But the neural lessons learned from being trapped in an I-It universe are surely the worst. Survival there demands an amygdala that is set for paranoid hypervigilance, plus a protective emotional distance or outright distrust, and a readiness to fight. We could not design a better environment for fostering criminal instincts.
Are these the best “schools” for a society to be sending people to—most particularly those still in their teens and twenties, who have a full life ahead of them? If they live in such settings for months or years, small wonder so many go back to crime on their release and end up right back in those festering holes.
Instead of relying on approaches that simply breed more criminality, we could take advantage of what “correction” means from the viewpoint of social neuroplasticity, the shaping of brain circuitry through beneficial interactions. A great many of the people in prison are arguably there because of neural deficits in the social brain, like impaired empathy and impulse control.
One neural key to self-control is the array of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex that can inhibit angry impulses from the amygdala. People with a deficit in the OFC are prone to brutality in moments when their violent urges swamp its ability to inhibit them. Our prisons are home to many such criminals. One neural pattern underlying this out-of-control violence appears to be an underactivation in the frontal lobes, often due to violent injuries in childhood.3
This deficit centers on the circuitry running from the OFC to the amygdala—the neural link that forms the brain’s brake on destructive urges.4 People with frontal lobe damage are poor at what psychologists call “cognitive control”: they cannot voluntarily direct their thoughts, especially when swamped with powerful negative feelings.5 This inability renders them helpless to resist the rush of destructive feelings: since their neural brakes are broken, their cruel impulses go unrestrained.
This crucial brain circuit continues to grow and be shaped into a person’s mid-twenties.6 From the neural perspective, during imprisonment society has a choice between strengthening the prisoners’ circuitry for hostility, impulsivity, and violence, or strengthening their circuitry for self-control, thinking before acting, and the very ability to obey the law. Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity in the penal system has been the failure to treat younger prisoners who are still within the window where the social brain remains most plastic. The lessons they learn from day to day in the prison yard leave a profound and lasting imprint on their neural destiny, for better or worse.
At present, it is for the worst. The tragedy is double: not only do we waste that opportunity to help reshape the neural circuitry that can help these young lives get back on track, but we plunge them into a school for criminality. Nationwide, the cumulative lifetime recidivism for prisoners age twenty-five and under—those newest to a criminal career—inevitably runs the highest of any age group.
On any given day, the United States has more than two million people in prison, or 482 inmates per 100,000 residents—one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, followed by Britain, China, France, and Japan.7 The prison population today is seven times larger than it was three decades ago. The costs have risen even more, from around $9 billion in the 1980s to more than $60 billion by 2005; prison costs are the fastest-growing expenses for states, behind health care. The relentless increase in the number of inmates in American prisons has created a population explosion that has jails dangerously overcrowded and states and counties like Kalamazoo scrambling to find ways to pay for them.
More compelling than the economic costs are the human ones: once a person is caught up in the prison system, the odds that he will escape its gravitational pull are abysmally low. Two-thirds of those released from American prisons are arrested again within three years.8
Such were the raw realities contemplated by those concerned citizens of Kalamazoo. By the end of their day of retreat, they had found common cause: “to make Kalamazoo the safest, most just, community in the United States.” Toward that end they scoured the country to find out what works: approaches that actually lowered the rate of return to prison, or had other concrete benefits, and the hard data to show it.
The result is a rarity, an evidence-based plan for turning lives around, in large part by restoring the connective tissue that links people in trouble to those who care what happens to them.9 The Kalamazoo group’s proposal spans efforts to prevent crimes in the first place, use prison time fruitfully, and reintegrate those released into a web of relationships that will help them stay out of jail.
The first guiding principle is that supportive connections prevent crime—and those connections must start in the neighborhoods where young people most at risk for crime live.
CONNECTED COMMUNITIES
In a down-and-out neighborhood on Boston’s South Side, a vacant lot has been turned into a community garden, where neighbors gather each spring and summer to tend cabbage, kale, and tomatoes. On the fence a hand-painted sign reads: “Please respect our efforts.”
This small message of hope calls for a willingness to help out a neighbor. Will a group of teens loitering on a corner be allowed to intimidate a smaller child walking by? Or will an adult tell them to disperse, perhaps even call their parents? Respect and caring make the difference, as they do between an abandoned, garbage-strewn lot frequented by drug dealers and a shared vegetable garden.10
In the mid-1990s a coalition of black ministers took to the stoops and corners in Boston’s toughest neighborhoods to engage the kids hanging out on the streets and bring them into after-school programs led by local adults. The murder rate in Boston plunged from 151 in 1991 to just 35 ten years later—just as it did in other cities across the country.
During the 1990s a nationwide decline in crime rates was largely attributed to the economic boom. But apart from such broad forces, the question remains: can weaving people together, as those black ministers did, in itself help reduce crime on a given block? The answer to this street-level question has come from the largest analysis of community involvement and crime yet done, a ten-year study headed by psychiatrist Felton Earls of Harvard. It suggests that the answer is a strong yes.
With a research group, Earls made videotapes of 1,408 blocks of street life in 196 Chicago neighborhoods, including the poorest and most crime-ridden. They documented everything from church bake sales to drug deals. The tapes were compared with crime records for those same neighborhoods, as well as with interviews from 8,782 neighborhood residents.11
The Earls group found two primary influences on a neighborhood’s crime rate. The first is the neighborhood’s overall level of poverty: high poverty rates have long been known to hike crime (as does illiteracy, another hidden factor). The second is the degree of connection among the people in a community. The mix of poverty and disconnection, in tandem, exert a stronger influence over an area’s crime rates than the standard factors usually cited, including race, ethnic background, or family structure.
Even in the poorest neighborhoods, Earls found, positive personal connections were associated not just with lower crime rates but also with less drug use among young people, fewer unwanted teen pregnancies, and a rise in children’s academic performance. Many low-income African-American communities have strong mutual-help traditions, through churches and extended families. Earls sees extending this neighbor-helping-neighbor spirit as a fruitful crime-fighting strategy.12
If a local group cleans graffiti off the walls, future graffiti will likely be less than if the city’s work crew comes in and cleans the walls. A neighborhood crime watch means the local kids have the security of knowing that caring eyes are on them. In the world’s impoverished neighborhoods, that attitude counts most when it comes to neighbors acting to protect one another and most especially each other’s children.
NO MORE STINKING THINKING
The son of an old friend—I’ll call him Brad—became a binge drinker in his teen years, and when drunk he all too readily became combative and even violent. This be
havior had led to a series of brushes with the law, until finally he was sentenced to prison for seriously hurting a classmate in a fight in his college dorm.
When I visit Brad in prison, he tells me, “No matter what the charge, basically all the guys are in here because of a bad temper.” He was fortunate to have been assigned to a special pilot program for prisoners who show some promise for changing their ways. Those living in this six-cell special unit get a daily seminar on topics such as telling the difference between actions based on “creative thinking, stinking thinking, or no thinking.”
In the rest of the prison, fights and posturing to intimidate are the order of the day. Brad’s challenge, he knows, will be to learn to manage his anger in a social world where violence and toughness determine one’s place in the hierarchy of the jailyard. That world, he tells me, is based on an us-versus-them paranoia, in which anyone in a uniform is “the enemy,” as is anyone who works with them.
“All these guys are easily pissed off, irritated at the least little thing. And they settle any disagreement by fights. But in my program you don’t have to live that way.”
Still, Brad has had his hassles. “There was this one kid, about my age, who came into our program. He was continually taunting and ridiculing me, always ragging on me. He made me really mad—but I didn’t let my anger take over. At first I would just walk away. But he would follow me wherever I went, always in my face. Then I told him he was just being stupid and that it didn’t matter to me what he said. But he kept at it, relentlessly.
“Finally, I let myself feel my anger enough so I could yell at him. I stood my ground—I screamed in his face, telling him how stupid he was. Then we were just glaring at each other. It looked like we were going to get in a fight.
“The way you have a fight here is to go into a cell together and lock the door behind you. That way the guards don’t see you. You fight until one guy gives up, and then you come out. So we went into my cell and locked the door. But I didn’t want to fight. I just said to him, ‘If you want to go ahead and take a punch at me, do it now. I’ve been hit lots of times—I can take it. But I’m not going to fight you.’
“He didn’t punch me. We ended up talking for an hour or two. He told me what he was all about, and I told him what I was all about. The next day he was transferred out of our unit. But when I see him in the yard now, he doesn’t hassle me anymore.”
Brad’s program typifies those that the Kalamazoo task force identified as best for young offenders. Teens incarcerated for aggressive offenses who go through similar training programs—where they learn to stop and think before reacting, to consider solutions and the consequence of different responses, and to stay coolheaded—get in fewer fights and are less impulsive and inflexible.13
But unlike my young friend, most prisoners never get to correct the habits and circumstances that keep them trapped in the cycle of release, relapse, and prison again. Since only a minority of released prisoners avoid being sent back to prison, the term used for this system, “corrections,” seems a tragic misnomer: nothing gets corrected.
Instead, for the most part prisons are colleges for crime, strengthening an inmate’s predilection and skill sets for criminality. Younger prisoners make the very worst kind of connections in prison, typically becoming mentored by more seasoned inmates, so that on their release they are hardened, angry, and endowed with greater skills as criminals.14
The circuits of the social brain for empathy and for regulating emotional impulses—perhaps the two most glaring deficiencies among the prison population—are among the last parts of the human brain to gain anatomical maturity. A tally of prisoners in state and federal facilities shows that about one quarter are under the age of twenty-five—not too late to nudge these circuits into a more law-abiding pattern.15 Careful evaluation of present-day prison rehabilitation programs has found that those targeting juvenile offenders are among the most successful in preventing a return to crime.16
Those programs might become more effective by borrowing methods from the many well-proven school-based courses in social and emotional learning.17 These courses teach basic lessons like managing anger and conflicts, empathy, and self-management. In schools, these programs have reduced the number of fights by 69 percent, bullying by 75 percent, and harassment by 67 percent.18 The question is how well these efforts could be adapted for use with a teenage or twenty-something prison population (or conceivably even older inmates).19
The prospect of reinventing prison to offer a remedial neural education is an intriguing point of leverage for society. To the extent that such programs for first-time offenders and young criminals spread, the number of prisoners nationwide will certainly fall as the years go on. Keeping the youngest criminals from embarking on a continued life of crime will do much to dry up the human rivers that now swell our prisons.
An exhaustive analysis of the 272,111 prisoners released from U.S. correctional facilities in 1994 found that over their criminal careers, they had been arrested for a total of nearly 4,877,000 crimes—an average of more than seventeen criminal charges each. And those were only the crimes they had been charged with.20
With the right corrective, that lifetime tally might well have ended right toward the beginning. But the odds now are that first-time offenders will go on to a career in crime, adding inexorably to their toll of lawbreaking as the years go on.
When I was young, we used to call juvenile prisons “reform schools.” They actually could be such if they were designed as learning environments that enhance the skills people need to stay out of jail: not only literacy and job training (and placement), but self-awareness, self-control, and empathy. If they were, we could make prison a place where neural habits are literally re-formed—“reform” schools in the deepest sense.
As for Brad, when I checked two years later, he had gone back to college and was supporting himself with a bussing job in a fancy restaurant.
He had been living in a house with some of his old friends from high school. But as he told me, “They weren’t at all serious about school—they were just into getting drunk and fighting. So I chose to move out.” He moved in with his father and kept focused on his studies.
Although it meant losing some old friends, he says, “I have no regrets. I’m happy.”
STRENGTHENING CONNECTIONS
Early one morning in June 2004 a fire ravaged the Mood’s Covered Bridge, long a landmark in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When the arsonists were arrested two months later, the community was shocked.
The six young men were well-known graduates of the local high school, all from “good” families. People were puzzled and outraged; the whole community felt victimized, robbed of a precious link to a more idyllic time.
At a meeting of townspeople with the six arsonists, one of the boys’ fathers expressed his anger at strangers who had attacked him and his son in local media. But he also admitted, when asked how his son’s crime had affected him, that he thought about it constantly, couldn’t sleep, and felt his stomach was in knots. And then, overcome, he wept.
As they listened to the pain expressed by their family and their neighbors, the young men were distraught and contrite. They apologized, and said they wished they could undo what they had done.21
The meeting was an exercise in “restorative justice,” which holds that in addition to punishment, criminals should face the emotional aftermath of what they have done and make amends where possible.22 The Kalamazoo plan puts special emphasis on restorative justice among the active ingredients in effective crime-fighting.
In such programs, mediators often arrange for some way the criminal can repair the specific damage done—whether by making payments, by hearing about the crime from the victim’s point of view, or by apologizing with genuine remorse. In the words of the manager of one such program in a California prison, “The victim impact sessions are very emotional. For many men it’s the first time they get the connection between their crime and the victim.”
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br /> Emarco Washington was one of those California men. As a teenager, he had been addicted to crack, resorting to robbery and assault to support his habit. He was especially abusive to his mother when she would not give him money for drugs. By thirty, he had served time almost every year since he was a teen.23
After going through restorative justice programs—combined with training in violence reduction—in the San Francisco jail, Washington did something different on his release: he called his mother and apologized. “I told her I had been angry when she wouldn’t give me money before, but the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt her. It was like a rain washing over me. That told me if I changed my behavior, my language, I could prove to myself and to others I wasn’t a bad seed.”
The emotional subtext of restorative justice urges offenders to change their perception of their victims from It to You—to awaken empathy. Many crimes by young people are committed while they are drunk or high; in a sense the victims don’t exist for the perpetrators; nor do the youth have any sense of responsibility for hurting people. By forging an empathic link between the perpetrator and the victim, restorative justice adds to the circle of connection that can be so powerful in turning a young life around.
The Kalamazoo group identified another important turning point: that perilous moment when a young prisoner returns home. Without intervention, it’s all too easy for young people to slip back into their old groups, their old habits—and more often than not, jail again.
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