Research completed by U. Illinois Professor Dan Bernhardt revealed a relationship between the length of an inmate’s prison sentence and his or her likelihood to rehabilitate.
Bernhardt, UI professor of Economics, evaluated the lengths of prison sentences and their influence on inmates’ rehabilitation efforts. The study was published in the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.
Bernhardt said he wanted to understand how the length of a prison sentence influenced an inmate’s incentive to rehabilitate. To determine this relationship, Bernhardt said he and his co-researchers, Steeve Mongrain, of Simon Fraser U., and Joanne Roberts, of U. Calgary, used numerical data and simulations to link their findings with correlations that other researchers had previously established.
The research, which took more than three years to complete, found that long, mandatory prison sentences and short sentences can counter-productively decrease an inmate’s motivation to participate in rehabilitative efforts, he said.
According to the published work, inmates with shorter prison sentences may not engage in rehabilitative behavior because they know they will soon be released. On the other hand, inmates with extensively long prison sentences may lose sight of rehabilitation efforts because their release dates are in the distant future.
Bernhardt said inmates usually display rehabilitative behavior to secure an early release date. As a result, prisoners with short sentences find no point in rehabilitation because they understand they will be released in a short amount of time, while prisoners with longer sentences have more to gain in terms of reduction of time served, he said. Bernhardt said this is why longer sentences may raise the incentives to rehabilitate.
Kris Bolt, chief deputy of the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office , said it makes sense that longer sentences would increase rehabilitation rates among inmates.
“With a longer term, the inmates would probably have a better chance to succeed,” Bolt said, adding that it’s hard for prisoners to completely rehabilitate their behavior in a short amount of time.
Although longer sentences can raise incentives and success rates, Bernhardt said if sentences are too long, the possibility for an early release based on good behavior becomes less tangible, making inmates conclude that rehabilitation may not be worthwhile.
“Many people are in prison precisely because they are impatient and lack impulse control,” he said. “Such impatience translates itself in the form of not valuing highly distant future payoffs.”
Bernhardt said inmates are often released without the state knowing if the inmate successfully reformed his or her behavior. As a result, those inmates end up relapsing and committing more crimes.
Jeff Christensen, chief of police for the UI Police Department, said recidivism, the habitual relapse into crime, is a concern when inmates are released from prison. He said he agrees with Bernhardt’s research that the rehabilitation of an individual has something to do with prison sentences but steered toward a more personal claim.
“My personal opinion would be that the eventual or not eventual rehabilitation of an individual is probably more inherently embedded in the desires and attitudes of that individual,” he said.
Christensen said he has observed people who were arrested and served their sentences but showed no signs of recidivism. He said others have a continuous problem with relapsing back to crime. He said he thinks “it just depends on the person.”
Bolt said prison sentencing is partially responsible for inmate’s motivation to rehabilitate; however, his or her surrounding environment is the ultimate determinate. He said prisoners are more likely to succeed if they have the support and attitude they need to move forward.
Bernhardt’s research doesn’t make any statements concerning the ideal sentence length. He said the state is not only concerned with rehabilitation, but also assuring the prison sentence is appropriate for the crime committed.
“Sentencing is very complex,” Bolt said. “There is no cut and dried answer of what an appropriate prison sentence should be.”