The Effectiveness of Parole - Coursework Example

Running Head: PAROLE RESEARCH The Effectiveness of Parole The Effectiveness of Parole Introduction In order to understand the way in which an inmate faces their life after parole, it must first be understood how the culture of prison changes an individual. The culture of prison life provides for learned socialization that becomes a part of the way in which the individual responds to the world, just as acculturation within any type of society will create perspectives and beliefs about life. Because structures in different states have often unique frameworks within which the idea of parole is created, it is also essential to understand what it means, on a general basis, to be placed in the parole system. As well, it is important to understand how an inmate qualifies for parole and under what circumstances the state is motivated to release an inmate before they have served their sentence. The measure against which to determine whether parole is a successful method of deterring criminal activity is by examining recidivism. Essentially, parole is successful if parolees commit fewer crimes after release than those who serve out their full sentence. Defining Parole Parole is a method of reducing the time a prisoner serves with the agreement that no further criminal activity will occur because the prisoner has learned how to behave properly within society, rather than living on the outside of societal expectations. Law is basically a structure within which individuals within a society are given frameworks on how to live their lives. Rights and privileges are given structure so that how people interact with each other is both acceptable and considered fair. When a person behaves or commits acts that are against those structures, punishment is met out by the society which in the case of the worst offenses will most often be incarceration. Understanding what it means to have committed a crime is essential in understanding what it means to be released on parole. According to the National Research Council (2007), the goals of parole are to protect the community. However, how this is accomplished can be viewed from a wide variety of perspectives. Some parole boards will see their duties as defined by supervision that includes “surveillance, control, and regulation of their client’s behaviors” (National Research Council, 2007, np). Other boards will determine that their role in the client’s life is to help find and provide treatment and reintegration services to ease them back into society (National Research Council, 2007). Culture determines how a parole behaves. A parole board will follow the trends of the society and culture in which they serve, the recent overall shift towards crime control, as an example, will affect the treatment/reintegration culture type of board negatively, while the higher control type board will be more deeply supported (National Research Council, 2007). The conflict of the parole board is that “they don’t know whether they are expected to be law enforcement agents or social caseworkers” (National Research Council, 2007, np). The parole system is responsible for both enforcing the law and serving the parolees as they begin to reintegrate into society, so their focus is split between goals. The problems that this leaves for parole officers can seem overwhelming. Alarid and Del (2011) describe the job of the parole officer by saying that, “the best the officers can do is to follow department policy, follow the orders of the court or the parole board, and justify their actions with accurate paperwork” (p. 150). It might be taken into consideration that as the members of the parole processed are often conflicted; the parolees would also find their position to be somewhat confusing. As much as there are conflicts about the way in which to administrate parole, the role of parole in society does not seem to conform to the mandates by which it is framed. The first inequity within the system is that it violates any sense of equality between sentences for different offenders committing the same crime. Punishment is not the mandate for the parole system, nor is it treatment. While these cultures of parole exist, the true nature of parole is to earn release through giving information to the parole that satisfies them that when released, the prisoner has accepted guilt and felt remorse. Since these are intangible qualities of an individual’s experience, the accuracy of this information cannot be appropriately judged. In other words, parole is about communication through action and words that suggest some sort of rehabilitation (Simon, 1993). However, rehabilitation cannot be thoroughly assessed until the prisoner has reintegrated into society in a meaningful and contributing way. The job of the parole system is to believe in the future of an inmate and to monitor whether or not he or she is living up to that belief in their potential. This is a daunting ambition for a system that is overburdened and rife with political shades that shift the foundation of the cultural beliefs that rule that system. Prison Life Just as the position of the parole board is defined by the culture in which they are serving, the culture of a prison is just as unique and defined, creating a new system of beliefs and thought processes to which a prisoner will have to adapt. Spitale (2002), who has written both from the perspective of having served time in prison and from having reintegrated back into society, states emphatically that “prison is another culture. It has its own code of ethics, its own mores and social values” (p. x). He goes on to say “It is a mindset, a backdrop that swallows up the inhabitants by degrees and conforms them to the twists and weaves of its cold, grey fabric” (Spitale, 2002, p. xi). He describes the experience as having such a strong feeling that it never leaves the subconscious, often appearing in his dreams (Spitale, 2002). What accompanies that feeling is a sense of familiarity as the rules and social dynamics are so clear and so precise that those who are released often do not feel quite right in regular society. The feeling of being anti-social is more comfortable, thus it leads to further crimes that they know will lead to incarceration (Spitale, 2002). According to Siegel (2010), Donald Clemmer did work identifying and explaining the emergence of prison culture and the way in which it affected the individual in regard to their inside and outside life. Inside the prison, an acculturation of prison life was defined by Clemmer as what he termed prisonization. This meant that the inmate was assimilating into the culture of prison through an “acceptance of its language, sexual code, and norms of behavior” (Siegel, 2010, p. 612). The bad news that Clemmer discovered, however, is that “those who became the most ‘prisonized’ will be the least likely to reform on the outside” (Siegel, 2010, p. 612). This means that the prisoner is in a difficult position in which survival on the inside might lead to an inability to reintegrate. As the prison experience has been designed so that the structures are extremely different to those of the outside, society suffers because it is clear that some prisoners will never be able to re-adapt to the world that they were forced out of through the experience of prison. The structure inside the prison environment has developed so that the ‘law’ that prevails is enforced by those who accumulate power within the framework of their peers. Violations of those laws are defined by those who gather power, and those that gather power do so by garnering fear in their peers. The fear of peers is the basis of the structure that has been established within the prison system. Groups are built around belief systems which are based on ethnicity, politics, criminality, or sexual behaviors. Sexual behavior becomes a part of that power struggle where prisoners find themselves dominated by rape, their position in the structure not through sexual attraction, but by the ability to force their will in what might be considered the worst possible way upon another inmate. Therefore the ‘law’ of the prison is enforced by peers, their lives given structure through violence, force, and fear (Siegel, 2010). As a way of understanding the nature of prison life and the way in which it can reach into the future of the individual after their release, it is interesting to examine the nature of one prison gang. The Aryan Brotherhood was born within the prison system and is the most powerful gang operating within the United States. Unlike other gangs, this gang will extend invitations to members that they believe will serve their purposes. Other gangs will recruit in order to increase their numbers, but the Aryan Brotherhood will extend invitations if a prisoner shows them there is a good reason for them to bring them into the fold. This proof is not always intended, but if invited in it is likely that the prisoner should accept that invitation on threat of violence which may be committed on themselves or on members of their family on the outside. Once in the group, they are in for life whether they are in prison or on the outside. Gangs that are prison based are not limited to operations within the prison, thus the prison culture extends beyond the time served (Williams, 2006). The nature of prison life influences far more than just the punishment of time taken from a life for a crime committed. Life in prison becomes a defining experience that changes an individual through forced acculturation into a society in which violence and fear rule daily life. Moving from this society into the outside world can be a difficult and challenging event. As shown by the example of the Aryan Brotherhood, those inside the prison can continue to influence life outside of the prison. When a prisoner is released, the continuation of influences from within the prison can make returning to a law-abiding life difficult as threats from those one has associated with continue to put pressure on actions towards integrating into the outside world. Parole To examine the effectiveness of parole, it is best to first understand how an inmate qualifies for parole and why parole is considered by society. One of the most effective uses of parole is to help in controlling behaviors within prison. When a prisoner knows they can get out earlier through good behavior, they are less likely to act in ways that will jeopardize their early release. When truth-in-sentencing laws were enacted in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the consequences was that the prison experienced a rise in violence as the lack of discretionary release options provided for a lack of the incentive to exhibit good behavior during their time in prison. These laws have been passé din more than forty states which require inmate to serve at least half of their sentences with twenty-seven states requiring those who are in for violent offenses to serve at least 85% of their sentence. However, without the incentive to behave, inmates have no reason to provide obedience in exchange for time off of their sentence, therefore the consequences of such laws are worse than state constructed incentives (Stack, 2006, p. 181). The statistical result of these laws is that in 1990 39% of all prisoners in the United States were released on parole, while in 1998 only 26% of all prisoners were released on parole. Another problem with the lack of parole is that prisoners are more often serving their full terms, but instead of the punishment being met with some sort of supervision as they try to reintegrate back into society, they are released without any sort of monitoring or supervision. These means that the culture that was learned inside the prison has not had any counter measures applied to help them back into society, nor has it been assessed whether or not the prisoner will be able to function outside of the prison. The prisoner is left unattended and with a complete new adaptation to social settings learned inside the prison that are not always congruent with life outside. Therefore, the criteria for parole not only is affective for determining whether or not the inmate deserves parole, but also contributes to controls while the prisoner is in prison, as well as controlling how they behave during their integration back into society. What the prisoner must show to the parole board is that they deserve a chance on the outside, gained through participating in programs as appropriate to their crime and their future, earned rewards in regard to good behavior, and their remorse about their crime. Additional levels of criteria are determined on a state by state basis, each system having its own structures. The core of the system, however, provides both control and services that allow the best possible outcome for the prisoner and for society as that prisoner is released back into the community (Champion, 1994). Recidivism According to research done by Smeeding, Garfinkel, Mincy, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2011), “A large body of criminological research consistently finds that nearly two-thirds of ex-inmates are re-arrested within a few years of release from prison” (p. 208). Men who are in prison are primarily in the early years of their life. Having spent five years of their early twenties in prison decreases the number of years they have spent working and accumulating knowledge about the culture of work (Smeeding et al, 2011). Therefore, one of the goals of parole is to help those who have not experienced work in their adult formative years to find ways in which to integrate as contributing members of society. However, the stigmatism that comes from being an ex-convict can often prevent successful integration. According to May (2008), 2005 records on recidivism among parolees occurred at a rate of 55% during parole, with 38% re-entering the system through new crimes and parole violations and 14.8 percent doing something that did not result in re-incarceration, but was noted and some form of official action was taken (May, 2008, p. 460). This means that parole was not effective in 55% of the time, thus only 45% of all parolees can be considered a success story. The overall rate of recidivism is at 48% which means that the rate is higher among parolees, but this might be due to the idea that parolees are closely monitored, thus they do not get away with actions that other who are not monitored are committing (Maxville & Babble, 2009, p. 79). Conclusion While the rate of recidivism is not encouraging the effects of parole on the behavior of prisoners within the prison system, as well as the monitoring of behavior after prison is an encouragement towards the parole programs. Parole is designed to either control behavior or treat inmates for integration, with the ideal being somewhere in the middle. The objectives of the parole board are defined by the culture of the prison system in a specific area, thus creating conflicts between the law enforcement and social services duties of a parole system. However, it is clear that the intent of parole is to assert social control over prisoners while they are in prison to reform them towards being able to reintegrate into society and live with the laws of society. The nature of the culture of prison makes this a difficult task; however it is clear that the prisoner will have to overcome the culture of prison life in order to continue forward into a more successful life. The strength of prison culture is clear as so few actually make it on the outside, but the goal of trying to reform those who have acted within society in such a way to deserve punishment into people that are active and contributing within the culture of freedom is a worthwhile pursuit. Therefore, parole does not show a raving review of success, but it does provide for much needed social controls both inside and outside of the prison. The effectiveness of parole is in giving hope where little hope exists so that behavior reflects a belief in the future. References Alarid, L. F., & Del, C. R. V. (2011). Community-based corrections. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Champion, D. J. (1994). Measuring offender risk: A criminal justice sourcebook. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. Maxville, M. V. & Babble, E. (2009). Basics of research methods for criminal justice and criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. May, D. C. (2008). Corrections and the criminal justice system. Sudbury, Mass: Jones and Bartlett Pub. National Research Council (U.S.). (2007). Parole, desistance from crime, and community integration. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press. Siegel, L. J. (2010). Introduction to criminal justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. Simon, J. (1993). Poor discipline: Parole and the social control of the underclass, 1890-1990. Chicago, Ill: Univ. of Chicago. Smeeding, T. M., Garfinkel, I., Mincy, R. B., & American Academy of Political and Social Science. (2011). Young disadvantaged men: Fathers, families, poverty, and policy. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Spitale, L. (2002). Prison ministry: Understanding prison culture inside and out. Nashville, Tenn: Broadman & Holman Publishers. Stack, R. A. (2006). Dead wrong: Violence, vengeance, and the victims of capital punishment. Westport, Conn: Praeger. Williams, G. (2006). Siege in Lucasville. Bloomington, Ind: Rooftop. Read More