An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse: An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider's Perspective

by Jens Soering

The United States has more people locked away in prison per capita than any other counters. Prison building is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and in some states more money is spent on prisons and prisoners than on education. Nearly one quarter of all prison inmates worldwide are housed in U.S. jails or penitentiaries, even though the United States has only five percent of the world's population. Yet, in spite of the vast amount of resources spent on locking people up and the number of people in prison, the United States leads the developed world in the number of homicides and violent assaults. For the last eighteen years, Jens Soering has experienced the inside of many different prison environments, from a youth remand center in London to America's notorious Supermax prisons, to medium-security institutions. What he has seen and experienced has convinced him that not only do prisons not rehabilitate prisoners who may be useful for society once their sentence has ended, but prisons turn petty criminals into hardened convicts all at enormous expense to society. Meanwhile, other nations control their crime rates at a fraction of the cost of the United States correctional system. Soering does not argue that prisons should not exist or dispute that there are people who need to be locked away. His book is not an indictment of the legal system that lands many people in prison. Instead, "An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse offers a mainly monetary analysis of why it is absurd fiscal policy to lock people up so often and for so long.

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2004

About the author

Prison reform advocated and convicted double murderer.

Soering had been imprisoned for a double murder of ther parents of his girlfriend in Virginia, USA. Söring claims he took the blame for his girlfriend and an other mom, thinking he had diplomaric immunity. Söring denies having committed the crime.

In jail Soering has written books about prison reform and his case.

Reviews

[N.C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider's Perspective, while it has many problems, is an entertaining read. The book is quite small, with the 91 pages being readable within 3 hours, but the shorter length works to the book's advantage. All the different points made in the book towards reforming America's prison system were given well, and the author likely would’ve ended up repeating himself if he tried to elongate the essay, as he began doing in the later chapters. The last 8 or so pages are completely unnecessary if you read the first 83 pages, as nothing new is added. The last 2 chapters as a whole in fact, is painful to read through compared to the rest of the book. They’re still well written, but the book loses much of it’s charm as they feel completely unfocused and sporadic. That being said, in order to enjoy this essay two important traits must be true of you. First, you’ll need to be at least vaguely interested in the topic and understand the pure basics American political system. Second, you need to be able to understand the author's bias be conscious of it throughout the mostly factual based essay. The author, Jens Soering, makes it clear multiple times within the novel that he has committed a double murder, is serving two life sentences for it, and he feels no guilt for it. The “Insider’s Perspective” in the title isn’t that of any regular criminal, it’s a remorseless murderer. That being said, most of the essay sticks to facts and statistics to prove the valid points brought up such as the idea that it’s much cheaper to give prisoners parole and reform programs than to imprison them. However, especially in the semi last chapter labeled Myth No. 6, multiple opinions and conspiracy theories are thrown around with minimal facts to support it. Many opinions both go with the Author's political views and would allow him to roam the streets once more are also present, even at one point stating “released murderers consistently have the lowest recidivism rates of any groups of offenders” (Soering 65). While this may be true, the author didn’t provide any statistics or a source in the text as he does for many other claims without statistics, and that claim would be ideal for a man in his situation hoping to be released. Now to describe the bulk of the book's content besides the occasional biased statements.
Many of the claims the book makes are backed up by statistics with the citations listed in the back of the book, or in the text in case of a quote. The book was written in 2004 with only the resources available to the author who, once again, is serving time in prison. That being said many of the numbers listed are still fairly proportional to what is true today with few exceptions, so it’s still worth a read. The basic layout of the book is disproving 6 myths with numerical facts and historical events such as political policy changes. The essay, of course, goes into much more detail than I can describe in one review, but the main idea is that America's crime rate is on par with that of all other developed nations, with a far higher incarceration rate. This causes the U.S. to spend far more than any other developed country on crime control as keeping people in prison is millions to billions of dollars more expensive than to keep the same people on welfare and to supply them with rehabilitation, education, parole, support programs/groups, etc. This increased cost of incarceration is increasing the national and state debt, and aside from a few underfunded regions and groups, the problem is only growing.
If going more in depth into this topic interests you, and you can see through bias where it’s present, than An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider's Perspective by Jens Soering is for you.