January 21, 2011 | 10:47 AM | By

Three questions about failure in criminal justice

FILED UNDER: Community, Center for Court Innovation, Joan Petersilia, John Goldkamp, Research, William Bratton

We often hear variations of the word “failure” used in the context of criminal justice. There are our “failed” state prisons that spit out inmates who are much more likely than not to return to prison. The parole department and sheriff’s deputies’ “failure” to monitor Philip Garrido and find the compound housing Jaycee Lee Duggard and their children. If a major crime happens, there’s been failure–failure to protect the public, failure to prepare law enforcement, failure of command staff to anticipate and prepare for a tragedy. The public, the media, and politicians simply do not tolerate failures in systems where the stakes are so high. But does that obsession with high-profile collapses prevent those who make policy decisions from actually correcting what went wrong?

The new book “Daring to Fail” by the Center for Court Innovation takes a look at this idea of failure in criminal justice, but with a twist. The book is a series of interviews with criminal justice luminaries who all, to varying degrees, embrace failure. Embrace it, that is, by changing its definition. To explain what that means, here are a few excerpts that illustrate where the book is going with this whole “daring to fail” thing.

First up, we fear “failure” but what does success actually mean?

“There’s a long history of over-promising and under-delivering that has contributed to the constant pendulum swings in punishment practices.” -Stanford Professor Joan Petersilia

Joan Petersilia, one of the preeminent criminologists in the country and a frequent advisor to those in power, says “failure,” in the sense of media debacle, sometimes happens because law enforcement, prison officials, and those who operate rehabilitation programs oversell their own importance and awesomeness. “There’s nothing in our history of over 100 years of reform,” Petersilia continues, “that says we know how to reduce recidivism by more than 15 or 20 percent. And to achieve those rather modest outcomes, you have to get everything right – the right staff, delivering the right program, at the right time in the offender’s life, and in a supportive community environment. We just have to be more honest about that, and my sense is that we have not been publicly forthcoming because we’ve assumed that we would not win public support with modest results.”

Next, how can we learn from our mistakes if no one’s keeping track of them?

“It’s incredible that our society funds abundant research on things like tooth decay but can’t adequately fund research on public safety.” -Bill Bratton, former chief of the NYPD and most recently, the LAPD.

Bill Bratton, the famous police chief who helped Rudy Giuliani clean up Manhattan (and now, after retiring from the LAPD, is serving a brief time as an advisor to Kamala Harris before moving to the private sector) says police departments are laboratories. And they have to be–they have to respond to what they’re seeing in the field, develop new techniques, and learn instead of limiting themselves to “the way we do things around here.” The problem is, no one’s keeping track of what works and what doesn’t. If the police department is a laboratory, they need a stats person taking results. Otherwise, policy becomes the result of the whims of politics and placating the media and general public. “I think the social and financial pressures will continue to produce short-sighted reform,” Bratton says.
What are the possible pitfalls of depending on science?
“I’ve noticed what’s almost a commercial interest in selling people on research-based models.” -John Goldkamp, professor at Temple University
People are starting to rally around this idea of “evidence-based practices” in criminal justice like never before. Monitoring which sorts of people are likely to reoffend and which are not, analyzing whether certain types of programs result in people not going back to prison, etc. Is there any danger inherent when the phrase “research-based” or “evidence-based” becomes almost a catch phrase? “I’ve been thinking recently about a different way to look at failure,” Goldkamp tells the authors. “Instead of focusing on the specific examples of failure, we should be looking at the examples where a ‘high-risk’ individual didn’t fail. In other words, we classify people as failures at various stages, but lots of them turn out to be quite fine and don’t reoffend. This is a failure of a different kind–when conventional wisdom about risk has misled us. In fact, a commercial classification system for high-risk offenders only gets it right 22 percent of the time. We need to understand what happens with the other 78 percent who are not as high-risk as we though.”

  • Anonymous

    This is a very nice story but it does not apply to California one bit! The problem in California is right in the $$$$dollars$$$$, look at what we spend per inmate and look at what Texas spends…they spend less than us and they have more inmates.

    It makes no sense and for years they have scared us with charles manson to instill fear and we the public would do ANYTHING to protect ourselves. And we did we opened the checkbook, we have NO one looking over them, they have been sucking us dry, the future of our children dry and look at their salaries and look at the performance of those individuals…transferred around from one prison to another because of disciplinary problems most of us would be in jail for if we did at our job and not only do they not get held accountable in our courts, they get promoted with pensions that YOU and I pay for! NOTHING is going to rehabilitation, they are allowing diseases to be spread because they do not even provide soap, cleaners or proper cleaning supplies that is required for such a heavily populated place. They take our money and they can’t even clean the darn showers with soap, with scrubbers, with disinfectant. This one problem has caused MRSA to run rampant in the prisons a deadly disease that is also being spread onto the streets..to you and me! And we pay almost 3.5 times the money to house our inmates than the next state and we cannot even buy soap! And more than 1 inmate is dying per week..no matter what they are in there for we are not a country that can allow this to happen, our government is killing people!

    If the public will just look around, listen to what is happening, read all the articles out there about the department of corrections and start asking questions I guarantee you that it will not take too much tapping for the whole department and many people in our legislature including the governor to all crumble! Scott Kernan the #2 in charge of the whole Dept silently resigned within the last week, and are we seeing a departure from the #1 as well? Why? What is happening in our courts and what is the world starting to find out about what is happening right under our noses? There is also reports of a shakeup at CCPOA headquarters….(those are the union that has created the mess).

    If you let them they will do all of this quietly and what they are so afraid of will never be revealed and the torture and deaths will continue to happen or we can demand that we know why and we demand the media have access and we demand that we gain control over this catastrophe! (2 people died one at mule creek and one at scc in jamestown last week and the public has NOT been notified, the newspapers are unable to get information)

    look for yourself:
    http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/state-284845-corrections-department.html
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0O8TpXY7ds&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

  • Anonymous

    Where a method is working, things improve.
    Recedivism is not improving. Parolee success stories are not improving. Heart-felt pain of victims is not improving. Far too many people are incarcerated and the numbers continue to climb. So more and more people are going into prison (some innocent or charged too harshly) and then coming out worse than when they went in. What will that do to a society… our human race, after so long of this same ole, same ole? Sounds like a preview to a science fiction movie!
    There is plenty of accomplished research out there that proves that our current… archaic methods aren’t working. Berkeley’s Criminal Justice department comes out with them regularly. Namely, stop turning humans into monsters and then letting them back out into public with no hope for a normal, happy life. Public safety is what we make it.
    What we need is a new method of handling what we call crimes. Restributive justice has been run into the ground in more ways than one. There are other methods. And there has not only been research done on the methods themselves, but on them in action. In stead of getting angry at “offenders” and making attempts to ‘get back at them’ for what they’ve allegedly done, Restorative Justice could actually heal the problem that caused an offense in the first place, while making peace between offender and victim (if there is one). Restorative Justice would completely do away with miscarriages of Justice. There would be no more innocents punished, abused, tormented or killed! Nor would there be an imbalance of justice as in cases where some disagree as to the constitutional limit of punishment handed down. It would, in fact, be quite impossible! Think of it – no mistakes, and all parties come out ‘healed’ and at peace – better off than before! It IS possible. It’s happening right now in other countries and is working!
    Where a method is working, things improve. We need to find another method! Restorative Justice gets my vote.

  • Anonymous

    the cali prison system helped create charles manson…..he was born in prison and lived most of his life there. if the will was truly there the situation could be improved greatly. first, free the plant. this would get many nonviolent people out from behind bars & free up space for more serious criminals. abe lincoln may have freed the slaves, but noone told jailers yet because i’d be willing to bet that most of their family pets get treated better than those they imprison. it’s all about the money (& pensions & benifits, etc.) if they were truly interested in rehabilitation it’d happen. if regular folks would take the time to see what’s really going on things would change. most people hide their heads in the sand and believe the bulls**t, figure everyone in prison deserves to be there, and that conditions are like a country club (yeah, maybe for bernie maddox)…..until they or someone close to them goes to prison.