Bryan Kohberger versus George Santos: Whom should we imprison?

The Hill

8 hours ago

An Idaho court just sentenced Bryan Kohberger to four consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole for murdering four University of Idaho students in 2022. He will serve his time in the state's only maximum-security prison.
In the world of American prisons, IMSI, as it is called, is relatively new, having opened in 1989. The oldest operating maximum security prison in the U.S. is the New Jersey State Prison, which dates back to 1798.
In 1817, New York opened the Auburn Correctional Institution — the first prison to house inmates in individual cells. Famous for the Auburn System, which focused on stripping inmates of their 'sense of self,' the prison had a strict silence policy and made them wear striped uniforms. Although the mechanisms have changed, prisons throughout the U.S., including Idaho's, still don't want the incarcerated individuals to retain their individuality.
Coincidentally, on the same day Kohberger was sentenced, former Representative George Santos reported to the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in Fairton, N.J. He will be there for up to eighty-seven months, having entered a guilty plea to charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Fairton is a medium security prison that houses 800 inmates. Criminals sent to medium-security federal prisons include people 'convicted of federal drug offenses, white-collar crimes, sexual offenses, and others. As such, there are no specific medium-security prison crimes.'
Nearly one-third of the federal prison population is held in medium security facilities like the one where Santos will serve time.
Sentencing people like Kohberger or Santos to prison is so much a part of American life that few question whether that mode of punishment still serves us well, more than three hundred years after it came on the scene. That is a very long time to be doing the same thing to punish offenders. Perhaps we should be asking whether there isn't a better way.
For both Kohberger and Santos, punishment is measured in increments of time and deprivation of liberty. For violent offenders like Kohberger, longer sentences are the norm. And imprisonment, whatever else it does, removes them from society and in so doing reduces the harm they can do.
For non-violent offenders like Santos, the loss of liberty is usually for less time. But imprisonment is a dramatic rupture from the conditions of his previous, 'respectable' life. It stigmatizes him and is a form of status degradation.
But time is a slippery thing. People experience time in different ways. For younger people, time tends to move more slowly than it does for older people. It tends to move faster when people do the same things day after day. That is why longer sentences may not have the punitive bite that some think they have because, over time, inmates habituate themselves to their incarceration.
This suggests that two people receiving the same punishment might experience it with vastly different levels of distress. As law professor Adam Kolber argues, it is therefore 'a mistake to believe that' both more sensitive and less sensitive offenders 'receive punishments proportional to their desert,' even if they receive exactly the same punishments.
Imprisonment is also a very costly endeavor. The median yearly expenditure is almost $65,000 per prisoner, with wide variations — Massachusetts spends more than $300,000 per prisoner per year and Arkansas just under $23,000.
Multiply those numbers by 10, 20, 30, or more years, and you get a sense of the financial costs of imprisonment. One estimate puts the cost at $64 billion just among state governments.
And the returns on this investment have not been terrific. The Sentencing Project argues that long prison terms 'are counterproductive for public safety as they result in incarceration of individuals long past the time that they have 'aged out' of the high crime years' between the late teens and early 20s. This may shift resources to housing older and less dangerous inmates instead of 'more promising crime reduction initiatives.'
Over the last two decades, New Jersey, Alaska, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, California, and Michigan have reduced the number of people in their prisons by more than twenty percent. According to the Sentencing Project, 'these reductions have come about without adverse effects on public safety.'
Moreover, this may be a good time to rethink the place of imprisonment in our system of criminal punishment, since incarceration rates are dropping almost everywhere. This is the result of a dramatic decline in crime rates that started three decades ago.
Now, instead of building new prisons, like Idaho did 1989, states are having to shutter some of their facilities.
Locking up Kohberger may still make sense even if the U.S. scales back on a long-outdated method of punishment. Santos, however, maybe not so much.
Going forward, when the government wishes to incarcerate someone, it should carry the burden of proving that it is necessary and that there is no alternative effective punishment. That burden would, as it should, spur new things about why and how we punish as we do and about ways to do it that those who were there at the birth of the penitentiary could not have imagined.