Social-Scientific Study of Prisoners’ Communication

Despite a large scholarly literature on crime and imprisonment, social-scientific study of prisoners’ communication with family and friends is sparse and weak. Prisoners’ communication with family and friends helps prisoners upon their release to re-enter successfully into outside society. That’s a prevalent, plausible, common-sense belief. Doing high-quality, social-scientific study of prisoners’ communication with family and friends, however, is difficult. Possibilities for building expertise and professional services around prisoners’ communication with family and friends aren’t propitious. The few studies showing that prisoners’ communication with family and friends aids prisoner re-entry have received more public acclaim than their social-scientific reason merits.

Social-scientific study of prisoners and prison management has attracted considerable government attention and funding. In 1964, Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General, praised a major new study of U.S. prisons:

Several times in the past few years, Prison Director James V. Bennett has brought to my attention the study of federal correctional practices financed by the Ford Foundation and conducted by Dr. Daniel Glaser of the University of Illinois. I have come to have a great deal of interest in this project. It represents a major step forward in American corrections – the application of the analytical techniques of the social sciences to the study of the largest and most advanced correctional systems in the world.^

Glaser described the genesis of this study:

In 1957, when I was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois and only three years beyond the PhD, the assistant director of the Bureau of Prisons, Frank Loveland, invited me to Washington to discuss a major study of the federal correctional system. … After Sayre and Bennett {Federal Bureau of Prison leaders} accepted our ideas, they perused annual reports of foundations to determine which members of boards of directors they should phone. Some months later, following formal proposal writing, I had a quarter million dollars from the Ford Foundation {worth about $2.2 million in 2010 dollar value}. Grantgetting has never been the same for me since.^

The study produced a six-hundred-page, highly technical book. To present the study to officials in a more accessible form, an abridged edition of 345 pages was produced in 1969. A the end of 1979, Glaser noted, “Our data have been repeatedly cited to justify … fewer restrictions on letters and visits to prisoners.” By then, Glaser’s study had been cited 285 times, as measured by citations in the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index.^

Glaser’s major 1964 study of prisons included just over four pages discussing prisoners’ correspondence and visits with family and friends. About three pages of that section presented new data on correspondence and visit frequency from a supplemental questionnaire the study administered in 1961-2. Another two paragraphs reviewed four cross-tabulations of parole success and frequency of familial letters and visits for samples of prisoners released in 1925-35, 1940-49, 1954-55, and 1956. In evaluating the effectiveness of the prison and parole system, the study primarily treated functionally central concerns of correctional practice – prisoner personal characteristics, prison discipline, prison work, prisoner education programs, and prison staff training – and their effects on recidivism and prisoners’ post-prison employment prospects. The study treated prisoners’ communication with family and friends as relatively unimportant.

The brief treatment of visiting and correspondence with prisoners indicated that prisoners who received more letters and visits from family were less frequently re-imprisoned for a new offense or a serious parole violation. For example, in the 1940-49 sample, among parolees who had received either two or more letters per month or one or more visits per month while imprisoned (50% of sample), the share not re-incarcerated was 74%. Among parolees who received no familial letters or visits (3% of sample), the share not re-incarcerated was 43%.^ Correlation between communication frequency and parole success does not necessarily imply causation. Particular personal problems and social circumstances might produce both rupture of familial communication and recidivism. Effectively disentangling causes has become central to the development of treatment expertise in sophisticated economic analysis.

In 1972, Holt and Miller, two government bureaucrats working at the California Department of Corrections, studied in more detail prisoners’ communication with family and friends. Their unpublished research report, which included eight chapters and thirty-one tables, both presented facts about prisoners’ communication with family and friends and analyzed the effects of such communication on prisoners’ behavior. Holt and Miller cross-tabulated the number of visitors (rather than the number of visits) a prisoner received from family and friends in his final year of a term of imprisonment and parole difficulties in the first year of parole following that term of imprisonment. Among prisoners who had two or more visitors, 64% had no parole difficulties and 5% had serious parole difficulties. Among prisoners who had one or no visitors, 50% had no parole difficulties and 10% had serious parole difficulties. Holt and Miller’s data thus indicated that prisoners who received more visitors formed a higher share of successful parolees.

Holt and Miller used a technique of refined tabulation for treating causation. Within groups of prisoners categorized by the amount of money the prison provided to them upon release, prisoners having two or more visitors had a higher share of parole success than prisoners having one or no visitors. Within groups of prisoners categorized by whether they had a definite job available on release, prisoners having two or more visitors had a higher share of parole successes. Within prisoners categorized as first termers, second termers, and serving a third or higher term, prisoners having two or more visitors had a higher share of parole successes. With the exception of serious parole difficulties among parolees with a low predicted probability of success, among prisoners categorized by predicted parole success, prisoners having two or more visitors had a higher share of parole successes. This result indicates that predictions of parole success were not adequately incorporating even a crude measure of visitors (among prisoners with equal predictions of parole success, visitors provided extra predictive power). The predictor of parole success, an operational measure called the “Base Expectancy Score,” was apparently too complex to be described in the report.^ Overall, a key strength of the report was that the variables considered in most of its analysis could be readily understood by any interested person. By today’s analytical standards, bi-variate cross-tabulation is a crude method for examining causation. Nonetheless, Holt and Miller’s 1972 work is the best social-scientific study of prisoners’ communication available today.

Since 1972, scholars have invested little in developing expertise in the communicative treatment of prisoners. The conclusions of the 1972 government bureaucrats’ report hint at a possible problem:

all the evidence suggests that there is a strong, independent, positive relationship between maintaining frequent family contacts while in prison and success on parole.
This evidence suggests that the inmate’s family should be viewed as the prime treatment agent and family contacts as a major correctional technique. This approach has numerous advantages not the least of which is that it is free. It doesn’t require the specially trained staff or costly staff augmentations so common to most treatment approaches.^

Members of an inmate’s family commonly lack training in social work, psychological counseling, and behavioral therapies. Regarding an inmate’s family as “prime treatment agent” devalues the skills of persons involved in treating prisoners.

Prisoner’s communication with family doesn’t provide an amenable field for expert knowledge. An article in a peer-reviewed sociology journal in 1990 considered what it means for an inmate’s family to be regarded as the prime treatment agent:

the maintenance of family relationships during imprisonment is important to family units, to individual family members, including the inmate and children, and to the general public. Family ties are instrumental in reducing the stress felt by individuals separated from their loved ones, in assuring their families that their imprisoned relative is all right, in promoting the prisoner’s mental health, in maintaining family bonds, in decreasing recidivism and increasing public safety. How and why family relationships are instrumental in these ways is not fully understood. How families can be used as an effective correctional resource is also not well defined.^

Hairston’s widely cited literature review from 1988 set out the case for economic analysis:

Whereas family-centered correction programs may be justified for a variety of humane – as well as practical – reasons, a major argument advanced by proponents is that strong family ties during imprisonment reduce the level of future criminal activity (Bloom, 1987; FCN, 1986; Mustin, 1984; Potler, 1986; West, 1985)
Investigation of any phenomenon which purports to prevent crime or reduce criminal activity is mandatory. The claim that prisoners’ families, of which there are many, could be resources in enhancing public safety makes understanding of this phenomenon even more compelling. Unfortunately, little scientific knowledge about prisoners and their families has been collected. The topic has not been popular with corrections researchers as they have generally failed to take into account the fact that prisoners’ social networks extend beyond prison walls. Similarly, few family researchers and social service professionals have identified the areas as a priority for knowledge building or service delivery.^

Claims that prisoners’ communication with family and friends reduce recidivism developed even without supporting knowledge:

With respect to family programs, there are a growing number of family-focused programs in institutions and in communities which claim the reduction in recidivism as a major intended program outcome. …Little is known about the effectiveness of these models in achieving their specific objectives, in contributing toward corrections’ recidivism prevent goals, or in maintaining the quantity or quality of family ties either during or after imprisonment. …No serious assessment of these program models has been undertaken, despite the fact of some growing interest in them.^

Hairston’s 1988 literature review found in post-1970 literature five empirical studies concerning “the family ties-post-release success relationship.” Two studies encompassed both letters and ordinary visits to prisoners, while the three others concerned special visiting provisions such as furloughs and extended family visiting programs. Hairston concluded:

The strength of the association between family ties and post-release success is consistent though modest. More importantly, the association held despite the expectations of some that family contact will have a negative impact on prisoners and without programmatic efforts designed to correct or treat prisoners’ families.
Empirical studies and theoretical frameworks independently support the hypothesis of a positive association between the maintenance of family ties during imprisonment and post-release success. … Research for the basic family ties, recidivism hypothesis, though consistent, is quite sparse. Even a basic research foundation requires more extensive studies to determine with whom, and under what conditions, this basic hypothesis holds. Such knowledge could provide the basis for predicting recidivism and could also be used to assess the need for special programs and supports.^

Hairston’s 1988 literature review, within which the 1972 government bureaucrats’ study was the most extensive study reviewed, continues to be cited more than a decade latter.

While none of the studies reviewed in Hairston’s 1988 literature review directly covered telephone communication with prisoners, the U.S. Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has generated a literature review directly concerning prisoners’ telephone communication. In 1999, OIG sought from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) studies concerning the effects of inmate telephone calls. Initially the BOP cited three studies. Upon examining them, the OIG found “none of the studies examines the use of telephones by prison inmates or analyzes the effect of reasonable telephone restrictions on inmate behavior or personal development.”^ The OIG then repeated its request for research and received additional studies:

The BOP later provided the OIG eight studies conducted by other researchers which it believes establish that inmates “telephone usage and other contacts with family contribute to inmate moral, better staff-inmate interactions, and more connection to the community, which in turn has made them less likely to return to prison.” However, the few of these studies that address telephones merely suggest that they can be used as a means for the inmates to maintain contact with their families, without any comprehensive analysis. In addition, while recognizing the problems of misuse of the telephones, they do not address whether inmates are more likely to use the telephone for positive purposes, or for criminal purposes.^

A reasonable, common-sense belief is that prisoners’ communication with family and friends helps prisoners upon their release to re-enter successfully into outside society. Social-scientific reason has contributed little to evaluating the empirical truth of that reasonable, common-sense belief.

Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes on Deterring Crime

At least through the beginning of the twentieth century, knowledgeable public intellectuals discussed deterring crime in a conceptually wide-ranging and popularly accessibly way. Consider the example of Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr. By 1897, Holmes was the well-regarded author of the legal text, The Common Law, and a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the highest court in Massachusetts. In a public address in 1897 at the dedication of a new Boston University Law School building, Holmes declared:

For the rational study of the law the black-letter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics. ^

Like Beccaria and Bentham, Holmes questioned traditional ideas and practices and encouraged wide-ranging, unsentimental discussion of penal policy. Holmes asked:

What have we better than a blind guess to show that the criminal law in its present form does more good than harm? I do not stop to refer to the effect which it has had in degrading prisoners and in plunging them further into crime, or to the question whether fine and imprisonment do not fall more heavily on a criminal’s wife and children than on himself. I have in mind more far-reaching questions. Does punishment deter? Do we deal with criminals on proper principles? ^

Holmes here gender-stereotyped the criminal and invoked the popular belief that prisons, by permitting association and communication among prisoners of all classes, serve as schools of crime. Holmes then passed on to consider deterrence in relation to personal types, imitation, and fashion:

A modern school of Continental criminalists plumes itself on the formula, first suggested, it is said, by Gall, that we must consider the criminal rather than the crime. … If the typical criminal is a degenerate, bound to swindle or to murder by as deep seated an organic necessity as that which makes the rattlesnake bite, it is idle to talk of deterring him by the classical method of imprisonment. He must be got rid of; he cannot be improved, or frightened out of his structural reaction. If, on the other hand, crime, like normal human conduct, is mainly a matter of imitation, punishment fairly may be expected to help to keep it out of fashion.

Holmes’ simile “as that which makes the rattlesnake bit,” followed by the direct, forceful, “He must be got rid of” surely is effective popular communication. Holmes combined such language with display of his knowledge of the current scholarly literature:

The study of criminals has been thought by some well known men of science to sustain the former hypothesis. The statistics of the relative increase of crime in crowded places like large cities, where example has the greatest chance to work, and in less populated parts, where the contagion spreads more slowly, have been used with great force in favor of the latter view. But there is weighty authority for the belief that, however this may be, “not the nature of the crime, but the dangerousness of the criminal, constitutes the only reasonable legal criterion to guide the inevitable social reaction against the criminal.” (Holmes’ footnote: Havelock Ellis, “The Criminal,” 41, citing Garofalo. See also Ferri, “Sociologie Criminelle,” passim. Compare Tarde, “La Philosophie Pénale.”) ^

Consider Holmes’ authorities. Franz Josef Gall, a German physician, founded phrenology, which he initially called craniology. Phenology replaced analysis of rational choices with biological description. Jean Gabriel Tardé emphasized social imitation as a cause of crime. Enrico Ferri focused on social groups in analyzing crime. Both harshly criticized Beccaria and Bentham’s individualistic analysis of criminal rationality. With respect to considering the criminal rather than the crime, Holmes concluded with a quotation from Henry Havelock Ellis. Ellis was paraphrasing Raffaele Garofalo. Garofalo’s work emphasized the biological characteristics of criminals and provided intellectual foundations for indeterminate sentencing and individualized parole decisions. Garofalo strongly criticized the assumption of free will at the foundations of economic analysis of crime.

Holmes considered crime in terms of biological types, imitation, and fashion. That’s much different from penal thinking of the early masters of proto-economics. Holmes cited no statistics. More generally, his address served a broad audience with appreciation for display of learning and without strong claims to narrow, technical expertise. Imagining the conduct of the “bad man” — the person like everyone except you and me and all women — is an intellectual exercise accessible and appealing to everyone.

Economics of Estimating the Elasticity of Crime

Academics trained in economic analysis, as if controlled by an invisible moderator of disciplined discussion, have vigorously competed to produce the best estimate of the elasticity of crime with respect to imprisonment. On the supply side, regressing is a predominate practice among empirical economists. An elasticity is a single coefficient produced cheaply in a log-linear regression. Since an increase in crime might naturally be associated with a subsequent increase in imprisonment, identifying the effect of imprisonment on crime raises the sort of causality questions that have been central to expertise within the discipline of economics in the second half of the twentieth century. Estimating elasticities thus provides opportunities for high-interest investments in expertise. On the demand side, the elasticity of crime with respect to imprisonment maps directly into summary statements that support a strong claim to policy relevance, e.g. “a 1% increase in the prison population will produce a 0.3% reduction in crime.” Such claims help to stimulate demand for expert quotations in newspaper articles and interviews on television. Scholars seeking value in economic analysis have rationally allocated considerable research effort to estimating elasticities.

The value of estimating elasticities does not lie within the foundations of economic analysis. Paul Samuelson, winner of 1970 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and perhaps the most academically influential twentieth-century economist, called elasticities “essentially arbitrary” and “more or less useless.” In a more nuanced evaluation, he stated, “On the whole, it appears that their importance is not very great except possibly as mental exercises for beginning students.”^ Consequences of changes in a control variable could be estimated, predicted, and described in a wide variety of ways. An elasiticity is merely one, particular, highly specific way of describing consequences.

Apart from disciplinary credit, the utility from estimating the elasticity of crime with respect to imprisonment appears astonishingly small. Prior to 1968, scholars had done little work empirically evaluating the effect of deterrence on crime. In the subsequent decade, at least twenty-four empirical studies addressed this question. A literature review, sponsored by the U.S. National Research Council, reported in 1978:

Despite the intensity of the research effort, the empirical evidence is still not sufficient for providing a rigorous confirmation of the existence of a deterrent effect. Perhaps more important, the evidence is woefully inadequate for providing a good estimate of the magnitude of whatever effect may exist.^

The associated report, the U.S. National Research Council’s Report of the Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitive Effects, offered a carefully worded declaration of non-knowledge:

we cannot yet assert that the evidence warrants an affirmative conclusion regarding deterrence. …Our reluctance to draw stronger conclusions does not imply support for a position that deterrence does not exist, since the evidence certainly favors a proposition supporting deterrence more than it favors one asserting that deterrence is absent.^

A book-length study of criminal incapacitation published in 1994 indicated that the state of knowledge had changed little:

Unfortunately, virtually nothing is known about the size of even the aggregate elasticity. Literally dozens of {estimates of the elasticity} have been calculated on the basis of econometric analysis, but the prevailing opinion is that none of these estimates are persuasive^

By 2000, more than 100 scholarly studies had attempted to test for deterrence.^ Through more than two decades of estimating the elasticity of crime, many technical improvements were declared in the scholarly literature. These improvements led to an important conclusion:

The ultimate futility of our analysis is at last revealed. We can be nearly certain the elasticity lies somewhere between -0.1 and -0.5, and we can be fairly sure it lies between -0.2 and –0.4, but we have no idea at all whether it is greater than or less than -0.265.^

The figure of -0.265 comes from the author’s back-of-the-envelope calculation of the elasticity threshold for the cost effectiveness of prison construction. Its three-digit precision, which is not convincingly supported, seems merely illustrative. A literature review in 2010 found relatively little evidence of severity of punishment having a deterrence effect, but found relatively strong evidence that the probability of punishment deters. The researchers concluded, “we see much need for new research.”^

Estimating the elasticity of crime with respect to deterrence isn’t a socially cost-effective contribution to public discussion of criminal justice policy. Almost everyone has almost nothing to say about deterrence when it is described as an elasticity. Public discussion of criminal punishment also commonly includes justifications that are unrelated to deterrence.^

Levitt’s Elasticity of Crime Estimates and the Extent of Incarceration

In 1996, economist Steven Levitt published in a leading economics journal an analysis of elasticities of crime. Levitt’s abstract began by declaring his technical innovation for treating intricate causal relations:

Simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime. To break that simultaneity, this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument for changes in the prison population.

Then his paper reported his elasticity estimates:

The resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies. A one-prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen Index I crimes per year.^

A one-prisoner change in imprisonment is a situation that a prosecutor might ponder in considering whether to charge someone with a wide array of crimes and then to seek a guilty plea on at least one of them. Is Levitt’s analysis relevant to that one-prisoner prosecutorial decision? More generally, in what social, criminal, and prison circumstances, at what magnitude of imprisonment, and at what scale change in imprisonment is Levitt’s analysis empirically relevant? An elasticity of crime abstracts from those questions. Abstracting from such questions promotes the value of economic analysis by enhancing its apparent generality.

Consider some circumstances concerning imprisonment in the U.S. In the U.S. from 1971 to 1996, the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one year of imprisonment grew an unprecedented 474%. The share of prisoners with drug offenses as their most serious offense rose from 9% to 24%. At year-end 1996, the U.S. had in prison 611 persons per 100,000 residents. U.S. incarceration prevalence was about the same as incarceration prevalence in Russia, which had the highest incarceration prevalence about 1996 in a dataset covering nearly all countries. Moreover, 65% of countries had an incarceration prevalence less than or equal to 150 persons per 100,000 residents. Thus, in 1996, the extent of U.S. incarceration was extremely high relative to U.S. history and to contemporary international comparisons. Nonetheless, the U.S. has continued to incarcerate a larger share of its population. In 2010, U.S. incarceration prevalence reached 733 prisoners per 100,000 residents.

An elasticity of crime obscures the specific historical circumstances. In a paper published in an economics journal in 2004, Levitt used his 1996 estimates of the elasticity of crime to explain part of the crime reduction in the U.S. from 1991 to 2001. Within that same analysis, those elasticities do not contribute to a satisfactory explanation for U.S. crime trends from 1973 to 1991. However, in his 1996 paper, Levitt estimated his elasticities of crime using U.S. state-level data from 1971 to 1993. Levitt’s elasticities of crime apparently work better in explaining crime across years for which they are less directly relevant.^

The value of an elasticity of crime seems to depend on idiosyncratic deliberative circumstances. In his 1996 scholarly paper estimating elasticities of crime, Levitt offered the following conclusions:

While calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain, it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner. …
If anything, the results of this paper suggest that increasing the amount of time served by the current pool of prisoners would be socially beneficial.^

Levitt co-authored a paper, published in 2004, that presented more elasticities of crime. This paper focused on incarcerating drug offenders. Its results affirmed that incarcerating drug offenders had a similar effect to incarcerating other offenders. Nonetheless, this paper suggested that existing levels of incarceration were excessive:

On the margin, locking up drug-offenders has roughly the same impact on violent and property crime as incarcerating other types of criminals. …
The question of foremost public policy interest related to our work is whether or not the investment in drug-offender incarceration has been cost effective. A serious cost-benefit analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, but a few points are worth making. First, for typical values of the costs of crime, even the most generous estimates of the crime reduction attributable to prison (Levitt, 1996) suggest that current levels of incarceration are excessive. Thus, it is not easy to justify drug imprisonment based on associated declines in violent and property crime alone.^

The reason for the difference between Levitt’s 1996 conclusions and these conclusions cannot be found easily in the papers’ technical analysis of causation. The U.S. level of incarceration in 2004, 729 inmates per 100,000 residents, like the corresponding figure of 611 in 1996, is extraordinarily high from historical and cross-country perspectives. Deliberative circumstances offer an alternative perspective on causation. Levitt in 2004 had greater disciplinary status and hence probably benefited less from making provocative claims. In addition, most persons, especially academics, tend to be more sympathetic to drug offenders than to other types of offenders. These deliberative circumstances seem to explain better than any obvious reasons within his papers’ technical analyses the differences in Levitt’s conclusions.

Economic Discipline Confines Analysis of Prison Conditions

In seeking to develop treatment expertise, economists have explicitly sought to limit communication. Consider, for example, that many more U.S. prisoners die in prison than are executed as punishment for crimes. Those facts could prompt wide-ranging discussion about punishment, public concern, and possibilities for change. Economists Lawrence Katz, Steven Levitt, and Ellen Shustorovich, in contrast, focused on whether death in prison deters crime. Their study, published in a scholarly journal, found “a robust negative relationship between prison death rates and violent and property crime rates”:

In terms of crimes reduced per prison death, the estimated effects are quite large: 30-100 violent crimes and a similar number of property crimes.^

The penultimate paragraph in the study’s introduction, which preceded an outline of the study, stated:

We cannot stress enough that evidence of a deterrent effect of poor prison conditions is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for arguing that current prison conditions are either overly benign or unjustifiably inhumane. Efficiency arguments related to deterrence are only one small aspect of an issue that is inextricably associated with basic human rights, constitutionality, and equity considerations. Our research is descriptive, not proscriptive.^

The rest of the twenty-five page-paper focused on estimating the effect of prison deaths on crime and contributed nothing to considering any issue other than this deterrent effect. The textual evidence indicates that the authors’ concern is to claim technical expertise. The last paragraph of the paper explicitly sought to limit discussion:

Without further analysis of the question, we also caution against extrapolating our results to argue that the elimination of prison amenities such as cable television and athletic facilities will prove a deterrent to crime. Although that position is consistent with our findings, it is by no means a direct implication of our results. Substantial changes in prison death rates are categorically different from minor alterations of the quality of life associated with the removal of weight rooms. Before drawing any conclusions about the later, we would be prudent to compile evidence that is more directly relevant to the issue.^

Death is surely a disincentive of a much different magnitude than ending a prisoner’s access to cable television. Yet at its foundations, economic analysis implies no categorical distinction between these disincentives. This study’s attempt to limit discussion of its finding and shift the burden of related policy discussion to further research is an economically rational communicative strategy for enhancing the value of the type of research it provides.

An economic study addressing the deterrent effect of prison location similarly limited communication. This study provided econometric estimates of “the punitiveness of reduced visitation associated with incarceration in institutions far from one’s city of residence.” The results:

Our results suggest that incarceration location has a sizeable deterrence effect. Increasing the average distance to a women’s prison by 40 miles reduces the female violent crime rate by approximately 6%.^

This study also included a technical statement of limitations:

our estimates do not quantify the welfare implications of this change. Increasing the distance to women’s prisons (or an outright ban on visitation) has clear externalities. There is ample evidence that a mother’s incarceration has adverse effects on her children (Baunach, 1985). It therefore seems quite likely, although not certain, that even more severe restrictions on maternal visitation would exacerbate an already bad situation for the children of female inmates. As such, the secondary effects therefore render the long-run general equilibrium effects of prison location on crime rates ambiguous. In contrast, other forms of hardening hard time do not suffer from the same types of externalities. Chain gangs, prison stripes, and loss of recreational privileges generally do not lower the utility of anyone but the convict.^

Only harshly disciplined scholars would discuss visiting prisoners in terms of externalities and “long-run general equilibrium effects.” Even Jeremy Bentham, who relished shocking sensibilities with his foundational proto-economic analysis of pleasure, pain, and utility, recognized sympathetic connections among family members. This study’s reason can be understood only in conjunction with communication confined to a group subject to particular, painful discipline.

Pain in the Economics Discipline

The economics profession has not reformed despite painful failings. For example, much formal econometric work has no influence outside of the economics discipline. Such work has continued despite a sensational declaration of this failing at an important economics conference in 1987. Moreover, economic theory and empirical evidence indicate that leading economic journals have been frequently publishing invalid results. Across about two decades, this knowledge has produced little change in publication practices. A third example: in 1991, a Commission on Graduate Education in Economic, whose members were prominent professors within the discipline, reported that coursework was not encouraging creativity and failing to develop communication skills. The economics discipline essentially has not responded to these failings.

Some aspects of work within the economics discipline have changed significantly. In leading economic journals, the average page size of articles, the number of references, and the lag between submission and acceptance have all roughly doubled over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Economic theory and plausible empirical explanations do not easily or well explain these changes in disciplinary practices.^ These changes do not appear to have increased the average quality of papers. They have made publishing papers a more time-consuming and less enjoyable ordeal.^

It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars.^

The communications problem in economics is being registered through surprising channels. In 2004 at a public conference in Washington, DC, Ronald Coase, the winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, declared:

They {economists} don’t study the economic system, they study other economists’ writings. The economic literature consists of a discussion of discussions and so it could go on. And it’s not really dealing with what happens in the real world, it’s dealing with this imaginary world that is economics.^

Economics students in France have engaged in protests, formed an alternate economics collective, and issued public demands:

If serious reform does not take place rapidly, the risk is great that economics students, whose numbers are already decreasing, will abandon the field in mass, not because they have lost interest, but because they have been cut off from the realities and debates of the contemporary world.
We no longer want to have this autistic science imposed on us.^

On March 11, 2004, terrorists in Madrid detonated bombs that killed 191 innocent persons and wounded about 1800 others. Terrorist acts are dramatic, evil forms of mass symbolic communication. One of the leaders of the terrorists came to Madrid to study on an economics scholarship.^ He apparently did not appreciate the usefulness and joy of seeking true economic knowledge and sharing it with others through peaceful communication.

Program Evaluation in Rehabilitation and Education

Since Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks surveyed the effects of rehabilitation programs on recidivism, program evaluation has become much more sophisticated. A leading scholar in the field recently presented textbooks in education as an example:

the question that is sometimes left unanswered is, “Do the textbooks make a difference in children’s learning?” … What we want to do here is compare what actually happens with the textbooks to what would have happened without textbooks.^

In considering this type of question with respect to rehabilitating prisoners, Lipton, Martinson and Wilks limited their review of rehabilitation programs to findings of evaluation research. Martinson described evaluation research as:

a special kind of research which was applied to criminal justice on a wide scale for the first time in California during the period immediately following World War II. This research is experimental – that is, offenders are often randomly allocated to treatment and nontreatment groups so that comparison can be made of outcomes.^

This experimental structure remains at the foundations of scientific program evaluation. In terms of leading scholarly evaluation techniques for the hypothetical textbook program:

We argue that we need to follow the example of medicine and set up randomized experiments. Since resources are generally limited at the beginning of a program, it makes sense to select twice the number of people, or schools, and introduce the program to half the sample, randomly selected. In this way, we can be sure that those who benefited from the program are no different from those who did not. If we collect data on both groups and find a difference between those who were exposed and those who weren’t, we can conclude it’s the effect of the program. Everybody can then use this evidence to decide whether to take this program up in other contexts – the knowledge becomes a shared resource.^

Such an evaluation procedure provides a propitious structure for the competitive development of scientific treatment expertise. It has generated highly successful research programs. Unlike the received understanding of Martinson’s evalutation (“nothing works”), more recent program evaluation tends to produce specific, nuanced results that aren’t easily summarized in a slogan. Leading research programs do, however, show clear concern for poverty, inequality, and oppression.

Meaningfully interpreting and using program evaluations in new contexts is difficult. The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 was awarded for work that, among other contributions, discovered “evidence on the pervasiveness of heterogeneity and diversity in economic life.” This work emphasized carefully separating two questions:

(1) “What is the effect of a program in place on participants and nonparticipants compared to no program at all or some alternative program?”
This is what is now called the “treatment effect” problem. The second and the more ambitious question raised is
(2) “What is the likely effect of a new program or an old program applied to a new environment?”
The second question raises the same type of problems as arise from estimating the demand for a new good. Its answer usually requires structural estimation.^

The problem in practice is to distinguish between a “new program” and an “old program,” and the “same environment” and a “new environment.” The pervasiveness of heterogeneity and diversity in economic life underscores exactly this problem. Does new staff make for a new program? Does the passage of time produce a new environment? Such questions are crucial for evaluating program evaluations. An economist rationally answers such questions by calling for more economic research.

Specific actions that can be easily measured daily are more amenable to program evaluation than are broad purposes realized over years. For example, a website owner might seek a greater number of visitors and a higher click-through rate on ads. Content and ad experiments, along with measurements of resulting traffic and ad-click-through rates, can be cheaply and quickly realized. Some such local optimization steps, e.g. duping and exploiting visitors, can generate bad long-term results. Nonetheless, at least the instrumental, short-term effects of the experiments can be meaningfully measured.

Treatment instruments are much more difficult to evaluate with respect to broad purposes realized over years. Reducing recidivism and improving education are purposes with a time horizon of years. Recidivism and education outcomes might might be measured over years using incarceration and earnings records. Doing so would require highly sophisticated controls for changes in circumstances over years. Even if that could be done convincingly and generalizably, the purposes of reducing recidivism and improving education are not merely to keep persons out of jail and earning income. Free, knowledgeable persons are at the core of ideals of persons well-governed personally and collectively. Programs of punishment and education cannot be adequately evaluated using just feasible measurements of their instrumental effects.

Reforming and Rehabilitating Prisoners:
Communicative and Consequentialist Challenges

Reasoning about criminal punishment and reformation is challenging. Despite the Age of Enlightenment’s great influence on Western civilization, the eighteenth-century foundations of economic analysis haven’t brought enlightenment to actual practices of punishment and reformation. Penal policy seems to be formed in other ways.

Mass persuasion and folk wisdom are alternatives to progressive reason. Late in the twentieth century, Robert Martinson argued for the importance of mass communication:

here is the public demanding some substantive knowledge about how to reduce crime and all it gets from Palmer is the dry crust of “middle base expectancy” and interminable intramural bickering about the esoteric mysteries of research design and significance tests and such-like oddities. … My neighbors in the 20^th precinct are mystified by Palmer’s obscurantism. … Correctional research must get out of the sandbox and speak straight to the American people.^

More recent scholarly research has advocated an common-person attitude:

we offer an attitude rather than an algorithm: one that trusts collective, commonsense judgments, and is humble in the face of uncertainty, steadfast in confronting urgent problems, and committed to fairness within and beyond this generation.^

Formal learning’s contribution to that attitude is probably small, if not negative. Moreover, that attitude probably wouldn’t inspire a difficult program of new intellectual work. It tends to encourage conservatism and a “precautionary principle.”^ Popular interpretation of a precautionary principle in the field of crimes and punishments tends to discourage mercy and second chances. A precautionary principle favors preemptive, discriminatory state control and mass incarceration.

Another alternative to structuring punishment and reformation is credentialism. In a scholarly article entitled “Beyond Correctional Quackery – Professionalism and the Possibility of Effective Treatment, ” three university-based authors forcefully advocated “evidence-based corrections.” They identified “four sources of correctional quackery”: “failure to use research in designing programs,” “failure to use effective treatment models,” “failure to follow appropriate assessment and classification practices,” and “failure to evaluate what we do.” According to the authors, fostering evidence-based corrections requires more appreciation for duly credentialed authority:

To move beyond quackery and accomplish these goals, the field of corrections will have to take seriously what it means to be a profession. In this context, individual agencies and individuals within agencies would do well to achieve what Gendreau et al. (forthcoming) refer to as the “3 C’s” of effective correctional policies: First, employ credentialed people; second, ensure that the agency is credentialed in that it is founded on the principles of fairness and the improvement of lives through ethically defensive [sic] means; and third, base treatment decisions on credentialed knowledge (e.g., research from meta-analyses).^

Ordinary persons typically have a sense of fairness and seek to act ethically, or at least in an ethically defensible way. More insights into the importance of credentials come from “eight principles of effective correctional intervention.” The third principle concerns “management/staff characteristics”:

The program director and treatment staff are professionally trained and have previous experience working in offender treatment programs. Staff selection is based on their holding beliefs supportive of rehabilitation and relationship styles and therapeutic skill factors typical of effective therapies.

Professional training, previous experience, supportive beliefs, and “skill factors typical of effective therapies” all separate credentialed persons from a random sample of ordinary persons. The description of “core correctional practice” describes in technical terms patterns of human interaction:

Program therapists engage in the following therapeutic practices: anti-criminal modeling, effective reinforcement and disapproval, problem-solving techniques, structured learning procedures for skill-building, effective use of authority, cognitive self-change, relationship practices, and motivational interviewing.^

Caring, empathetic persons committed to helping prisoners and who have passed courses of such practices undoubtedly help prisoners. The contribution of credentialed techniques themselves to that effectiveness is far from clear. Credentials and credentialed techniques, in this field as in others, create barriers to entry and raise costs of caring for prisoners. They also devalue prisoners’ ordinary communication with their families and friends.

Correctional experts world-wide in the nineteenth century promoted complete suppression of prisoners’ communication. Competitive fields of knowledge and authority, like markets for goods, can fail badly.

Robert Martinson, Freedom Rider

Amid Robert Martinson’s graduate education in sociology, he and other students found themselves in an extraordinary position:

We walked barefooted, two by two, into our cages and stood there embarrassed, naked, outraged.

This environment could easily break the spirit of most graduate students:

a one-story, cement-block structure composed of two wings. It is surrounded by a high, barbed-wire fence with guard towers at the corners. It is a prison within a prison, especially designed to break the spirit of the toughest felon. … The inmates are caged in small, two-man cells and look out upon a bare cement corridor bathed in perpetual light.

Yet even in these oppressive conditions they maintained and valued communication with each other:

Imagine the frustration of maintaining democracy under such physical conditions. Someone in cell No. 2 on the far side makes a motion which is ponderously passed from cell to cell, to our “pivot man” and down the thirteen cells on our side. Assuming the motion managed this precarious passage without distortion (or objection), the debate began. Each person’s remarks and interpolations had again to be passed around the block. After everyone had had his full say, the voting would begin. “How does cell No. 4 vote?” “One for, one, against.” “O.K. Cell No. 5, what about you?” “Two abstentions. We want to explain our abstentions.” A series of low groans would break out. This democratic spirit was doggedly defended to the very end.^

The democratic spirit implies inclusive discussion. Such discussion can be long, tedious, undisciplined, and apparently futile. Participants often groan and suffer while awaiting action that has already been widely anticipated. Nonetheless, Robert Martinson and his fellow Freedom Riders were committed to upholding ideals of democracy even while incarcerated.

The effects of freedom depend greatly on its relationship to true knowledge. Among Freedom Riders, Robert Martinson perceived freedom in knowing and acting on the truth:

{The Deputy Sheriff} asked a young Negro why he was smiling and received no answer. He repeated the question in his deadly way: “Boy, what you got to smile about? You in jail, you know.”
“Sheriff,” he answered, “you just wouldn’t understand. I’m smiling because I’m free.”
And I was witness to the fact that, indeed, a new kind of freedom — tough, critical, unsentimental, knowing — is being forged in the jails and prisons of the South. Those who emerge from these jails will never be the same again.^

The democratic spirit of freedom encompasses more than just freedom of discussion. This spirit also includes the hope that true knowledge – “tough, critical, unsentimental, knowing” – can help free discussion to produce less groaning and more smiling.

Robert Martinson and Nothing Works

After his experiences as a Freedom Rider incarcerated in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Robert Martinson returned to graduate school. He had entered University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student in sociology in 1958. He finished his Ph.D. dissertation, Treatment Ideology and Correctional Bureaucracy: A Study of Organizational Change, in 1968. Martinson was then working as a lecturer at City College of the City University of New York. He subsequently became a junior professor at City College.

In 1967, New York State initiated a study of the most effective means for rehabilitating prisoners. Martinson joined a team of experts that New York State sponsored to survey rehabilitation programs. Reviewing the English-language literature on results of rehabilitation programs throughout the world from 1945 to 1967, the survey team identified 231 studies that met their standards for social science research. They then reviewed, re-analyzed, standardized, and summarized this set of studies.^ None of these studies concerned prisoners’ communications with family and friends. This major effort seems to have been a sincere quest to develop expertise on rehabilitating prisoners.

The knowledge resulting from the New York State survey was not radically new. In an article published in 1972, Martinson introduced his summary of the survey’s findings with these general observations:

The aim of research is knowledge not justification. Without more and better research, we will permit arrogant assertion to rule us.

These general observations contrast knowledge with sophisticated verbal practices (“justification”) and entrenched authority (“arrogant assertion” that will “rule us”). Martinson allied the survey’s findings with consensus and folk wisdom:

The conclusions will not come as a surprise to those engaged in correctional research, or to many practitioners who have long suspected that it is difficult to treat persons who do not wish to be treated. The Office of Crime Control Planning (now the Division of Criminal Justice) was farsighted in underwriting scientific inquiry with no instant guarantee of pay-off. I absolve them and my co-workers from responsibility for the interpretation that I place on these findings.

Martinson then summarized the survey’s findings:

On the whole, the evidence from the survey indicated that the present array of correctional treatments has no appreciable effect – positive or negative – on the rates of recidivism of convicted offenders.^

Other scholars who had earlier reviewed relevant evidence had reached similar conclusions.^ Martinson, identified in biographical blurbs as “co-author of The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment,” stated that an eight-hundred-page volume extensively documenting the findings of the survey that New York State sponsored would be published later in 1972.

New York State attracted attention to The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment by attempting to suppress it. New York State had hoped for knowledge to inform planned new rehabilitative programs.^ The findings of the survey did not serve to justify such programs. For several years, New York State refused to allow the survey to be published. In an article published in a public affairs journal in 1974, Martinson explained what happened:

By the spring of 1972 – fully a year after I had re-edited the study for final publication – the state had not only failed to publish it, but had also refused to give me permission to publish it on my own. The document would still not be available to me or to the public today had not Joseph Alan Kaplon, an attorney, subpoenaed it from the state for use as evidence in a case before the Bronx Supreme Court.
During the time of my efforts to get the study released, reports of it began to be widely circulated, and it acquired something of an underground reputation. But this article is the first published account, albeit a brief one, of the findings contained in that 1,400 page manuscript.^

In the 1974 article, Martinson again summarized the survey’s findings:

With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.^

This conclusion differed little from the one Martinson set out in his 1972 publication. Nonetheless, Martinson’s 1974 publication, and this conclusion, became highly influential in discussions of prison reform.

Martinson’s article fostered polarized discussion of rehabilitation. The first clause of his 1974 article’s title was “What works?” The last section heading of that article was “Does nothing work?” “Nothing works!” became a pithy, emphatic summary of his article’s conclusions. This sensational claim, along with the additional benefit of attempted censorship, apparently was enough to win for Martinson an appearance on the TV show 60 Minutes:

in August of 1975, {Martinson} appeared on 60 Minutes in a segment entitled, “It Doesn’t Work.” Mike Wallace, as the interview proceeds, announces that Martinson’s “findings are sending shockwaves through the correctional establishment”. When probed by Wallace about his research, Martinson offers that various treatment approaches have “no fundamental effect on recidivism”. He depicts parole as “almost a Machiavellian attempt” by offenders “to get out”. Psychological counseling may be a “good way to pass the time,” he admits, but otherwise it has “no effect”. In the end, Wallace is left to ask, “Is it conceivable that nothing works?”. The answer is obvious.^ Cf. ^

Douglas Lipton, the lead author of the study on which Martinson’s article was based, was furious with the media’s treatment of Martinson:

The {60 Minutes} segment made no mention of Martinson colleagues, who had worked on the project far longer than he. (Martinson had worked on the project for about eighteen mongths, according to Lipton.) Nor did it credit them for their research. When the camera showed the title page of the book, the names of his coauthors were cropped out.
This kind of treatment enraged Doug Lipton. … “Everyone kept calling it ‘The Martinson Report,” which it wasn’t. I wrote to 60 Minutes, and I wrote to Newsweek, but nobody wanted to hear what I had to say.”
“I was the voice of reason,” {Lipton} said, “but he was the sound bite.”^

“Nothing works!” attracted those who sought to get tough with prisoners to combat a perceived lack of respect for law and order. “Nothing works!” also attracted those suspicious of state power used for involuntary therapeutic treatment and concerned that indeterminate sentences linked to treatment success created systematic racial, sexual, and class inequities under law.^ A significant constituency also existed under the counterpoint banner, “Treatment works!” As Martinson himself acknowledged in his 1974 article, some treatment programs did work.^ Participants and supporters of those programs, the many persons who sincerely sought to help prisoners and dedicated their lives to doing so, as well as others who just feared job loss, income loss, or loss of intellectual status, all could unite under the banner, “Treatment works!” More than thirty years after Martinson’s articles, this organization of discussion remains deeply influential.^

Communicating with Prisoners

Public Interest Analysis