Leo R. Sandy

During these times of fiscal crisis it is important to examine large public institutions and their policies to determine how they can operate more efficiently. One of those institutions is the U.S. prison system which has an annual budget of $60 billion at a cost of $43,000 a year per prisoner. Some critics of the prison system see it as a reflection of failed social policy. They point to the fact that the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 24 percent of the world’s prisoners – over 2 million. One in 32 US adults are now in some type of correctional facility. The US also has higher crime rates than other affluent democracies. For example, recent figures indicate that the United States has 737 homicides per 100,000 people whereas the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Japan have 134, 107, 93, 85, 67 and 62, respectively. Our prison population has increased 600 percent between 1980 and 2005 and critics attribute this rise to the neglect of factors that give rise to crime – substance abuse, poverty, mental illness and educational failure. Approximately 70 percent of those incarcerated are nonviolent offenders. Black males represent 44 percent of the prison population but represent only 6.5 percent of the population. From 1980 to 2004 the incarceration of women has increased 900 percent and their crimes have been mostly nonviolent. Eighty percent of these 200,000 women are also mothers whose families are seriously disrupted during their incarceration. While the majority of correctional officers are honest and honorable people, there are some who take advantage of female prisoners. When these victims report sexual abuse to authorities, they are often not taken seriously. They are also retaliated against by their abusers. Forty-two percent of female prisoners have been raped but the 1996 Prison Litigation Act prevents these women from seeking redress. The guards in women’s prison are 70 percent male, and the mere appearance of this is problematic. Given this situation, I don’t understand why there aren’t a majority of female correctional officers in women’s prisons.

There are also 100,000 juveniles held in custody and they are often mixed with adult seasoned criminals from whom they learn how to be better criminals. The worst thing about all this is that two-thirds of people released from prison end up back in not long after they are set free. If this were any other business, it would be bankrupt. One major problem in prison overcrowding is mandatory minimum sentences that remove judicial discretion from cases. Judges are trained and have experience in looking case by case at the individuals they sentence. They look at the big picture to determine what is fair and just for that individual. It is an insult to judges to remove that discretionary power from them just because a few in their profession have exercised bad judgment in some high profile cases. Judges must be allowed to judge. That’s what they get paid for and we should trust them to exercise good judgment. One example of this mandatory minimum sentencing law is the case of a woman from Florida named Yraida Guanipa, a mother of two young boys. She had never been in trouble with the law, did not use drugs and was in good standing in her community. One day she agreed to pick up a sealed package for a friend which turned out to be cocaine. For this she received a 13 year sentence for “drug conspiracy”. Unfortunately, her story is not unique.

Joanie Connors and Ethel Tobach, in an article published in the Peace and Justice Studies Association Journal, noted that “changing the US obsession with imprisonment and execution is an essential and necessary step toward achieving world peace…US government policy toward prisoners deserves the attention of peace scholars and activists because it is a consequence of our government’s deep penchant for revenge and retribution”.

There is also a high correlation between childhood problems and incarceration. For example, New Hampshire ranks as one of the lowest states in incarceration rates, and its rating for overall child well-being is number 1. Mississippi, on the other hand, has one of the highest incarceration rates and is 50th in overall child well-being. Clearly, the better children are taken care of, the less likely they will end up in prison as adults. This seems to represent a clear mandate to policy makers.

There are some positive signs that reform is beginning to happen. Eighty-five percent of all wardens across the country favor more prevention programs and increased use of alternatives to prison. Proposition 36 in California provides for treatment diversion programs. Passage of the Crack-Cocaine Equitable Sentencing Act and the Drug Sentencing Reform Act will do much to reduce sentences and lower the prison population. As the US prison system comes under increasing scrutiny more positive changes are likely to occur. It is also important to acknowledge that we need prisons because some people are too dangerous to be let out on the streets. Most prisoners I have talked to, especially those who are parents, are glad that there are prisons because they don’t want their children to be victimized by dangerous people.

The real problem is that we keep nonviolent people in prison for unnecessarily long periods of time without positively changing them so that they can reenter society as productive citizens. The most successful prisons provide individual and group therapy on a regular basis as well as vocational training and other forms of rehabilitation. Boston University provides free education to prisoners in some Massachusetts prisons and those prisoners who complete their degrees rarely reenter the prison system. Prisoners must pay their dues to society but society benefits little if those prisoners end up back in prison because they have been changed for the worst instead of for the better. According to Fyodor Dostoevsky, “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but how it treats its criminals”. The U.S. is said to be hard on criminals but soft on crime. If it were harder on crime, we wouldn’t have so many of our citizens in jail. Being harder on crime means understanding its causes and dealing with them in proactive ways and not knee jerk jail sentences. One thing we could do is to examine those societies that have low crime and low prison populations. We must also put more resources into crime prevention and prisoner rehabilitation. The old idea of locking criminals up and throwing away the key is a failed policy. It may win votes but it doesn’t work. The system is broken and needs fixing now.