2022 Stockholm Prize Winner calls for a more enlightened U.S. prison system
An address by a 2022 winner of the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology looks to the future of corrections in proposing a more enlightened U.S. prison system. The proposal places prison reform within the Biden Administration’s support for improving infrastructure to establish new prisons that are rational, based on evidence, improve offenders’ lives, and foster a new era of progress in corrections.
The address, delivered in Stockholm in the summer of 2022, appears in Criminology & Public Policy, a publication of the American Society of Criminology. It was written by Francis T. Cullen, distinguished research professor emeritus of criminal justice and senior research associate at the University of Cincinnati. Cullen won the Stockholm Prize for his work on the effectiveness of offender rehabilitation strategies. The prize was established under the aegis of the Swedish Ministry of Justice and with contributions from the Torsten Söderberg Foundation.
“The United States is at a turning point in the history of corrections,” explains Cullen, referring to the end of mass incarceration around 2010. “Prison reform is inhibited by the twin realities that states have limited budgets and prisons are rarely shuttered. We need new thinking to move beyond these restrictions.”
Cullen’s “Build Back Better Prison Experiment” would be funded by the U.S. government in line with the mission of the Biden Administration’s infrastructure plan and result in the building of 10 prisons, each funded at $1 billion. Proposals for the prisons would compete, with states partnering with criminologists and prison experts worldwide as well as with private enterprises to set forth a model for prisons; a panel commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice would select the 10 winners.
Building on the book Enlightenment Now, by the Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Cullen argues that each prison proposal should be rooted in reason and science and should nourish the development of prisoners rather than diminish them. In each prison, every prisoner would have to be engaged every day in an activity (e.g., education, work, treatment) that improves human capital and decreases crime-related risks. A team of researchers commissioned by the Justice Department would conduct an ongoing process and outcome evaluation.
“We have inherited a physical design of prisons and a resulting society of captives that blunt our imagination of alternative possibilities,” says Cullen. “We need to develop new models of the prison that can be shown to be enlightened and then test them experimentally.”
JOURNAL
Criminology & Public Policy
ARTICLE TITLE
The end of American exceptionalism: An enlightened corrections
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
15-Nov-2022
No comments:
Post a Comment