The United States incarcerates the highest percentage of its citizens of any country in the world. The country has about 5% of the world’s population but almost 25% of its prisoners, with the world’s largest number of inmates and highest per capita rate of incarceration The prison population has tripled since 1987, with now one in a hundred adults in prison. States are dealing with the consequences of an increasingly expanding prison population, stretching the already thin resources provided for prisons, jails and related expenditures. A variety of societal issues correspond with the rate of incarceration, however for states dealing with unsustainable prison populations, they are bound to use either alternative methods for punishment or reduce the mandatory statutes for crimes.
Last year, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that California reduce its state prison population by 30,000 within two years. The court argued that the current overcrowding in prisons violated the prisoners’ eighth amendment right to no cruel and unusual punishment. With 161,000 prisoners in state prison at the time of the ruling, the penal system was running at 165% of its capacity. As a result California implemented AB 117 that redistricted the placement of some prisoners from state penitentiaries to county jails. The shift has alleviated the state prisons of 12% of its occupants, bringing the total current population down to 141,000.
By handling the influx of inmates that are sent to federal prison pre-trial for a variety reasons, notably not being able to afford bail, prisons took on a substantial number of people that they would like to have otherwise avoided. The bill is designed to prevent prisons from taking on inmates that have not as of yet been convicted. It
“enhances the authorization granted to the correctional administrator to offer a voluntary home detention program to include all inmates and additionally subject those inmates to involuntary participation in a home detention program. The bill would provide that the board of supervisors of any county may authorize the correctional administrator to offer a program under which inmates being held in lieu of bail may be placed in an electronic monitoring program”
Of course, the other effect of the bill is that local and county jails that are taking on long-term inmates are ill-equipped to accommodate the criminals on an extended basis. Those sentenced after the realignment policy that committed non-serious, non-violent, and non- sexual crimes are sent to the county jails. With that the local jails are quickly becoming cluttered and growing at a rate that would increase the number of inhabitants by 40% by 2015. The jails were originally designed to house prisoners for sentences of less than one year, so the methods of recreation permitted in federal prisons are severely limited in local jails.
So if California is plagued with overcrowding in prisons and it is not alone in that ailment, the question then lies in what makes the prisons so overcrowded? The research is divisive as are the politics about easing the penalties on crimes, without even taking into effect the circumstances that bring about criminal tendencies starting at infancy. Since a full-scale reform of the system is not likely to be seen in our lifetime, it is then best to examine the deficiencies that may be most readily addressed.
At the forefront of a reform movement is the petition to remove mandatory sentencing for crimes. In these instances, judges are left without any discretion as to what punishment is appropriate given the circumstances. For example, California’s legislature and voters approved a change in the state’s criminal sentencing law, referred to as the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” policy, which sets a minimum punishment for repeat offenders. Now, if a person has two or more previous serious or violent felony convictions, the sentence for any new felony conviction (not just a serious or violent felony) is life imprisonment with the minimum term being 25 years. Bills in Alabama, Florida, and North Carolina all set minimum punishments for repeat offenders, with each subsequent punishment escalating exponentially in severity.
Phillip Cook, a Public Policy Professor at Duke University, sees an assortment of other solutions to the incarceration rate, but his most resounding plea is for sentencing to revert back to 1984 levels. He estimats that the change would reduce current prison population by about 400,000 and cut prison spending by $12 billion or 17% of today’s spending. The mid-1980s are crucial to the discussion of current rates as it signifies the beginning of two significant changes in policing and sentencing.
Starting with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign in 1984 and culminating with President Reagan signing the Anti-Drug Abuse act in 1986, a movement to combat the prevalence been started. The 1986 act appropriated $1.7 billion to fight the drug war, as well as created mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses. Notoriously, the act also included of drugs had different sentencing requirements for crack and powder cocaine. Then-Senator Joe Biden proposed a 100-1 discrepancy in sentencing between possession of crack cocaine, a cheaper and ultimately more dangerous drug than its powder cocaine counterpart. As a result, low-income neighborhoods became increasingly decimated by the crack cocaine insurgence and the increased sentencing of its inhabitants.
Without a doubt, the racial consequences of the act perpetuated significantly different arrest rates by race. An ACLU report found that African Americans make up 15 percent of the country’s drug users but make up 37 percent of the drug arrests, 59 percent of the convictions, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison. Prior to the act, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 11 percent higher than for whites, but four years later it was 49 percent higher. In 2011, the US Sentencing Commission passed an amendment to raise the minimum possession for a five-year sentence from 5 grams to 28, and for a ten-year sentence from 50 to 280 grams. Nevertheless, the surge in the prison population can be increasingly tied to the stricter sentencing originating from the 1986 act.
The other substantial change from the mid 80’s was the origin of the private prison system. In 1987 about 3000 out of 3.5 million convicts were in private corrections facilities. By 2001, the convicted population had risen to 6.5 million and 123,000 of those were in privately owned facilities. Now, approximately 7.2 million people are serving sentences, of which 1.6 million are in state and federal prisons, and 256,000 of them in private facilities. The proportion is projected to grow. As NPR reports, no state has allocated money to build new state-run prisons in the last year because of budget crises. So some state governments are turning to the private sector to house their prisoners.
The cynical nature of corporations having monetary investments in the number of persons incarcerated has led to some gross miscarriages of justice. In Louisiana and Mississippi, reports have circulated surrounding the incentives from increased arrests and poorer treatment. The Walton Grove Youth Facility in Mississippi, is a privately run juvenile center that houses 1,200 boys and young men from the ages of 13-22. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU National Prison Project have filed a class-action lawsuit against the GEO group citing the various illegitimate actions inside, most notoriously the inadequate number of qualified guards. The Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators insists on a 1 office to 10 or 12 juvenile inmates. Inside Walton Grove the ratio was 1 guard to 60 inmates.
In Louisiana it is no better as prison overcrowding in the 1970’s forced the expansion of jails despite budget constraints. As a result, Louisiana adopted policies similar to what California has recently adopted, meaning more inmates sent to either county jails or private complexes. The state has shifted 52% of their state prison population to these facilities and has astonishingly poorly compensated those facilities per prisoner. As The Economist writes, the $24.39 provided per day for each inmate is less than half of what the state spends on prisoners in state jails. Thus, the private jails sacrifice privileges at the expense of the incarcerated while still seeking more prisoners in search of more funding.
The United States Justice Department has taken notice of the conditions and twice admonished the Orleans Parish Prison for its gross failings. The second letter from the department demanded changes from the warden and claimed that he had “failed to take basic steps to correct the systemic issues” addressed in the first letter. Not only that, but the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office has had to be in front of the Supreme Court 3 times in 16 years for prosecutorial misconduct. Louisiana has had to compensate for the inadequate police work and in HB 1, the budget for the 2012-2013 fiscal year, had to disburse over $1.4 million to 16 plaintiffs that were wrongly imprisoned.
The problems with the current system are blatant; especially with the current political atmosphere pervasive across the country. To recall the infamous 1988 ad against presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, being perceived as soft on crime has doomed many candidates and seems likely to continue doing so. In order to create fundamental changes in the system, it would require bipartisan support and an astounding amount of patience to really see systemic shifts away from criminal behavior worthy of imprisonment. Improvements in education, poverty, family structure and the other assortment of precursors for criminal behavior unfortunately require a devotion of resources and time to see substantial improvement. Until then, it may be wise to reevaluate what can be done in the intermediary to bring down the rate of crime that leads to the current rates.
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