Finally, criminalization may not deter because criminal punishment fails to target the underlying causes of intimate partner violence and therefore cannot change the behavior of those who engage in it. This lack of understanding about why offenders engage in crime is a particular problem in the context of intimate partner violence. The antiviolence movement has long maintained that men abuse in order to exert power and control over their partners, building this belief into the intervention programs created to address men’s use of violence. Criminal sentences for intimate partner violence often require offenders to participate in these programs. But as pioneering advocate Ellen Pence observed shortly before her death, whether men actually intend to exert power and control, or whether power and control is instead a byproduct of abuse, is an open question. Pence noted that neither the women nor the men with whom she worked identified power and control as the goal of abuse.28 Assuming that obtaining power and control is the reason men engage in intimate partner violence has preempted serious study of other potential causes of that violence, leading to ineffective interventions.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Although criminalization and incarceration are often conflated, criminalization has its own particular set of costs. Being labeled a criminal brings both social stigma and a host of restrictions, including denial of the right to vote, ineligibility for public housing, federal welfare benefits, military service, and education grants, and barriers to finding employment. For undocumented people, convictions can result in deportation. Just being arrested for intimate partner violence can create a record that the public can easily access through online court information systems. Criminalization invites surveillance of offenders through community monitoring and probation, even if offenders are not incarcerated—and sometimes even if they are not ultimately convicted. Diversion programs and other conditions imposed in lieu of adjudication allow the state to monitor offenders’ behavior in exchange for a dismissal of charges if offenders meet enumerated conditions. But even minor infractions committed during the monitoring period can result in the imposition of more serious penalties, including incarceration.
When using incarceration as the benchmark, the costs of criminalization are exponentially higher. Not only does incarceration not deter future violence, time in prison may actually drive further offending. Incarceration creates or reinforces conditions that lead to greater recidivism: dehumanization of inmates, destruction of communities, and prevention of structural investment.
Penal facilities in the United States are dehumanizing institutions, relying upon practices of punishment and control abandoned by most developed nations. Law professor Jonathan Simon refers to U.S. penal facilities as “waste management prisons,” arguing that such facilities are not intended to transform prisoners in any way, but are meant only to warehouse criminal offenders.29 Incarceration in these kinds of facilities reinforces the bitterness of those subjected to such treatment and does nothing to decrease the odds of recidivism.
Incarceration helps to explain “why ex-prisoners earn less, are employed less, and toil at ‘bad jobs characterized by high turnover and little chance of moving up the income ladder.’”30 Prior to being jailed, two-thirds of male inmates are employed, and half of them serve as the primary source of support for their families.31 When fathers are incarcerated, family income declines by as much as 22 percent, and 65 percent of families cannot meet all of their needs.32 The children of incarcerated fathers are more likely to experience homelessness; their mothers are more likely to receive public assistance33; and the families are more likely to live in unsupportive neighborhoods.34 Upon release, formerly imprisoned men both work and earn less. Sixty percent of former prisoners experience long-term unemployment, and employed former prisoners earn 40 percent less than those who have not been incarcerated.35 Having been incarcerated poses a significant impediment to finding employment for white men and a “nearly insurmountable barrier” for men of color; as few as 5 percent of African American applicants for employment with criminal records receive callbacks for interviews.36 Incarceration depresses both the wages and annual income of former inmates. As criminologist Elliott Currie concludes, “[T]he experience of incarceration, especially in a society that already suffers from a hollowed opportunity structure and thin social supports, is often a disabling one that sharply reduces the number of prospects of a good job and decent earnings—and thus serves in practice to cement great numbers of former offenders into a condition of permanent marginality.”37
Former inmates are frequently released into neighborhoods whose stability is undermined by the loss of their members to prison. In communities already weakened by poverty and high unemployment rates, social networks are essential in providing support. But the disappearance of significant numbers of individuals who should be raising children and contributing to the local economy saps community strength. “[T]hese ongoing removals, isolations and relocations can prove a formidable barrier to building a stable, close community in which people look out for their neighbors.”38 When members of communities know less about each other, their capacity for understanding each other’s behavior decreases. Given this lack of familiarity, the community is less able to address conflicts when they occur. The state, however, is ready and willing to take these conflicts out of the community’s hands; when community relationships are frayed, the community is open to allowing the state to assume responsibility. In such communities, informal social controls are undercut, creating conditions that are ripe for violence. By ceding responsibility for conflict resolution, communities lose the opportunity to discuss and recalibrate the norms by which members of the community should live—including norms around nonviolence.
Moreover, investment in prisons diverts resources away from the economically disadvantaged communities that many offenders are released into, depriving those communities of funding for education, health care, employment assistance, housing, and other services that could benefit ex-offenders and stabilize communities. Such services are more likely to prevent further violence than doing time in a “waste management” prison.
The costs of incarceration are similarly high in the specific context of intimate partner violence. Incarceration depresses employment opportunities for former offenders. Rates of intimate partner violence correlate with male unemployment; the more often a man is unemployed, the higher the rate of violence.39 Both subjective reports and objective measures of economic strain correlate with intimate partner violence.40 Moreover, rates of intimate partner violence increase in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, possibly as “a product of the loss of social controls in a community and the weakening of social ties. When residents have weak ties with their neighbors, they are unlikely to effectively shape social norms in the neighborhood.”41 The intersections of economics and community characteristics with intimate partner violence will be more thoroughly explored in chapters 2 and 4.
Finally, the violence that offenders experience in prison is recycled in their interpersonal relationships. The irony of incarceration is that individuals being punished for violence are sent to places where they are likely to be perpetrators or victims of, or witnesses to, violence. Up to 20 percent of prisoners have been physically abused in prison. Ten percent of state prisoners report being sexually abused. The trauma of victimization has serious consequences, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health issues. Witnessing violence in prison can also trigger symptoms of trauma. Former prisoners bring this trauma with them into their relationships in the community, with harmful consequences; perpetration of intimate partner violence and PTSD are strongly correlated.
Moreover, as law professor Angela Harris has argued, “relying on