A Chinese legal scholar is in New Haven hunting for ideas. He wants to help reform his country’s prison system. Even though our own country’s prisons are bursting, Liu Qiang is finding encouraging alternatives here to what his country calls “harsh punishment.”
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Liu Qiang came face to face with a rapist, and he sentenced him to death.
The year was 1983. Liu hadn’t officially become a judge. But China had initiated a new campaign called “harsh punishment.” It wanted to fight violent crime by locking up more people, longer, and by applying the death penalty to 60 different kinds of crime. The system needed lots of judges, fast. So Liu, a staff member in the Baoding District’s middle-level court, found himself on the bench.
And he believed in the campaign.
The rapist was 70 years old. He had repeatedly raped four girls younger than 14 years old. “He gave them candy,” Liu recalled. “They didn’t know about sex.”
The rapist pleaded before Liu for a lighter sentence. “I am very sorry about this behavior,” the rapist said. “I am very ashamed. Can you give me a chance to survive?”
Liu went with the sentencing guidelines. “At the time I thought, according to Chinese law, we should give the death penalty,” the relaxed and open 51-year-old scholar said the other day in his office at Yale Law School, where he’s spending the fall as a researcher with the China Law Center. “It was necessary. When the girls grow up, they will be affected.”
Another day, he ordered death to the organizer of a gang of knife-wielding men who robbed people on the street.
“I thought the crime wave was the problem. I thought harsh punishment was necessary to deter crime,” Liu recalled.
He spent a year as a deputy judge. He proceeded to a series of jobs in the judicial system, then academia. That odyssey took him to the United States and back home again, and now to his fall semester at Yale. That odyssey, combined with the realization that China’s “harsh punishment” campaign didn’t cut crime, radically changed Liu’s views. The “harsh punishment” experience changed China, too. With the permission of the authorities, Liu is studying how people in Connecticut have developed alternatives to locking people up, in favor of helping people rehabilitate themselves.
He has spent time with Warren Kimbro observing the programs Kimbro runs at New Haven’s Project MORE, where the state send prisoners not ready to reintegrate themselves into society. Kimbro has been taking Liu to meet with key figures in the state judicial system —” a judge, a probation worker, state government officials, the co-chair of the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee —” to learn how alternative programs are designed and how they become law.
Only about 30 percent of American convicts are incarcerated; the rest are out on probation, on parole, or in halfway houses and job-training and substance abuse programs like those at Project MORE. Part of the reason more aren’t in prison is that the jails are already overcrowded. Arrests doubled in the 1980s in Connecticut as conservative lawmakers, like their counterparts nationwide (and in China), pushed mandatory sentencing laws that put non-violent drug offenders behind bars for decades. But now the state has a moratorium on building new prisons. That has advanced the cause of alternative programs.
By contrast, 80 to 90 percent of China’s convicts are in prisons, according to Liu. On the other hand, a far smaller percentage of China’s population is incarcerated.
A New Perspective
After his 1983 stint as a deputy judge, Liu worked as a supervisor in Baoding jails. He didn’t like what he saw: He felt many prisoners belonged out of jail sooner so they could rebuild their lives.
He surveyed the prisoners. He learned about the social and personal pressures the led many of them to commit crimes. “In Chinese prisons, in Shanghai, about half of the people are rural,” he said. Coming from the provinces to the city, they often have trouble finding work.
Liu experimented with a program that rewarded good behavior with sentence reductions. He got results.
Meanwhile, after an initial drop, violent crime in China went back up, despite the “harsh punishment” drive. Recidivism rates rose.
That led Liu to look for alternatives at the Chinese Central Criminal Justice College, then the Shanghai Politics and Law Institute, and the Justice Research Institute of Shanghai, where he currently serves as deputy director. It also led him to Iowa State University’s sociology department, where he studied criminology and corrections; and now to Yale Law School. As part of Yale’s growing ties with China, the law school launched a project devoted to helping reform that country’s legal system.
Liu said China has been reforming its legal system since the creation of the criminal law and criminal procedure law by the People’s Representative Congress in 1979 and the introduction of legal proceedings involving prosecutors and defense attorneys.
“A lot of people commit property crimes. We need to put more of these people in the community, give them a chance to contribute to society,” Liu said. “We pay more attention to deterrence and retribution.”
“Change will be gradual” because it bucks against centuries of tradition, he reflected. “Chinese people cannot accept this yet.”
If he could go back to 1983 knowing what he knows now, how would Liu have ruled on those cases?
He would not have given the death penalty to the mastermind of the knife-wielding robbers, he said. With good behavior, that convict had a shot of having the sentence reduced to 20 years at the time. Now, Liu said, he would have handed down a 12 to 15-year sentence, with an option of getting out on parole after seven and a half.
As for the rapist?
In that case, he said, he would still choose death.