Football, Prisons

No, Ray Rice Should Not Be In Jail

The criminal justice system is failing when it comes to domestic violence, but not because Rice isn't in "jail."

By  
on

Yesterday, Elie lambasted the judicial system for failing to heed the video of Ray Rice punching his then-girlfriend, Janay Palmer, in a casino elevator. There is a natural reaction that the criminal justice system completely failed Palmer and women everywhere when it sentenced Rice to a pre-trial diversion program. How can there be justice if he’s not in jail?

The criminal justice system is failing when it comes to domestic violence, but not because Rice isn’t in jail.

The “imprison first” mentality permeates modern America. It’s why America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The answer to any behavior we don’t agree with is to throw people out of sight, out of mind.

But while prison is a necessary sanction for many crimes — indeed, for some it may be better than any alternative — blanket faith in the prison system is poor policy. Professor Susan Sered, a sociologist at Suffolk University, discussed the role prisons play in actually intensifying the domestic violence problem in America.

In a large-scale Oregon study, Margaret Braun found that at least 25 percent of male ex-prisoners engaged in acts of violence against wives and girlfriends within the first several years post-release. The impetus for this violence simmers during confinement….

More broadly, prison culture amplifies the sexist attitudes and gender violence of so-called free society. Young men thrown into overcrowded jails often learn that in order to survive they have to become tough, numb to the pain of others; they learn to be the aggressor in order not to be the victim. This dynamic is deeply gendered. Criminologist Donald Sabo and his coauthors write, “Rape-based relationships between [same-sex male] prisoners are often described as relationships between ‘men’ and ‘girls’ who are, in effect, thought of as ‘master’ and ‘slave,’ victor and vanquished.”

While a famed athlete like Rice does not face the same challenges that lower-income black families face, the rush to assign convicts to prison has particularly ravaged those communities with a rash of intensified violence against women:

Sponsored

Over the past decades, both the incidence and intensity of violence against women has risen in communities with high rates of incarceration. Indeed, Beth Richie, author of “Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation,” links the rising rates of brutal sexual violence carried out against black women to the disproportionately high rates of incarceration of black men during the regime of what law professor Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow.”

Obviously, some offenders are so far gone that rehabilitation is an unrealistic goal, and the need to protect the victim and future potential victims requires incarceration. But sentencing an abuser to prison should be a nuanced, case-by-case determination instead of a blanket response.

That said, the specific diversion program that Rice must undergo may not be effective either. The Battered Women’s Justice Project notes that some jurisdictions use generic, out-patient (thus providing no immediate protection for the victim) diversion programs as little more than a mechanism to avoid lengthy and expensive prosecutions.

Offender and system accountability remain at the heart of diversion critiques. Diversion is often an informal and haphazard process, with no criteria or guidelines for eligibility, no admission of guilt, and little supervision or oversight by the court, prosecutor, probation, or other entity (Rebovich, 1996; Martinson, 2003; Martinson, et al., 2002; Hobart, 2002). As such, it becomes an example of case processing without meaning for victim safety or offender accountability. Of the diversion programs reported by Rebovich, for example, nearly two-thirds (63%) allowed an offender to enter the program without a guilty plea. Diversion has been used because it’s easier than getting a conviction before a particular judge. In other instances it remains outside of judicial purview and is an informal process between the prosecutor and defense attorney: sign up for a batterers’ program and the charge will disappear.

But that’s a matter of ill-funded and mismanaged diversion programs, rather than a reason to eschew any alternatives in favor of the prison system that empirically fuels abuse. Intervention by professionals trained in the psychology of abusers who can target the root of the anger and help the abuser avoid resorting to violence, coupled with a genuine admission of guilt and non-imprisonment punishment (e.g., community service, fines), and some in-patient standards to protect the victim through the term of the program (this cannot be understated) could better address both the punitive and rehabilitative goals of the justice system than adding another body to an established prison.

Sponsored

That most diversion programs around the country utterly fail at this is a further indictment of the “imprison first” mentality — the government simply doesn’t put the time and energy into creating effective alternatives. And thus, diversion programs typically lack the investment in trained professionals, facilities, and court supervision that they need.

Ray Rice must be punished for his crime, and the punishment he’s received so far doesn’t fit the crime or address the underlying existence of abuse looming over his marriage with Palmer. But if Rice’s pre-trial diversion program sounds like an inadequate response to an abuser, let this episode spark more activism in favor of funding better programs specifically tailored to address abuse while protecting the victim instead of another opportunity to mumble something about prison and walk away.

It’s too important not to let America’s love affair with incarceration become another way station in the continuing cycle of abuse.

And The Assault Charges Will Be Dropped [ATL Redline]

Topics

, , ,