Sarasota’s own answer to crime reduction

The most intractable problem of crime is that of repeat offenders. Most offenders will return to crime after serving a prison sentence for being caught the first time. Solving that is no easy task, but right here in Sarasota, an impressive nonprofit organization called Project 180 is showing it can be done.

Our justice system today works on the assumption that punishment deters crime. You do a crime, you get caught, you go to prison, it is terrible, so you don’t do crime again. And since you know that is what will happen, you think twice, or thrice, about committing crime in the first place. 

The problem is that the data clearly shows things do not work that way. The U.S. Department of Justice points out that:

Being imprisoned doesn’t convince most people to avoid crime, and once imprisoned, many have less fear of going back to prison.

The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful a deterrent than the severity of punishment, even very long sentences, and most offenders know little about what the punishments for specific crimes are. 

Policing policies that increase the perception that offenders are likely to be caught reduce crime more than does punishment.

You can see the truth of this is some basic numbers. In any given year in Florida about half of the people sent to prison have been to prison before. Or look at it another way. Each year offenders are out of prison the odds they will commit new crimes and go back to prison goes up. Almost 85% will be back in prison within a decade of getting out from their first sentence. 

So, locking people up is not an effective way to reduce crime, yet for the most part, that is all our justice system currently does. And this imposes huge costs on us all. Each time the system fails, and an offender goes back to crime after their prison sentence, it imposes a range of costs on the rest of us:

1. The costs to the new victims of their crime, not just the value of any goods stolen but also the personal cost of violence and/or disruption of life.
2. Costs of police to catch them, the courts to try them and the jails to hold them during the process. 
3. Cost of imprisoning for the new sentence to be served.
4. The loss to the economy from the offender not being productive.

A detailed study in Illinois calculated that in Illinois the costs for each new offense by a reoffender of item one is $57,418, items two and three at $40,987, and item three at $20,432. In other words the cost of recidivism per offender in Illinois is about $120,000, and that is likely very similar in Florida. The most recent estimate for Florida is that it costs $77.53 per day just for item three above, to house an inmate in a state prison. The Council of State Governments estimates Florida spends over $313 million per year just to imprison individuals who violate terms of release (parole) without even doing another crime! 

Changing the beat

The single most effective thing we can do with in the criminal justice system to reduce crime and its costs is to reduce recidivism. That is easier said than done. The reasons why offenders go back to crime are many. But some efforts to turn offenders’ lives around and help them avoid going back to crime have worked, and a great example is right here in Sarasota.

Project 180 is a local charity that provides a live-in program for individuals released from prison to the Sarasota area. Barbara Richards, the saint who created and runs Project 180, has devoted her life to solving the problem of helping people turn away from crime. 

It would take a short book to fully explain their approach, but I am going to give the essence of it here. I heartily recommend checking out their website and their public programs and learning more about them. 

All successful programing for former offenders recognizes that incarceration completely disrupts the life of the offender, and it is a huge challenge for them to get back to normal life. It is very hard for them to find a place to live, a job, get a car or transportation, to live a normal and stable life, to fight off the addiction to drugs or alcohol that most of them have and resist temptation, and to avoid the situations and people that surrounded them when they turned to crime in the first place. 

For each offender this requires a very personalized, hands-on program of assistance — each one of them will have different strength of needs and priorities from the list in the previous paragraph. For the staff at Project 180, combining the right help for each person is the key to success. 

To provide a foundation for the very personalized help that each individual who lives in the Project 180 homes and programs, they focus on six pillars of stability.

Recovery — addiction to drugs or alcohol is a near universal problem for ex-offenders and starting the lifelong process of recovery is mandatory.

1. Housing —Living in a conventional house in a conventional neighborhood, avoiding homelessness and loneliness, cooperating with roommates and participating socially are all important.
2. Employment — Getting a full-time job that is a career not just a job.
3. Relationships — Rebuilding with family, developing friendships, participating in groups, organizations and community.
4. Finances — Paying each month to help with housing and programs, learning about financial management.
5. Health care — Meeting medical and mental health needs.

It is easy to see why those are the pillars of stability in Project 180’s program — a disruption of any one of those is the kind of thing that destabilizes someone’s life and can lead to a spiral out of control and possibly back to crime. 

And that list simplifies all the Project 180 does. The details of helping each individual are full of particulars that meet that person’s specific needs. And things like helping to get driver’s licenses, or education, or group recreation and social events in the community all matter as well. 

This sounds intense, but it works. As the accompanying figure shows, the average Florida offender has a 49% chance of committing a new crime and going back to prison in their first year out of prison. For those who got into Project 180’s program that chance is 14%. A more than two-thirds reduction in first-year recidivism is a very impressive result. 

So three cheers to Project 180. Let’s hope they can continue to grow and that many more programs like it emerge around Florida and the nation. It won’t solve all crime, and it won’t prevent all recidivism. But our current system is a disaster of recidivism and return to crime and prison, and this is an vital part of breaking that cycle and reducing a lot of crime in our society.