Mass Incarceration in Arizona Social Cultural and Legislative History

Mass Incarceration in Arizona: Trends and History

Mass incarceration is an example of one of the more profound injustices of our time. Arizona is one of the states in America that currently struggles with mass incarceration, as its penal system has spiraled out of control, becoming a factor of injustice, rather than a necessary and notable part of the justice system. This paper will look at how the penal system has changed—in Arizona and in America as a whole, and discuss how Arizona has also gotten on the corrupt bandwagon of for-profit prisons, something that does a tremendous disservice to all the citizens of the nation. Finally, this paper will examine the race relations in Arizona from a more historical perspective, ultimately demonstrating that mass incarceration impacts black and brown men more than white men, and is ultimately a form of segregation revived. This paper seeks to prove the undeniable connection between the big business of mass incarceration in Arizona and its racist past.

For-Profit Prisons

The prison system used to simply be a melancholy aspect of the greater justice system, a potential consequence of breaking the law (Gottschalk, 2006). Today in Arizona and elsewhere in the United States, it’s big business. Consider the following: “Largely a product of the era of mass incarceration, jails today churn an incredible 11 million people per year through their doors. Americans now spend more than $20 billion annually on jails, a sum that has grown fourfold since 1983. Yet on any given day, more than 60 percent of people sitting in jail are awaiting trial and presumed innocent. This ‘pretrial’ population drove 99 percent of jail growth from 2000-2015” (Rizer & Haggerty, 2017). Based on these bloated numbers, one can infer that there is some form of corruption or some sort of societal ill or imbalance, motivating this trend. The reality is that jails were originally created to be part of a tool in curbing crime. One would think, based on this logic that if jails were effective at reducing crime, there’d be fewer criminals. However, “recent studies show that even short stays in jail can spur a significant increase in a person’s likelihood to reoffend, while longer detentions correlate with even greater odds of recidivism” (Rizer & Haggerty, 2017). Part of this is in connection with how flawed and unjust the system is: the bulk of people currently in jail in Arizona haven’t even been convicted.

While rates of crime in Arizona are exceedingly high, the rate of reoffending is up 65 percent or higher: this is a big red flag that the preponderance of prisons isn’t helping recidivism rates, which is one of the more massive obstacles to the justice system. For example, Pima county is a place where 80% of those in jail haven’t even been convicted of a crime: this puts young people in danger of becoming substance abusers in jail, of being abused, of psychological damage in jail and a host of other dangers (Rizer & Haggerty, 2017). Luckily in Arizona, Supreme Court Chief Justice Scott Bales created the Task Force on Fair Justice for All (Rizer & Haggerty, 2017). One thing that this task force did that was so reputable was shine a light on how the increase in the pretrial population have been motivated by the cash bail system and hence ultimately recommended that “pre-trial detention should be avoided to the furthest extent possible” (Rizer & Haggerty, 2017).

One of the major issues with the proliferation of prisons in Arizona is that it reeks of injustice. Every single person in America has the inherent right, regardless of social class, race, or ethnicity, to expect a justice system that is unbiased, as dictated by our constitution. As a result, “We do not employ a private police force that is paid based on the number of arrests they make. We do not employ private prosecutors who are paid based on the number of convictions obtained.  We do not pay judges based on the amount of fines they collect” (Dacey, 2017). This is because incentivizing such actions would clearly create a disruption of justice by motivating the darker inclinations of human behavior, such as greed to motivate arrests. Rather than administering justice, officials of this system would be more inclined to arrest and jail people for their own personal gain. This would mean that vulnerable populations, such as minorities, would instantly become the “low hanging fruit” and likely to be most victimized by this set-up (Dacey, 2017). All persons in America are supposed to be guaranteed liberty: a justice system that incentivized officials in such a way would be completely disconnected to integrity.

In Arizona at this time, there is a certain level of this type of corruption present because the private prison business is booming, and its something, which only benefits corporations. Throughout America, opponents to the private prison system have had to use their voices, speaking out about the desire of the government to add thousands more prisons around the nation, something that you take around $50 million to create. Obviously, the private prison system creates a tremendous burden for taxpayers, when all educated citizens know that such money would be better used funding schools or used to rehabilitate the homeless. But an undeniable aspect of our government is in support of incarceration-for-profit and this injustice and corruption of government needs to be changed immediately. Looking back, in 1980 America only had a half a million people in prisons: today that number is 2.3 million. “The U.S. today has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners.  We put as many people in prison as China and Russia combined” (Dacey, 2017). The corruption began to seep into the U.S. system began around 1980 when the federal and local governments started to share some of their duties in running prisons to private, profit-motivated major corporations. Clearly this was a huge mistake, as it was only going to connect greed with the prison system. “CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) and GEO Group control most of this "market," or the human inventory in profit-producing prison cells.  The private prison industry is now the fourth-largest prison system in the United States, and CCA alone is the fifth largest” (Dacey, 2017). The sheer corruption that acts as a foundation of this system is completely staggering and unconstitutional. It is amazing that this system is allowed in America at all.

Manipulating the Legal System

Prisons quite simply used to be about crime and punishment, and protecting the members of society from dangerous criminals. However, within the private prison system, officials within our society are motivated to lock people up and ensure they stay locked up. Private prisons receive money from the government in compensation for every day the spaces in the walls remain occupied, comparable to how motels and comparable businesses work. Hence, these private corporations know that the more of their cells that are full, the more profits to be made for all people who hold shares in the company. To increase in the corruption and longevity of this crooked business, the big companies hire powerful lobbyists to sponsor legislation and attempt to influence lawmakers to pass laws that will be more conducive to putting people in jail and ensuring they stay there longer. “For-profit prison corporations spend generously on political campaigns to make sure that more of the prisoner inventory is directed to them, and so they can command 20-year government contracts with 90 percent occupancy guarantees – such as with the Arizona Department of Corrections – where the taxpayer holds the bag even when the crime rate goes down” (Dacey, 2017). Even more disturbing is that since motivated by money, for-profit prisons aren’t inclined to release prisoners. Corruption permeated all aspects of this system. Researchers have found that for-profit prisoners will tend to create bogus incident and disciplinary reports that impact parole dates (Dacey, 2017). Prisons are scary, often seemingly lawless places that can cause tremendous amounts of trauma to the individual. In prisons, cellmates learn how to abuse drugs, commit crimes, and engage in violence, while suffering enormous psychological scarring. Within the for-profit prison system, high rates of recidivism abound, a sign of the inherent failure of the system, but probably to the warped minds that run this system, they see it as a positive thing, as if these repeated prisoners are like “repeat customers”

Disrupting the for-profit prison system is something that needs to occur so that justice might reign again. Another way in which the egregious shame of mass incarceration can be disrupted is by pushing for drug sentencing reform. There is an aspect of mass incarceration that has been motivated and enabled by the opioid crisis in America. With the opioid crisis impacting people of all races and social classes, the powers that be, really have a duty to view it as a disease to be treated, rather than a dangerous moral failing to be punished. And overwhelmingly in Arizona, the policies at hand have remained sunken, backwards and generally ineffective, as the state uses a “tough on crime” method to attempt to fix drug use, in spite of the wealth of research which shows without a doubt that such methods do not minimize addiction nor do they have a positive impact on public safety (Fealk, 2017). Arizona is a state that really offers abysmally poor actions when it comes to addressing this issue; with their “tough-on-crime” stance, activities connected to drugs are the number two reason for arrest and the reason most charges are filed (Fealk, 2017). However, the state ensures that none of these people receive treatment for addictions, ensuring that the rate of recidivism will stay high.

Another sign of corruption that exists within Arizona is that “the state does not collect any aggregate data on how criminal sentencing laws are actually being applied. There was no way to know how many people were arrested or sentenced under a given criminal law, what sentence they received, or how much it cost” (Fealk, 2017). This is a deeply unsettling aspect of incarceration culture there, as it indicates a certain lawlessness within the system, where officials can just lock people up according to their own discretion, without any concern of even keeping appropriate records of their actions.

A recent task force in with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sought to shine a light among the dark halls of corruption. A group of law students within the state gathered data from the court buildings in several distinct counties in order to collect data about drug cases and drug sentencing. One of the major elements revealed by this method was that the criminal justice system in the state of Arizona isn’t just corrupt; it’s racist as well. “African Americans are more likely to go to prison for a drug offense (even possession) and receive sentences that are 24 percent longer than white people convicted of drug crimes” (Fealk, 2017). Furthermore, the data showed that the justice system was happy to arrest people for softer drug charges, such as possession or use. Very few to none of the charges incurred by the state were for harder drug crimes like sale or trafficking. The numbers broke down to demonstrate that on a daily basis, the state of Arizona spends a half-million per day to incarcerate people who have a mild drug offense. This data demonstrates all the markings of a society that is sick. Rather than attempt to understand the problem—how it was started and the elements that motivate it, along with how to help people and better support them—the system believes in the exploitation of those who bear these weaknesses, so that they can be punished and removed from society (Gottschalk, 2006). It is deeply troubling.

Fiscal Impacts

There’s been the repeated suggestion from lawmakers that Arizona can’t sustain this sort of corruption any longer and that the burden on taxpayers is too great. For each inmate incarcerated, represents a cost to the state and to the individual taxpayer. As a result of the fact that Arizona’s prison population is so large, with around 40,000 inmates to support each year, this ends up being an annual cost of $1 billion being shouldered by the government and the tax-payer (Gottsfield, 2017). Each year the state budget of Arizona gets tighter, as more cuts are made to tax payers and to public programs for the elderly, the homeless and the disabled. Such a tight state of economic affairs suggests that there has to be a more viable option for those incarcerated. As already stated, many of the people locked up in Arizona are non-violent offenders who are behind bars on first time drug charges. Research suggests that there are programs and means available that would be more effective in treating people who have gotten involved in drugs. “There are those who believe that all inmates in Arizona prisons and jails belong there. Contrary to this view is the growing national consensus that we should not be incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders, even those with prior drug convictions, who have not committed property crimes. In fact, there are a number of other less serious crimes whose sentences could be reduced as well without any deleterious impact on public safety. Moreover, even when offenders deserve incarceration, they may not have deserved the amount of time imposed - the punishment did not fit the crime” (Gottsfield et al., 2017).

Racism Revisited

There are some who argue that mass incarceration in states like Arizona represent the new form of Jim Crow as they often unfairly target minority populations. US Attorney General Eric Holder recently referred to a nonviolent drug offender who was given a mandatory life sentence without parole in a federal prison highlighting how such sentencing does not even come close to fitting the crime. The length and severity of such a sentence clearly demonstrates that there’s a sheer absence of justice. In many cases, prisoners are first time offenders being put away for a nonviolent case that does not even involve property damage, and thousands such offenders exist in the Arizona prison population. Such a state of affairs doesn’t keep Arizona any safer and in fact ends up undermining the general wellness of the collective as it sucks money away from more worthy affairs that need the time money and attention of the local society.

Historically, race relations in America have not favored blacks from the time of slavery, through segregation until now, where many argue that institutionalized racism prevents many African Americans from succeeding and reaching higher levels of social class and financial stability. Jim Crow laws were designed to curb the rights of blacks and to prevent them from exercising a full docket of human rights. Mass incarceration has a similar impact, even though the most commonly held perception is that justice is color blind and impervious to all things connected to bias, such as race, age, class and gender (Wacquant, 2002). Unfortunately, the facts tell us that just isn’t true. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid” (Alexander, 2013). In fact, researchers estimate that three out of four black men in Washington dc can expect to serve time in prison, at some point in their lives, particularly those from lower middle class household (Alexander, 2013). These statistics are mimicked in Arizona and all over the country. While some people argue that more blacks are incarcerated because they simply commit more crimes, a quick look at the data demonstrates that just isn’t true. The numbers of drug use among ethnic groups is more or less the same: “‘A 2001 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that, 6.4% of whites, 6.4 percent of blacks, and 5.3% of Hispanics were current users of illegal drugs.’ A subsequent DHHS study in 2003 also found “nearly identical rates of illegal drug use among whites and blacks, only a single percentage point between them” (Alexander, 2013). Reports from the US Department of Justice found that white youths were actually more likely to use or sell drugs than black youths (Alexander, 2013).

Given the dark history of America in regards to African Americans, one needs to examine just what happens to the average black person after being incarcerated and released. Once a prisoner is released to society, they do so with the new label of “felon” and this opens them up to all forms of classic discrimination familiar to black people living in the era of Jim Crow: these are things like employment discrimination, housing discrimination, not being able to exercise the right to vote, a limitation on educational opportunities, not being able to receive food stamps, nor serve on a jury (Alexander, 2013). All of these tenets are suddenly legal and now puts a black man in a position as having few rights than a black man living in the south at the height of Jim Crow. Hence, legal scholars all over the world have suggested that perhaps Jim Crow was never truly eradicated, but something that was simply redesigned (Wacquant, 2002). In order to get a clearer understanding of how this has manifested in Arizona, it would be useful to examine something such as race relations in Arizona at this time and historically as a means of understanding the state’s historical relationships with ethnic minorities.

While Arizona became an unlikely leader in battling segregation in 1953, when Maricopa Superior Court Judge Frederick C. Struckmeyer, Jr. decided in the case of Phillips vs. Phoenix Union High School District, that segregation was unconstitutional—this was still have decades of pro-segregation legislation. Segregation had been a hot button issues since 1909, when a law in Arizona passed allowing schools to segregate children on a basis of their race (Whittaker, 1997). This caused much fury and controversy around the state and while the Caucasian governor, Joseph H Kibbey vetoed this legislation, the state legislature was over to override his veto, which meant that in 1912 Arizona was officially a segregationist state (Whittaker, 1997). This slice of history gives a tremendous amount of insight into the history and culture along with some of the more overwhelming though subliminal motivations that shape Arizona state law. From a historical viewpoint, the majority of the state has believed in “separate but equal” and of the importance of the non-mingling between blacks and whites. While these backwards laws don’t exist anymore, there is still plenty of de-facto segregation, such as residential segregation that exists in the state today. With the majority of the incarcerated population made up of black and brown men, it does seem like the state is reliving some of its more racist and segregationist inclinations. This is not to a benefit to the white population nor to the state as a whole. Until there’s reform on sentencing and drug laws on a statewide level, there’s little doubt this trend will continue.

Summary

Arizona’s existence of for-profit prisons, large numbers of incarcerated ethnic minorities and lack of equitable sentencing represents a sickness inherent within their state justice system. The for-profit prison system in Arizona, as well as America as a whole, has gotten out of hand and is riddled with corruption, and is ultimately draining justice out of the justice system. This is a shameful state of affairs, and one that the citizens of the state pay for very dearly, as keeping mass incarceration within the state going each year costs them a billion dollars—while cuts are made to educational and social programs. One can only imagine how the state might thrive if that money were given to worthy programs. Finally, even the most perfunctory glance backwards at Arizona’s social, cultural and legislative history shows a state that was mired in racist laws and tendencies, historically upholding and fighting for segregation. It looks like these racist policies have just been renovated to fit modern times, and that ethnic minorities remain stripped of their rights and behind bars so that the state can fight a bogus “war on drugs.”

References

Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.

Dacey, J. R. (2017, January 8). Viewpoints: Private prisons are costly - and unconstitutional. Retrieved from https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op- ed/2017/01/08/private-prisons-arizona-dacey/96120404/

Fealk, R. (2018, February 9). Arizona: A case study in why we need drug sentencing reform. Retrieved from https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and- commentary/arizona-case-study-why-we-need-drug-sentencing-reform

Gottsfield, R. L. (2017, August). Fixing Arizona’s Mass Incarceration Dilemma | Morrison Institute for Public Policy. Retrieved from https://morrisoninstitute.asu.edu/products/fixing-arizona%E2%80%99s-mass- incarceration-dilemma

Gottschalk, M. (2006). The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in America. Cambridge University Press.

Rizer, A., & Haggerty, J. (2017, September 14). Our Turn: Want less crime? Put fewer people in jail. Retrieved from https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op- ed/2017/09/14/jail-reform-focus-pretrial-detention-crime/493424001/

Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration. New left review, 13.

Whitaker, M. C. (1997). In search of Black Phoenicians: African American culture and community in Phoenix, Arizona, 1868-1940.