Incapacitation What Is the Difference

Incapacitation

What is the difference between collective and selective incapacitation?

Collective incapacitation involves increasing the severity of the sentencing for those who are convicted of a specific crime. It is reportedly a way to reduce crime by punishing the offender based on the crime committed. The more serious the crime, the more sever the sentence that is generally imposed. And two offenders that have both committed the same crime will receive identical sentences. Selective incapacitation, on the other hand, entails a policy of basing sentencing decisions on the basis of what individual offenders have done. For example, if a person is seen as a career criminal based on all the arrests and convictions, even though that person has committed the exact same crime as a first time offender (armed robbery, for example), the career criminal, under selective incapacitation, would serve a longer sentence.

A good example of selective incapacitation is the popularity of the "three strikes" strategy -- on your third offense, they throw the book at you. The premise of selective incapacitation is an attempt to fight recidivism (repeat crimes by the same person, who gets out of prison only to be arrested again; he hasn't learned from his incarceration); selective incapacitation attempts to keep those with the greatest risk of repeating crimes behind bars.

In Wilson's piece he references Christy Visher's definition of collective incapacitation ("mandatory minimum sentences") but adds some sarcasm and color to it. "The main benefit of collective incapacitation is that it does not care if low-rate offenders are kept in prison for lengthy periods of time," Wilson explains, because "That cost it worth it…" And moreover, when low-rate offenders "…remain endlessly behind bars," it costs "enormous sums of money to pay for prison cells that are not giving us much crime savings." America is putting these low-rate offenders behind bars under collective incapacitation because it will keep them from doing "what they might do in the future." As to selective incapacitation, if only 6% or 18% of offenders are chronically committing "serious crime" (committing 60% of the crime, according to a Los Angeles Times' story referenced by Wilson), then by selectively incapacitating those people, society takes their risky behaviors off the street. Then the less serious offenders should, logic tells Wilson, get short sentences.

How large is the incapacitation effect? In Wilson's narrative (Chapter 5), he mentions that 2.4 million offenders are currently incarcerated / incapacitated in American prisons. The theory of incarceration, Wilson quotes Cullen and Johnson, is "When in doubt, America incarcerates" but "other nations tend not to do so." And even though the United States is a far smaller country than China in terms of population, the U.S. incarcerates "roughly 750,000 more individuals than China," and about 1.5 million more than Russia does. In broad terms, the U.S. has only 5% of the population of the world but the U.S. has locked up 25% of the 9 million individuals that are in prisons worldwide.

Due to this imbalance of imprisoned offenders, America should use imprisonment "more judiciously," Wilson explains. Moreover, the policy in place simply takes criminals off the street so they cannot victimize innocent people, but the policy doesn't change offenders, it just places them in prisons. In other words, stop crime by putting offenders where they can't commit crimes. According to Wilson's narrative, the answer to this question -- "Has the prison experiment been a success or a failure?" -- is that it has been a dismal failure. Not only are 2.4 million criminals in prison at this time, 4.2 million offenders are on probation -- and 20% of those on probation were convicted of a violent crime. About 50% of those 4.2 million offenders on probation are felons that had good lawyers or otherwise we able to get their charges reduced by plea bargaining.