On one side of the ledger are the scenes of out-of-control violence and disorder in cities like Oakland and Chicago. On the other is the constant stream of news stories and viral videos highlighting the abuses of the criminal justice system. This polarized vision, split along partisan lines, is a trap—the kind of false binary that our contemporary political culture specializes in producing, but it can be escaped by turning away from politics for a moment and considering the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. The Rebbe, as he is universally known to his followers in the Chabad movement, was both a passionate advocate for prison reform and a supporter of law and order.

In 1968, in the aftermath of national riots and an earlier episode of convulsive debates over crime and policing, New York City’s then-Mayor John Lindsay visited the Rebbe in his study in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There, writes Chabad.org’s Dovid Margolin, the Rebbe advised the mayor that “proper policing and maintaining safe streets would benefit not only potential victims, but also aid the would-be criminals themselves, so often not much older than children.”

Rather than forcing us to see criminals as human beings, whose well-being is ultimately tied to society as a whole, our current system tries to hide them from sight. But even that is no longer possible as the conditions in prisons like New York City’s Rikers Island have gotten so bad that scandals related to the facility are now a recurring feature of local news. Indeed a CBS News feature from just last month detailed the findings of a federal monitor’s report that found the hygienic conditions in Rikers are downright inhumane:

The 150 pictures in the report paint a stomach-turning picture of dirty toilets, wash basins, sinks and other personal hygiene facilities. […] Inspectors found a cornucopia of live roaches, ants, water bugs, fruit flies, gnats, and mouse droppings.

Aside from filth, the violence, abuse, murders, and suicides at Rikers wreak havoc among the prisoners. While the prisoners have no choice, a significant portion of correctional officers abuse their sick days to avoid showing up to work in such conditions. In fact, the situation has devolved to the point where a potential federal takeover of Rikers is in the cards due to City Hall’s failure to comply with a series of court orders aimed at improving the prisoners’ conditions.

Yet, for all of the U.S. attorney’s showboating about taking over Rikers Island in order to clean up the city’s mess, study after study has revealed that sanitary conditions and the treatment of prisoners are poor across the federal prison system, too. A recent John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analysis revealed that chronic health conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, asthma, HIV, and a host of mental illnesses are significantly undertreated in correctional facilities compared to the general population. Much like in Rikers Island, it’s a common occurrence in federal prisons for toilets to either overflow or suffer from water shortages, forcing inmates to spend days with their refuse in their cells. These urgent yet easily solvable health and sanitary crises are compounded by the fact that a third of state and federal prisons are located within three miles of a Federal Superfund site. Superfund sites are polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous contaminants, and living in such close proximity can shave off up to 15 months of a person’s life expectancy.

In an “Inside Rikers” special report, ABC7 NY found that assaults against officers have increased by more than 23% over the last decade, while fights between inmates have more than quadrupled over the same period. Multiple studies over the previous 40 years have shown that between 20% and 25% of prisoners have reported being victims of physical violence from another inmate while incarcerated.

Guard-on-inmate violence might be even more frequent, though it’s hard to get accurate numbers since it’s common for guards to cover up for each other, falsify reports, or punish prisoners who want to complain with solitary confinement as a deterrent.

This climate of violence leads many first-time offenders to seek gang affiliation inside prison as a form of protection, which in turn increases the likelihood they will engage in violence and reoffend once released. It also highly increases the chance they will spend time in solitary confinement due to the violent behavior of their gang-related activities.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice released a special report which found a recidivism rate of 78% among violent crime offenders, 84% among drug offenders, and 87% among property crime offenders. Almost 44% of criminals return to prison within a year of release. 68% are rearrested within three years, 79% within six years, and 83% within nine years.

These statistics show we do not have a correctional facility that emphasizes correction. Only 5.1% of the global American population will spend any time in prison throughout their lives, but of those who will, most will end up there more than once.

The conclusion is clear: The U.S. penal system neither rehabilitates prisoners nor scares them out of reoffending. Instead, it routinely subjects inmates to conditions of rampant depravation and violence that, in other contexts, we would consider torture.

Unfortunately, most of the solutions to the prison problem proposed by progressive criminal justice reform advocates threaten to make things even worse. So-called “decarceral” policies aimed at reducing the prison population often do so by simply allowing crimes to go unpunished. In New York City for instance, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who campaigned for office as a criminal justice reformer, announced as his first public policy that his office would “not seek a carceral sentence” for a whole host of crimes. In the period since he took office on Jan 1, 2022, Bragg’s office downgraded 52% of felony cases to misdemeanors, “while also managing to lose half of the felony cases that do reach court,” according to an analysis from the New York Post. That approach did send fewer people into the prison system—the Post recorded a 29% drop in felony convictions leading to prison sentences in the period it examined compared to 2019—but major crimes in the city spiked by 22% last year.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, conservatives tend to simply ignore the issue, or insist that prisoners deserve the appalling conditions as retribution for their crimes.

Thankfully, where our political culture falls short, Judaism has the answer.