News
Letter: Incarceration Is Not the Answer
|
For generations, Americans have struggled with what to do with people of all ages who are convicted of crimes. When crime rises, it is very easy to seek a sense of safety in the building of prisons and filling them to the brim. When young people allegedly offend, there is often a knee-jerk reaction to drop the heavy hammer of penal law upon their heads.
This publication’s November 19, 2020 piece titled ‘New Canaan Police Commissioner Pushes for Hardline Prosecution of Car Thieves’ illustrates the oversimplification of this very complex topic. Quotes attributed to one of New Canaan’s Police Commissioners and the town’s police chief typify the many-decades-old perspective that calls for more immediate, harsher penalties for young offenders. In New Canaan’s most recent experience, young offenders are alleged to be stealing cars with keys kept in the interior of the very same unlocked cars. The idea that young people should be imprisoned for such offenses and suffer quickly imposed and harsh sentences flies in the face of what well-informed criminal justice experts, sociologists, psychologists and educators understand; incarcerating young people for automobile theft is not effective for the present, nor, very importantly, for future generations. Incarcerating young people for non-violent crimes not only is ineffective in preventing future crime, but may in fact, increase the risk of recidivism.