Overcrowded and Under-Funded Prisons According

Overcrowded and Under-Funded Prisons

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, on June 30, 2005, there were 2,186,230 prisoners being held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails, an increase of 2.6% from the previous year (Prison 2006). In other words, there were approximately 488 prison inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. Although the United States comprises less than 5% of the world's population, its incarceration rate leads the world, holding 25% of the world's prisoners (Marciniak 2002). The estimated annual operating cost of U.S. prisons and jails is $40 billion, making it the nation's largest and costliest program in human services (Marciniak 2002). Between 1980 and 2002, roughly 1,000 new prisons and jails were built in the United States, yet most remain dangerously overcrowded (Marciniak 2002). Individuals convicted of an offense today are far more likely to be sentenced to incarceration and a longer period of incarceration than they would have been in previous decades, a trend that has resulted in prison overcrowding and has left state governments burdened with funding a rapidly expanding penal system (Incarceration 2005).

A number of critics blame the U.S. wars on crime and drugs for the six-fold increase in the prison population, which has resulted in the construction of the world's largest prison system in less than three decades (McCormick 2000). According to Elliot Currie, in his study, Crime and Punishment in America, since 1972, the U.S. has been engaged in an "unprecedented, unparalleled, and largely unnoticed social experiment, 'testing the degree to which a modern industrial society can maintain public order through the threat of punishment' or, more specifically, imprisonment" (McCormick 2000). Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project notes that "during this period public policy in the U.S. has resulted in...a second wave of the great 'experiment' in the use of incarceration as a means of controlling crime" (McCormick 2000). David Rothman's the Discovery of the Asylum, explores America's fascination with penitentiaries and stiff sentences that can be traced back to the early days of the Republic, however recent policies aimed at controlling crime have generated a corrections boom that has led to the construction of the largest prison system in human history (McCormick 2000).

Between 1972 and 1998 the U.S. State and Federal prison population more than sextupled, increasing from less than 200,000 to over 1.2 million, and by mid-1999 the total had grown to 1,860,520 (not counting those being held or supervised elsewhere, not the roughly 4 million on parole or probation) (McCormick 2000). In 2000, the national incarceration rate was 5-8 times that of other industrialized democracies, meaning that not only does the United States imprison more people than other nations, but has approximately a quarter of all the prisoners in the world behind its bars (McCormick 2000).

Like Currie and other commentators, noted criminologist Norval Morris argues that the increases in the U.S. prison population are the direct result of policy changes regarding sentencing, especially for drug offenders (McCormick 2000). These policy changes, which began with New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws in 1973, Massachusetts Bartley-Fox Amendment in 1975, and Michigan's Felony Firearms Statue in 1977, heralded in a wave of "tough-on-crime" bills in state legislatures that have replaced indeterminate sentences with so-called "truth-in-sentencing" laws that called for mandatory minimums, stiff sentencing guidelines, and the "three-strikes" rule (McCormick 2000). Federal legislation, such as the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, and the Omnibus Crime Control Bill of 1994, also moved in the same direction. These state and federal policies have resulted in more and significantly stiffer prison sentences being handed down for a broad array of crimes, which have in turn created a sextupling of the U.S. prison population (McCormick 2000). Moreover, policies have resulted in a disproportionate increase in the numbers of non-violent criminals being sentenced and kept in prison. In fact, during the last three decades, the greatest increases in the prison population "have been the result of jailing low-level nonviolent drug offenders who would not previously have been incarcerated" (McCormick 2000).

With an inmate population that grows by 50,000 to 80,000 a year, the financial costs of these new policies have been staggering. Since 1980, some 1,000 new jail and prisons have been built and about one new 1,000 bed facility will need to be added every week from 2000-2010 to keep up with the prison population (McCormick 2000).

The cost of incarcerating an adult offender ranges from $25,000 to $70,000 a year, and the total cost of constructing each new cell is approximately $100,000. During the last two decades, the annual budget to building and maintaining prisons has increased from $7 billion to $40 billion (McCormick 2000). According to Stephen Donziger, "prisons are the largest pubic works program in America, providing housing, food, (and only sometimes) education, mental health services, and drug treatment" (McCormick 2000).

Since 1980, reports have noted: "spending on crime control increased at twice the rate of defense spending," and "spending on corrections on the state level has increased faster than any other spending category" (McCormick 2000). Yet, despite this building and spending spree, roughly 75% of all prisoners are housed in overcrowded facilities. In 1995 forty states, two territories, and the District of Columbia were under court order to address overcrowding in their systems (McCormick 2000).

Aside from the financial costs, the human costs of America's wars on crime and drugs have been devastating for African-Americans. According to Michael Tonry, author of Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America, criminal behavior of African-Americans has not been getting worse, yet since the mid-1970's, the war on drugs has resulted in a steady and disproportionate increase in black inmates (McCormick 2000). In fact, the number of African-American inmates has tripled since 1980. From 1979-1992, the number of African-Americans sentenced to state and federal prisons grew from 39% to 54% (McCormick 2000). In 1991, incarceration rates for African-Americans were seven times higher than those for whites. According to studies conducted in 1990, 23% of African-American males aged 20-29 were under criminal justice system control (McCormick 2000). Studies by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives and the Sentencing Project revealed that on any average day in 1991 some 42% of young African-American males in Washington, D.C., and 56% of those in Baltimore were in the criminal justice system (McCormick 2000). By 1995, one out of every three young African-American males nationwide was under the criminal justice system. One critic notes that as a result of these trends, half of all current prison inmates are African-American, stating that "a black boy in 1991 stood a 29% chance of being imprisoned at some point in his life, compared to...a 4% chance for a white boy" (McCormick 2000).

In 1970, there were approximately 5,600 women in state and federal prisons across the United States, and by 1996, there were some 75,000 - a thirteen-fold increase (McCormick 2000). Critics calculated that at the beginning of the new millennium, incarcerated females exceeded the entire U.S. inmate population in 1970.

The majority of this increase has been the result of women arrested for non-violent crimes, with African-American women being the fastest growing demographic group among the newly incarcerated (McCormick 2000). The number of women under the jurisdiction of state or federal prisons increased 3.4% from mid-year 2004, reaching 106,174, while the number of men increased 1.3%, totaling 1,406,649 (Prison 2006).

Currie believes that prisons have "become America's social agency of the first resort for coping with the deepening problems of a society in perpetual crisis...a substitute for the more constructive social policies we were avoiding" (McCormick 2000). Another critic argues that America's highly punitive wars on crime and drugs have allowed "both the public and politicians to evade more intractable and more unwelcome problems" (McCormick 2000). For example, focusing on street crime offers elected officials and the general public a "distraction from and scapegoats for the larger social ills" facing American society (McCormick 2000). The authors of the Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission noted that America's massive prison construction has represented a commitment by our nation to plan for social failure by spending billions of dollars to lock up hundreds of thousands of people while at the same time cutting billions of dollars for programs that would provide opportunity to young Americans" (McCormick 2000).

Tonry and others note that the current corrections boom has been part of a war against the poor, arguing that for a number of reasons the war on drugs, which has provided so many of the growing ranks of inmates filling U.S. prisons and jails, has largely targeted inner-city neighborhoods where the poor and minorities are over represented, and have had a foreseeable and disastrous impact on African-American communities (McCormick 2000). According to Tonry, "anyone with knowledge of drug-trafficking patterns and of police arrest policies could have foreseen that the enemy troops in the War on Drugs would consist largely of young, inner city, minority males" (McCormick 2000). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan agreed, noting that by choosing to fight the drug problem through prohibition, "we are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities" (McCormick 2000). In the American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, David Musto notes that throughout the twentieth century, America's drug wars have regularly scape-goated minority groups, like the Chinese with opium, marijuana among the Mexicans, and cocaine among the African-Americans (McCormick 2000).

The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals reported in 1973 that "the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record a failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it," yet during the next two decades both state and federal legislatures implemented increasingly stiffer penalties and mandatory minimums claiming that prisons were an effective tool for crime control, and longer prison terms would reduce crime by deterring or incapacitating criminals (McCormick 2000). However, at the end of this period, after the average prison sentence had tripled and the prison population at more than quadrupled, a National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by the Reagan administration's Department of Justice asked: "What effect has increasing the prison population had on levels of violent crime? Apparently, very little" (McCormick 2000).

These decisions have resulted in filling U.S. prisons with large numbers of non-violent and drug offenders - over 50% in both state and federal prisons - at an annual cost of $20,000 or more for each incarcerated individual, even though there is increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not the most effective means of achieving public safety (Incarceration 2005).

Other critics point to special interests for the burgeoning prison-industrial complex. Politicians rely on "tough-on-crime" rhetoric to get elected and re-elected, while rural communities see prison construction as a boon to their local economy and employment rates (McCormick 2000). Other special interests groups include the swelling ranks of correctional officers, whose union support tough anti-crime policies that will ensure more prison jobs. Moreover, an increasing number of major corporations are profiting from the nearly $40 billion a year corrections boom, and a private prison industry that has gone from 11,000 to 140,000 beds in the last ten years and is now worth some $4 billion (McCormick 2000).

Researchers, such as Tonry and Currie, argue that tough penalties have little effect on crime rates. Studies that compare the punitiveness of different states, and studies that track the effect of longer prison terms on crimes rates, conclude that "to the extent that prison 'works,' it works only in dismayingly uneven and inefficient ways" (McCormick 2000). There have been modest decreases in the number of property crimes and robberies, but there has been "no overall decrease in serious criminal violence, and there have been sharp increases in many places - including many of the places that incarcerated the most or increased their rates of imprisonment the fastest" (McCormick 2000). In fact, on researcher notes, "the best that can be said about changes in homicide is that these rates were no worse in 1995 than in 1970 despite the addition of nearly one million prison inmates" (McCormick 2000).

While effects on overall and violent crime rates have been modest or negligible, overwhelming evidence indicates that criminal justice efforts to control the drug trade through interdiction and "drug busts" have been singularly ineffective (McCormick 2000). Although more than 400,000 persons are incarcerated for drug offenses, illegal drugs remain as or more available and inexpensive as they were two decades ago (McCormick 2000).

Author Jerome Miller argues that the "prison experiment" is not only ineffective, but is decidedly counter-productive and criminogenic. Recent studies suggest that an "increased emphasis on apprehending drug offenders is harmful to overall crime control efforts" because it detracts needed resources from other important law enforcement efforts (McCormick 2000). Moreover, an increasing reliance on incarceration has overwhelmed critical parole and probation programs "geared to the reintegration of offenders into society" (McCormick 2000). Furthermore, flooding U.S. prisons with low-level drug offenders who are required to sever out mandatory minimums has resulted in the early release of violent criminals back into the community. A 1992 Illinois study linked the huge increase in drug law enforcement in the state to the sharp rise in violent crime, because "greater numbers of violent criminals were released from prison early to make room for the surge of drug offenders" (McCormick 2000). According to Miller, America's war on drugs and crime have raised the levels of violence in the inner city and created an "oppositional culture" (McCormick 2000).

According to Currie, America's prison experiment has coincided with significant reductions in the nation's social safety net, and a weakening of the social compact with the very people and communities that are most threatened by crime and violence (McCormick 2000). After three decades of this corrections boom, the financial and physical divide between the rich and poor in the U.S. has steadily increased, "resulting in the largest income inequality of any industrialized democracy and the doubling of both the number and population of high-poverty neighborhoods" (McCormick 2000).

The doubling of the prison population in the 1980's was accompanied by significant cuts in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in the Food Stamp program, in the child-nutrition and maternal/child health programs, in federal funds for day-care, and for training and employment programs (McCormick 2000). Between 1976 and 1989, state spending on corrections increased by 95%, while higher education declined by 6% and welfare dropped by 41%, and in 1991, for the first time in U.S. history, several major cities spent more on law enforcement than on secondary education (McCormick 2000). According to the National Criminal Justice Commission's 1996 report, "The result is that today among developed countries, the United States has the highest rates of incarceration, the widest spread of economic inequality, and the highest levels of poverty" (McCormick 2000). In California, then governor Gray Davis decreed that most government departments had to cut their budgets by 15%, including higher education and K-12 education, while at the same time planning a $335 million, 5,000 bed maximum security prison at Delano (Munoz 2006).

Although drug policies removed thousands of drug dealers from America's streets, they also created a huge and rapidly growing industry that must be funded by American taxpayers. The private sector is very involved in prison management, and prison privatization is one of the nation's top industries (Dickenson 1996). Some companies manage entire prisons, others specialize in particular operations such as health or food services, while manufactures provide necessary items, from uniforms and bedding to surveillance and monitoring equipment (Dickenson 1996). The prison population is expected to only increase, however even without growth, the current prison population will still be much more expensive to maintain in the future (Dickenson 1996). According to the February 1996 issue of American Demographics, "offenders who are in prison for drug-related crimes are more likely to have serious health problems...the prison population is also aging...these trends ill increase prisons health-care costs" (Dickenson 1996). Yet, these trends are dwarfed by the continuing consequences of tough sentencing laws, and until drug abuse stops or drug laws change, "the prison population bomb will keep ticking away" (Dickenson 1996).