HOPE Springs Eternal

• Published date: 01 November 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12262
• Date: 01 November 2016
• Author: J. C. Oleson

COMMENTARY

HOPE COLLECTION

HOPE Springs Eternal

New Evaluations of Correctional Deterrence

J. C. Oleson

University of Auckland

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this issue’s three evaluation articles of

swift, certain, and fair (SCF) deterrence programs (Hamilton, Campbell, van Wormer,

Kigerl, and Posey, 2016; Lattimore et al., 2016; O’Connell, Brent, and Visher, 2016).

Around the world, legislators, policy makers, judges, and community corrections officials

are struggling to do more with less, searching for the silver bullet that can reduce correc-

tions costs while maintaining—or improving—public safety. The touted successes of Judge

Alm’s Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) program (Hawken and

Kleiman, 2009; Hawken et al., 2016) have captured the attention of policy makers the

world over,and they have inspired numerous jurisdictions to adopt SCF programs (Pearsall,

2014). But as these three articles document, replication studies have produced mixed find-

ings, raising questions about the generalizability of the HOPE model in particular and about

SCF in general. Some of these questions have already been explored elsewhere (e.g., Cullen,

Manchak, and Duriez, 2014; Duriez, Cullen, and Manchak, 2014; Kleiman, Kilmer, and

Fisher, 2014). Nevertheless, based on the proliferation of another popular innovation—the

drug court—it is reasonable to predict that deterrence-based SCF programs will continue

to be adopted, not necessarily because they provide the elusive silver bullet of correc-

tional efficacy, but because they align with popular intuitions about what criminal justice

should be.

This essay begins with a recapitulation of the state of criminal justice, especially cor-

rections, in the United States. Although this account will be familiar to most criminologists

and many policy makers, it is worth repeating to underscore the acute need for change.

The essay then summarizes the achievements of Hawaii’s HOPE program and describes its

adoption around the world. Some proponents of HOPE, excited by the promise of reducing

recidivism and costs while humanizing the criminal justice system, have been enthusiastic,

Direct correspondence to J. C. Oleson, Sociology, University of Auckland, Level 9, HSB Building,

10 Symonds Street, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, New Zealand (e-mail: j.oleson@auckland.ac.nz).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12262 C2016 American Society of Criminology 1163

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 4

Commentary HOPE Collection

even evangelical, in their advocacy of SCF. The analogous growth of the problem-solving

court movement might serve as an illustration of how and why alternative models of criminal

justice proliferate and become part of the mainstream. The essay concludes by suggesting

that SCF, although constituting a break from orthodox probation as usual, might not be

ambitious enough. Meaningful change to community supervision might require an even

more fundamental change to our orientation to criminal justice.

The Broken System

Most criminologists know—all too well—the troubled state of affairs in the U.S. criminal

justice system (e.g., Stuntz, 2011). They know that police shootings of young Black men are

a regular occurrence (Tolliver, Hadden, Snowden, and Brown-Manning, 2016), know that

criminal convictions are obtained through plea bargaining—not trials (Devers, 2011)—and

know that mandatory minimum sentences have stripped discretion away from judges and

have conferred it on prosecutors (Ulmer, Kurlychek, and Kramer, 2007). Criminologists

also know about the near demise of rehabilitation (Cullen, 2005), the ensuing punitive

turn (Garland, 2001), and the prison boom (Mauer, 1999; Spelman, 2009). They know

that U.S. prisons have spread like a disease (Drucker, 2011); that the U.S. prison and

jail population increased sevenfold between 1970 and 2005 (Holder, 2016); that the per

capita rate of incarceration soared from approximately 166 per 100,000 in 1970 to 698 per

100,000 in 2013 (Justice Policy Institute, 2000; Walmsley, 2016), a level approximately

five to ten times the incarceration rate of other Western democracies (Berman, 2009); and

that the United States, possessing just 5% of the world’s population, incarcerates 22% of

the world’s prisoners (Holder, 2016). Criminologists know that U.S. mass incarceration is

racially biased (Alexander, 2010; Mauer, 1999), class biased (Taibbi, 2014; Western,2006),

expensive (Oleson, 2002), and most likely criminogenic (Cullen, Jonson, and Nagin, 2011;

Vieraitis, Kovandzic, and Marvell, 2007). A cynic might attribute Travis’s (2005) iron law

of imprisonment—“they all come back”—not to the community to which prisoners return

but to the prison. After all, two thirds of state prisoners are rearrested and more than half

are back in prison within 3 years (Langan and Levin, 2002). Elsewhere, I have argued, with

only modest hyperbole, that the United States would be better off, constitutionally and

economically, if it placed its prisoners into narcotic comas rather than incarcerating them

in warehouse and supermax prisons (Oleson, 2002). The excesses of mass incarceration

finally reached a breaking point in Brown v. Plata (2011), a U.S. Supreme Court decision

that ordered California to alleviate its prison crowding by reducing its prison population by

approximately 46,000 inmates (down to 137.5% of design capacity). President Kennedy’s

(1960) observation that in Chinese, “the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, one

representing danger and the other, opportunity” is actually erroneous, but the underlying

concept is so attractive to people that the linguistic fiction is accepted as a truth. In Mass

Incarceration on Trial, Simon (2014) argued that Plata might signal a jurisprudential crisis, a

turning point through which the courts might breathe new life into the Eighth Amendment

1164 Criminology & Public Policy