The Accountable Prison

Abstract

Despite being used on a massive scale and consuming huge amounts of the public treasury, prisons have largely failed to reduce offender recidivism. This failure persists both because of archaic beliefs that prisons cannot affect future behavior and because nobody is held accountable for inmate reoffending. Building on lessons from the field of policing, we propose a new era of accountability in corrections—an era in which prison wardens and other correctional officials are mandated to reduce inmate recidivism and are rewarded for doing so. Through a restructuring of incentives, the aim is to create in corrections a sustained interest in making offenders less likely to commit new crimes. More broadly, this approach is intended to transform correctional institutions into “accountable prisons” where concern over offenders’ future community conduct rivals concern over their daily institutional conduct.