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This
Strikes Us …
A
Sojourner’s Truth Editorial
It had
to happen eventually … sooner, in fact, rather than later.
As the Washington Post reported on Monday, many
cash-strapped states are reversing two decades of
tough-on-crime policies and are proposing to open the prison
gates to release thousands of incarcerated folks, well
before their time is up.
Leading
the way is
California
where the governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wants to free
22,000 prisoners convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual offenses
some 20 months on average earlier than their release dates.
Rhode
Island,
Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina are some of the
others. And Michigan, whose incarceration rate is 47 percent
higher than that of any other Great Lake State … an
incarceration rate that causes the state to spend more on
prisons than it does on higher education, may have to follow
suit quickly.
But you
knew it had to happen.
In 1984,
national politicians started climbing all over each other
trying to come up with harsher and harsher sentencing
policies. The result was the Sentence Reform Act that
brought us sentencing guidelines that tied federal judges
hands until the Supreme Court, just a few years ago, ruled
that the guidelines were not mandatory.
Then
followed the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986 which set mandatory
sentences for a range of drugs. That’s the one that gave us
a 100 to one ratio of crack to powder cocaine equivalents
for sentencing purposes.
It’s
almost surreal how some of these things happen. This
particular act came about in the aftermath of the drug
overdose death of Len Bias, a University of Maryland
basketball star who died a few days after being drafted by
the Boston Celtics. The Boston fans were outraged and one of
their congressmen, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, saw an
opportunity for Democrats to get out in front of this issue.
Democrats had been accused of being soft on crime in the
1984 elections and their numbers had dwindled as a result.
So the
effect of these two acts was a flurry of prison building
activities which was certainly good news for all those small
towns that now saw their jobs situation improve dramatically
almost over night.
Then the
federal government used its ability to control the flow of
dollars back to the states in order force those entities to
get tough on sentencing.
Presently, the United States has the highest incarceration
rate in the industrialized world, 702 inmates per 100,000
population. Canada, our neighbor to the north, imprisons 116
per 100,000 population.
The
problem with blowing up the prison population was two-fold.
First, it costs a lot of money. Second, you gotta let these
folks go sometime. Actually there are a whole host of other
problems, but these two stand out at the moment.
The
first is obvious. Yes, a lot of jobs were created but the
taxpayers paid for those jobs with no return on their
investment.
As to
the second, you can imprison someone for drug trafficking
for five years, or 20 years, or 30 years. Once the
sentencing guidelines and the mandatory sentences took
effect, a lot of sentences increased from five or so to the
20 and 30 year range. But people are still going to get out
over time.
And what
has all of this imprisonment given us in terms of decreasing
crime rates? Not much apparently. The rate of violent crime
is about the same now as it was in the early 1970’s.
So we
have a failed policy of massive incarceration, at a cost of
billions that could have been better spent and, now, seeing
few other alternatives to the option of releasing thousands
of prisoners, federal and state governments are still
avoiding taking any sort of look at long-term solutions to
the incarceration craze.
What is
it about our current national mindset that prevents us from
seeing the obvious: imprisoning huge numbers of people,
particularly those who pose no threat to society, is simply
not working on any level. This policy does not deter crime,
it does not keep us measurably safer, and the punishment
itself carries with it untold damage to millions of
ex-offenders, their families and society in general.
If we
fear the costs of recidivism at all, we have to admit that
incarcerating thousands or people who pose no threat to
their fellow citizens for ridiculous amounts of time can
produce no long-range benefits. If anything, this policy of
incarceration guarantees that crime rates – committed by
those who are freed and find no other options to earning
money or by those who are raised in an environment without
the guidance and support of one or more parents – will
continue at these same levels.
We have
to be a bit more realistic than we have in the past which
has been characterized by knee jerk reactions by career
politicians. We either have to fundamentally change the way
we view crime and retribution or we have to lock up
offenders, all offenders, for life.
Fortunately we can’t afford the second solution as we are
apparently only starting to realize. |
