Review of "Down the Rabbit Hole"

Modern society thinks about crime prevention as being those agencies – mainly police – which apprehend people who break the law. In this conceptualization, prisons are just where we dump offenders after conviction, but this has it all wrong. Crime prevention b͟e͟g͟i͟n͟s͟ in prison, by rehabilitating convicts so that they stop offending upon return to society. That is at least the way things are supposed to work, though the reality falls disappointingly short.

Every year the USA spends $𝟳𝟬 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 on corrections. We incarcerate around 1.2 million persons nationwide, of whom 95% will be released at some point. Recidivism measured within the first three years of release approaches 67.8%, and chronic offenders cost society $1.3 million lifelong. From these sobering statistics we can easily gather that both crime and corrections cost us dearly, yet we are not getting our buck’s worth in terms of rehabilitation.

Everybody knows this, yet we simply dismiss it by declaring criminals incorrigible. Some definitely are, but most are malleable to corrective influence, presuming they get it. The problem is that often in modern prisons, the personnel and programs employed to exert corrective influence are rife with inconsistencies undermining this objective. This is the subject of Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime (2017), by Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz, which is my new favorite book! At John Jay College of Criminal Justice I had studied criminology and penology, so I have read a fair amount of literature on the subject, but no book hits as hard and close to the truth as this one, and that’s because this one’s written by two inmates in prison over the course of incarceration exceeding twenty years.

This is no gripe about mistreatment or the like. Both authors accept full responsibility for their crimes. If anything, they argue that the system treats offenders undeservingly well. The authors identify numerous comforts in accommodations and activities extended to offenders, which do nothing towards rehabilitating them except to make it more difficult. Most insightfully, the authors rely on numerous sources of clinical and academic research into psychopathy to highlight how criminals actually think, and in turn, how criminals process rehabilitative programs in prison. For example, “social justice” undercurrents pervading many penitentiary programs tell offenders that they are actually victims of an oppressive society… which plays into criminals’ tendency towards deflection and nullifies all attempts at rehabilitation.

Obviously the book goes into depths and details which cannot be covered in this review, but readers will walk away much better informed about what’s going so wrong in our prisons in terms of rehabilitating offenders. Though society could always go back to warehousing offenders just to wait their time out – which would be astronomically cheaper – as long as society hopes to reform offenders, Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime is a crucial first step towards understanding how taxpayer money could be more effectively spent on rehabilitation.

Originally published August 19th, 2023, on Facebook.