Francis Cullen is a Professor at the University of Cincinnati's Division of Criminal Justice and the author of several books on criminal rehabilitation and criminological theory.
How openly is failure discussed in criminal justice circles?
We fail a lot more than we succeed, but there’s an immense amount of effort dedicated to avoiding knowledge about failure. In medicine, there’s a much clearer professional ethic that says, you ought not do things that cause harm. Covering up failure in medicine would be seen as unethical, but you don’t have a corresponding sense of ethics in criminal justice.
Why does such a stark difference exist in the willingness of the medical and criminal justice fields to admit to failure?
There are a number of factors, but one is that we haven’t wanted to pay more to professionalize the field of criminal justice. For example, you can walk into a juvenile justice facility and deliver cognitive behavioral treatment with little or no training. That’s not true in other fields. Also, there’s a hubris that people have in the system where they think they know things that they don’t. Many judges who get to sentence people and make judgments about a person’s risk of re-offending have never had a criminology class in their life. What’s missing is a sense of professional accountability – the idea that people get together in a profession to try and do things the right way.
So what happens in the absence of this kind of professional accountability?
We end up with programs that are completely detached from what we know about the causes of crime. A successful intervention starts out with an understanding of why crime occurs, and then targets those factors. Many criminal justice interventions, however, invent the cure before you know what the problem is. Programs like boot camps and intensive supervision sound good and make sense intuitively, but they’re not based on a shred of criminological evidence. Why do people think they can prevent crime without reading anything about the causes of crime? In medicine, we would call that snake oil salesmanship. But take boot camps – we probably ended up spending $1 billion on boot camps, only to learn that they had no effect, and perhaps a small negative effect, on recidivism. There’s a real opportunity cost there, because the money spent on boot camps could have been spent on more effective programs. If you don’t apply the science, you’re almost certainly going to fail, but being anti-science is almost part of a professional orientation in criminal justice.
What impact does this kind of routine failure have?
It’s huge, and it’s not just about the offenders whose lives were not improved because of bad programs. There are also the public safety impacts of doing programs unprofessionally. Why do we tolerate a recidivism rate of 40 to 60 percent among people who are leaving prison? How many people are getting victimized because of that? We’re worried about public schools that have 50 percent drop out rates, why shouldn’t we be concerned about prisons that have 50 percent re-arrest rates? There’s not a warden in the world who gets blamed for that kind of failure.
How do we change that?
It’s hard. One problem is knowledge dissemination. Even when you have the science, how do you deliver it to people who want it? There are people in my department who travel across the country making presentations, and they can barely keep up with the demand. We also grossly under-finance research on offenders. There are only about 25 longitudinal studies of offenders that track behavior over a long period of time, while in medicine there must be over 100,000. So we know a lot about heart ailments and what causes heart attacks, but we know very little about what causes crime. The money we spend goes into controlling crime, not understanding it.
What’s your view of the legacy of Robert Martinson, who was famous for saying in the 1970s that “nothing works” to rehabilitate offenders?
Most people have never read Martinson’s work. He didn’t say that nothing works. Instead, what he argued was that there was no one type of rehabilitative intervention that works all the time. The reason the study received so much attention – and got interpreted as concluding that nothing works – is that the time was ripe for his message. You have to remember that at the time, both conservatives and liberals didn’t like rehabilitation, albeit for different reasons. Conservatives thought it meant judges were soft on crime, and liberals were convinced that judges were abusing their discretion with rehabilitative programs. The silver lining was that Martinson brought into focus the idea of effectiveness. He brought criminal justice into an empirical realm and in the long run, opened the door for evidence-based practice.
Is it possible that we expect too much from the criminal justice system?
Oh, yes. The first error we make is the idea that the system is the main producer of crime. The truth is that it has only a marginal effect. Crime has much more to do with other factors like biology and poverty. We also know that there are lots of people committing crime who are not even in the criminal justice system. David Farrington did a study where he estimated that for every arrest, an individual commits 82 crimes. Still, it’s fair to ask: of those people who do come into the criminal justice system, are we doing what we should be doing?