EDITORIAL 'Get tough' policies are leading more to prison
U.S. prisons and jails held more than 1,630,000 people in
mid-1996, more than double the number from the mid-1980s, according to a
Justice Department report released last week.
By the end of 1995, 1 out of every 167 Americans was in prison or
jail, compared to 1 out of every 320 a decade earlier, according to the
department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The world's highest incarceration
rate has seesawed in recent years between the United States and Russia, with
both far outdistancing other nations.
The bureau reported that the nation's prison and jail population
grew by an average of nearly 8 percent a year between mid-1985 and June 30,
1996. The steep increase reflected a number of get-tough laws that have been
adopted by the federal government and the states in an effort to put more
serious criminal offenders in prison for longer periods of time.
While the number of prisoners in this country has more than
doubled in the past 20 years, the numbers on parole are even greater. The vast
majority have been convicted of drug-related offenses. Astonishingly, nearly
one in three young black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is under criminal
justice supervision on any given day. The "War on Drugs" is the single largest
factor contributing to this crisis facing the black community.
With the new wave of harsh sentencing laws (such as "three strikes
and you're out"), the one-in-three figure is likely to get even worse soon. One
1995 prison survey found that state corrections officials expect their 1994
inmate populations to rise 51 percent by the year 2000.
In recent years, African-American women have experienced the
greatest increase in criminal justice supervision of all demographic groups.
Their rate of criminal justice supervision rose by 78 percent from 1989-94.
The number of black (non-Hispanic) women incarcerated in state
prisons for drug offenses increased more than eightfold, by 828 percent, from
1986 to 1991.
While African-American arrest rates for violent crime -- 45
percent of arrests nationally -- are disproportionate to that group's share of
the population, this proportion has not changed significantly for 20 years. For
drug offenses, though, the African-American proportion of arrests increased
from 24 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 1993, well above the African-American
percentage of drug users in the national population.
African-Americans and Hispanics now constitute almost 90 percent
of offenders sentenced to state prison for drug possession.
The Department of Justice has ignored its own 1994 report, which
questioned the wisdom of mandatory minimum sentencing, and now sides with the
Republican-dominated Congress in opposing the Sentencing Commission's downward
revision of crack cocaine sentences to the level of powder cocaine. The
crack/powder disparity is a major factor in the racial bias in today's criminal
justice system.
This incredible state of affairs, where 3 out of every 100 of your
neighbors is involved with our criminal justice system, is a direct result of
the efforts of politicians who have discovered during the past decade that
Americans love politicians who promise to "get tough on crime." We have elected
these people, and they have begun to deliver on their harsh promises. We have
built more and more prisons, creating a quickly evolving "prison-industrial
complex."
In this complex, millions of dollars are funneled to the
contractors, vendors, guards, police, judges, parole officers, lawyers,
bailiffs, court reporters, and the communities that process and hold criminals
in prisons. Now thousands of people have jobs in the criminal justice industry,
and their livelihoods depend on criminal justice. Our nation has a growing
vested interest in keeping millions of Americans behind bars.
We have also adopted a number of "tough" policies of questionable
value: treating juveniles as adults, developing new, more intrusive lock-down
policies in our maximum security prisons, fewer living comforts in prison,
"three strikes and you're out" (for life) laws, truth in sentencing laws,
mandatory minimum sentences.
Some "reformers" are now advocating the return of chain gangs,
corporal punishment, use of electroshock control devices, the holding of
prisoners in unheated tents during the winter months and a wide expansion of
the death penalty.
Where will this end?
Leading the charge for a "safer" society are conservatives and
moderates, both Democrats and Republicans, who see crime "prevention" methods
as "pro-family" policies. Meanwhile, these same conservatives and moderates
advocate social and economic policies that tend to produce a larger and larger
underclass.
Clearly, something has to be done about crime. But are our
crime-fighting strategies working?
Building more prisons does not reduce crime. States with high
incarceration rates often have high levels of violent crime. For example, from
1980 to 1992, California spent $3.8 billion on prison construction and
quadrupled its prison population, yet violent crime rates continued to
rise.
Incarceration, meanwhile, is cost-prohibitive. The average annual
cost of incarceration per maximum-security inmate is about $35,000. Projected
costs of "three strikes and you're out" laws are so staggering ($5.5 billion
annually in California) that some states may never fully implement them.
The threat of punishment does not deter violent behavior. Using
punishment as a deterrent assumes rational thinking and decision-making among
those committing crimes. But experts say much violent crime is "an impulsive
response to an immediate stressful situation," often committed under the
influence of drugs or alcohol.
We need once again to take the unpopular road of assessing the
conditions in society that lead to crime and then begin working to eradicate
those conditions. Generally speaking, that would include:
- social and employment programs that would instill a sense of
hope and community investment for young families and youth;
- strengthening a sense of neighborhood and community ownership
through localized neighborhood development programs, especially where they
address immediate social problems;
- recognizing and educating ourselves about the relationship
between anti-social behavior and wider family, educational, economic, political
and cultural factors.
No "get tough" policies get to the roots of those problems that
are leading so many U.S. minority persons into the prisons and the criminal
justice system. Walls and prison guards are inadequate and, in the final
analysis, unworthy of a nation that prizes "liberty and justice for all."
National Catholic Reporter, January 31,
1997
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