CRIME: "People want to be safe, and people want policies that are effective.... Right now, we're just getting the worst of everything.".

• Author: Burgess, Phil
• Position: LAW & JUSTICE

STREET CRIME is increasing. Rehabilitation is not working. The revolving door called recidivism--from prison to freedom and back to prison after repeated law-breaking and reconviction--is on the rise.

According to the National Institute of Justice, "Recidivism affects everyone: the offender[s], their family, the victim of the crime, law enforcement, and the community overall. . . . Furthermore, taxpayers are impacted by the economic cost of crime." Indeed, the per prisoner annual cost of incarceration in the U.S. now ranges from $35 JOOO to $ 100/JOO.

The system is broken. Tough, inflexible, mandatory sentencing rooted in the 1990s has given way to a soft-on-crime approach with refusals to prosecute and "no bail" arrests now in the ascendency. This policy shift ignores the fact that providing personal safety and preserving public order are the highest callings of any government.

"People want to be safe, and people want policies that are effective. . . . Right now, we're just getting the worst of everything," according to New York University law professor Rachel Barkow, whom Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption author Bryan Stevenson has called "one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment."

Today in the U.S., some 6,600j000 people, more than two percent of the population, live under the supervision of adult correctional authorities--in Federal or state prisons, local jails, or on probation or parole. Of these, 2200,000 are behind bars. Though more than 600,000 are released every year, two-out-ofthree are recidivists, rearrested within three years, as nearly 400,000 relapse into unlawful behavior and return to prison. This is the recidivism that helps keep the U.S. prison population, already the world's largest per capita, expanding.

The economic burden of recidivism is substantial, beginning with the $80,000,000,000 annual cost to taxpayers to incarcerate and then reincarcerate so many people, a cost that does not begin to include the tragic and wasteful toll this cycle of crime and incarceration takes on individuals, families, communities, and enterprises.

"Unfortunately, reducing recidivism is only one of many 'ready, fire, aim' proposals for reforming our system of criminal justice," laments Craig Berkman, an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and civic leader who speaks from experience. Berkman spent 2013-18 in Federal prisons in Estill, S.C., and Butner, N.C.--what he calls "the other gated community"--when he was convicted of financial...