of operational funds, not development funds, according to their degree of contribution.
This means that no portion of the $80 billion we currently spend annually would be used up front for the development process itself.
As the new system is implemented over several years and the non-violent offenders are gradually migrated to TSC (parole hearings might be used to determine which current offenders can be transferred), the total costs of incarceration will gradually be reduced (leaving only violent offenders behind bars during the first phase of TSC).
When this migration of non-violent offenders is complete, close to 68% of the current $80 Billion total, or $54 billion would be theoretically available for the TSC piece of the pie.
How much of that do we actually need?
TSC will need funds to support two types of activities. Control and Rehabilitation.
While at this stage it is difficult to provide precise estimates of cost for these activities, experience can give us a rough idea. Let’s assume that we are processing roughly 1.5 million individuals (the non-violent 68%). Our costs would look something like this (if we err somewhat on the side of excess):
This leaves almost $34 Billion saved by a system that will, at the same time return sanity to a structure that is contributing to the demise of our nation.
And this is before we incorporate violent offenders into the mix - and before the crime rates themselves are reduced by the absence of universities of criminality - and before the financial implications of shorter sentences are tabulated.
In short the implementation of TSC will cause overall penal costs to plummet over the next decade.
“But wait a minute!” you interrupt, “What about those violent offenders – murderers, rapists, child molesters? Is it actually possible to bring them back to society in a positive way?”
Our current system eventually returns them to society anyway, so why not try to set them on a positive course in the meantime?
But before we jump in with violent offenders, we need to make sure our non-violent offender structure is working - and we need to tune our structure to accommodate unexpected consequences. I suspect that within perhaps five years we may be in a better position to experiment with violent offenders most of which will probably need to travel a slightly different route within our system.
We should, for example, require that violent offenders be thoroughly reviewed and screened for risk to society, and we should require those that pass to attend our boot camps. Once they are release with their GPS anklets, we will most likely need to impose much more stringent restrictions upon them and choose more carefully their work environments. Rapists and child molesters in particular represent a significant challenge in this regard.
Other potential uses for TSC
Use within the educational process.
Discipline within some school systems is an enormous problem where the antics of a small minority rob the majority of any hope for a real education.
TSC with its capacity to hear all and see all could offer milder and carefully graduated alternatives for this scenario which could be developed and prescribed by the educators closest to the problems.
For example, school-age offenders who commit legal offenses could be scheduled for local community projects and their activities closely monitored by TSC.
And positive TSC incentivization might help raise the plight of young offenders to the level of a social concern which would be dealt with by ourselves, not institutions.
General use within society
As with the Emberá women, grandmothers might also have limited access to a system that might help them control grandchild activity before it’s too late.
But here again we need to act with great caution so that we don’t hand power to tyrannical individuals.
And such potential uses of TSC would need to await the results of the careful mainstream implementation over several years to be able to evaluate potential benefits and problems and decide whether TSC would be helpful or not.
We can do this!
For centuries humankind has employed methods of punishment which have had the effect, intentional or not, of depriving society of many of its potentially productive members. Though we give lip-service to rehabilitation, many of us nevertheless believe that our living and breathing offenders are throwaways that we can do without. These perspectives and prejudices are deep and damaging and create barriers to change that must be removed if we are to succeed.
Remember - but for ripple in the endless ocean of events, you and I might have been among them - and yet still be ourselves - and still be capable of good action as well as bad.
Many offenders are talented individuals who can definitely contribute in important ways. Others are average Joes capable of many of the tasks that need doing. For most of them, society has a useful slot.
Why not employ them?
After all, we repair our refrigerators and our automobiles and our bicycles when they fail and thereby give them renewed life and productivity. Why shouldn’t we adopt the same attitude toward these infinitely more precious resources?
But we must keep in mind that the cultural evolution underlying a better penal system cannot happen overnight. Generation’s worth of negative habitualization will take decades to undo because we cannot easily reach inside the minds of already damaged millions and simply undo that damage.
Luckily, this general attitude shift will be an inevitable consequence of our solution (if we have the wisdom and strength to implement it) - because culture is a lubricator of success. As our method succeeds, the cultural benefits will gradually gain momentum and acceptance. If it succeeds dramatically, those involved will become highly valued.
And our Nation will be healthier and stronger for it.