That's the mind-boggling gist of a new study showing that more than one in 100 American adults are currently in jail. That's 2,319,258 jailbirds, at an average annual cost of more than $23,000 per inmate.The report, from the Pew Center on the States, showed that spending for incarceration has gone from $11 million to $49 million, a rate six times greater than the increase in spending for higher education.
The culprit appears to be a spate of "get tough on crime" legislation sponsored by politicians who know that law-and-order legislation is popular with the public. While well-intentioned, "three strikes" laws and other similar measures have mandated lengthy sentences for petty crimes, leaving the states to foot an ever-growing bill for room and board.
That might be tolerable if such laws were really making much of a difference, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The report concluded that the burgeoning prison population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime."
According to an Associated Press report, Kentucky governor Steve Beshear noted in his annual budget speech that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.
The report also updated some staggering statistics regarding the racial inequity of prison life: one out of nine black males between 20 and 34 is in prison. For the overall population of men in that age group, the rate is one out of 30. The rate of imprisonment for African-American women is also well above the average.
Worldwide, America leads the world -- by far -- in locking people up. Even China, with a reputation for oppression and a population of 1.3 billion (more than four times the U.S. population), has just 1.5 million behind bars, according to the report.
America cannot afford to continue this trend, and not just because it's too expensive. There have to be better solutions than just putting people on ice when they get into trouble. The report cited Kansas and Texas as states that are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules. Other states will need to act, and other options must be developed, lest more lives be wasted.
A nation that celebrates being "the land of the free" shouldn't be keeping more than one percent of its population in jail.
[Graphic from www.fbi.gov.]
5 comments:
I was wondering what your suggestions would be for reversing this trend.
I'm certainly not an expert in this area, but I think many sentences are too long, especially for things like minor drug trafficking. If the same money were put into community enrichment and job development programs, many of those young men now doing time could be doing a productive job.
I think there's a basic problem of inconsistency, too. It's no wonder that many people can't comprehend why selling an illegal drug can put you away for many years when the government itself controls the sale of hard liquor, or you could get a job at the convenience store and sell beer and wine. Being legal and liquid doesn't make alcohol any less of a drug, any less addictive, or any less dangerous.
Somehow, we need to find a way to help people get past the self-absorbed search for a high that leads to drug dependence, and to find meaning in healthier pursuits. This is where the church could make a contribution.
Thanks Tony, for your attention to this issue. It is a blight on American society and culture, and should move us as a society to reflect on what it is in our shared civic and social life that leads to this reality of so many incarcerated. Sure, some of the dramatic increase in prison populations has to do with laws - laws of the kind that Tony talks about. But there are other causes that contribute as well. Poverty and the systems of injustice that perpetuate poverty are rarely discussed by our political leaders - and almost as rare are churches who see as their mission the prophetic task of engaging the larger community to address the violence of poverty. The mere fact that the overwhelming majority of those behind bars are poor should disturb the church.
So much of the last 25 years we have witnessed an well organized effort to drain our shared, public resources - public schools, public parks, public transportation, public programs, (even the military)-and privatize them. Programs that are designed to lift those at the bottom of the social and fiscal scale have been seriously challenged. The demise of a sense of civic responsibility for the public good parallels the movement to privatization. It has had serious consequences for our shared society, and has created a nation where 1 in 100 are behind bars. We need to regain a sense of what it means to live in a community where we address the factors that lead to the scandal we now find ourselves living in.
Scott, it's funny, but I think you and are I probably on opposite sides of the private sector/public sector fence (with the exception of the military--of which privatization is unconstitutional, I think), but I think we would agree on the influence poverty has on this issue of such a high percentage of incarceration.
I think an influx of money and resources directly into the hands of many of those in poverty will only end up leading many to waste money (alcohol and drugs, like Dr. Cartledge alluded to, and other addictive behaviors like gambling). Without being able to manage their cash flow, not matter how much money you put in a person's pocket, the money simply siphons either back into the government (to be redistributed again) or the corporate world. At the heart of any program to help eliminate poverty, I think there should be a fundamental element of basic money handling skills--budgeting, saving, etc.
I think we're trying to scale the same mountain, but we're looking at different paths up the side. I get the feeling that there's a third path that hasn't been found yet because people are so busy talking about how right their trail is that they can't see the possible good in the other's trail, nor can they even begin to look for any other path.
Oh...and for the record. I'm not saying "poor people shouldn't gamble or drink or [fill in the blank]." Adults are free to do those things as they choose, but shouldn't do so at the expense of living expenses (like rent/mortgage, utilities, groceries, etc) no matter how much they make. I've heard it said that since we have a statue of liberty on the east coast, we need a statue of responsibility on the west coast.
Prisons are big business. Big business needs a product. Prisoners are the product. One participant at the New Baptist Covenant session on justice said half the counties in New York would go bust if prisoners were all rehabilitated and the cells emptied. We'll never slow this process until prisons and prison building stops being big business. Second, we need to seriously reconsider the penalty for crimes of personal behavior, both whether or not there actually is a "crime" committed when a person ingests a drug, and the length of punishment for such crimes. Third, we need to come to a mindset as Christians that it is better to spend $27,000 a years to rehabilitate someone in a community setting, than to spend that amount keeping a harmless person locked up. The number of people in prison in this country is a crime itself.
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