Prison Reform the United States

Prison Reform

The United States has many reasons to be proud, its prison system is not one of them. America has fewer than 5% of the world's population, but nearly 25% of the world's prisoners (Liptak, 2008.) the U.S. has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. Russia is the only other major industrialized nation that even comes close, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have significantly lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63 (ibid). These American incarcerated help make up an enormous prison population, which has increased from 300,000 to two million in 30 years, a rate that dwarfs those of China and Iran. In fact, the U.S. leads all countries in prisoner production, the result of an entirely unique approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for myriad crimes, for anything from white collar thievery to selling small amounts of marijuana, which would rarely lead to any prison sentences in other world nations. In addition, they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Worse, the American prison system is being compared by some to the new Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010). More African-Americans are either incarcerated or on parole than were actually slaves in 1850. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised due to their felon status than in 1870. Skip to next paragraph. Alex Durham (1994) gets right to the point by asking: "Why should we expect the correctional system to be able to accomplish so much when so many other social institutions have failed? When family, school, and churches are unable to inculcate law-abiding behavior, why should we be surprised if the correctional also system fails?" Is Durham correct? Does the U.S. want to change its prison Guinness Book of Records status and, if so, could it actually improve its failing system? Robert Johnson (xxxx), offers several suggestions on how a prison system can be changed for the betterment of the prisoner, victims and society in general. He calls on the goodwill of citizenry to place an emphasis on implementing such programs, yet American history does not bode well for their response.

Before addressing changes to the penal system, it is imperative to determine how the U.S. reached this point in the first place. For a country that was supposedly founded on freedom and liberty, it has taken a number of steps backward along this line. In the 1960s, the prisons were losing populations, and most citizens saw drug addiction as a public health problem, not one for the criminal courts (Schlosser, 1998). The prisons, themselves, were mostly viewed as a brutal and useless means of controlling criminal behavior. The Federal Bureau of Prisons was expecting to shut down large penitentiaries in several states, and the number of California inmates had fallen by over a quarter from 1963 to 1972, despite the state's quickly growing population. The number of New York state prisoners had declined to its lowest since at least 1950.

In January, 1973 Senator Barry Goldwater relied on the much-used fear of crime to entice white middle-class voters. That same month, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave a State of the State address demanding all illegal-drug dealers, even juvenile offenders, be punished with a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole and that plea-bargaining should not be allowed. By proposing the strictest drug laws in the country's history, he assumed the lead on a problem that would soon become a major priority on the nation's political agenda. The Rockefeller drug laws, legislated just a few months later by the state government, were not exactly what were earlier proposed: the penalty for possessing four ounces of an illegal drug or selling two ounces was a mandatory prison term of 15 years to life. The enactment also included a provision establishing a mandatory prison sentence for numerous second felony convictions, despite the crime or its circumstances. The governor proudly stated that New York had passsed "the toughest anti-drug program in the country" (Schlosser, 1998). Additional states joined the bandwagon and legislated harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Even Democrat, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, led the push to renew the U.S. compulsory minimums that were incorporated in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The strategy worked: 19 months after his drug laws were on the books Rockefeller became Vice President of the United States.

By the mid-1990s, 1.75 million people were incarcerated in prison or jail throughout the U.S. According to the Oxford History of Prisons (Morris & Rothman, 1998), these prisons now range from high-security double-barred steel cages with high-walled, electronically patrolled surroundings to rooms in unlocked buildings and unfenced fields. They run the gambit from psychological pain from windowless rooms of close-confined and sensory-deprived 23-hour isolation to work camps with no adversity. They include so-called "open prisons," which look just like farms and inmates who spend the entire day working with no supervision in the community, "weekend prisons," "day prisons," "co-educational prisons." Some prisons have tennis courts, while others only have one hour of pacing in an outdoor cage three times a week, some look just like workers' hostels, and others are excessively crowded. Mostly, however, there are prisons in larger cities where violence and brutality are the norm and consist of a deadening routine. Every day it is the same boring schedule, unless a lockdown occurs. Then the prisoners remain in their cells 24 hours a day with one weekly shower.

The price of these prisons is exorbitant. The operating costs for the U.S. state and federal prisons and jails climbed from $49 billion in 1999 to $57 billion in 2001, at the same time as the population rose from 2.6 to 3.6% every year. Between 1984 and 1994, New York state increased its corrections spending by $761 million, at the same time as spending on state colleges and universities fell by $615 million. In 1995, all of the American states combined spent more on prison than colleges. This is a trend that is accelerating (Soering, 2004).

Since 1969, federal court interventions have impacted a wide range of areas of prison operations, such as staffing, medical and mental health care, food, hygiene, sanitation, disciplinary procedures, segregation conditions, fire safety, inmate classification, grievance policies, race, sex and religious discrimination and accommodations, and disability discrimination and accommodations (Schlanger, 2006). In 1995, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) was passed with the strong backing of the state attorneys general who wanted better control over the institutions (Wharton, 1996). No longer did the federal court supervision have power over several state correctional systems and further court intervention became increasingly difficult (Schlanger, 2006), which led to greater possibility of negatively impacting prison conditions. Sullivan (2000), for instance, reports that the Tennessee prisons have increasingly deteriorated after they no longer fell under federal court supervision, including the decrease in the correctional staff and increase in the amount of violations of regulations governing mental health, fire and occupational safety, and hazardous materials. In February 2009, federal judges found prison conditions in California so poor that inmates die regularly of suicides and lock of proper care (Thompson, 2009). Katz, Levitt, and Shustorovich (2003) have used the number of deaths as a comparison for prison conditions. The prison mortality rate is computed as prison deaths per 1,000 state prisoners, which due to data limitations, is not adjusted for the prisoners' age, gender, or race.

Given the situation in the prisons, is there any hope to reform of the inmates? The results are mixed on the answer to this complicated question. Tonry does not see this present penal system changing in the foreseeable future. The prison will remain the primary punishment result for serious crimes, since "symbolically appropriate responses are needed" (p. 4). He believes that there are "good reasons to doubt that changes in the severity of punishment have any significant deterrent effects on behavior, no one doubts that having a punishment system, compared with not having one, does have crime-preventive effects." However, Tonry adds, a prison does not have to be a "walled institution where adult criminals in large numbers are held for protracted periods, with economically meaningless or insufficient employment, with vocational or educational training for a few, with rare contacts with the outside world, in cellular conditions varying from the decent to those which a zoo would not tolerate" (Morris 1965, p. 268).

Lin (2000) explains that although sentences continue to get longer and the situation in the prisons get worse, most of the prisoners do eventually return to society. Most recently, crime policies both at the state and federal levels have focused on incarceration with longer sentences, "mandatory minimum sentencing," the reduction of time off for good behavior, and the abolition of parole. These policies are expected to lower the crime rate by keeping possible recidivists off the streets and deter prisoners from reoffending. How much these policies succeed at achieving their goals is greatly debated. Even if they do, they create new policy problems, such as ever expanding prison populations and extensive overcrowding, and released prisoners, who for their sake and the society's must be reintegrated into the community. The average felony sentence imposed upon federal and state offenders in 1996 was 62 months, or just over 5 years. On average these prisoners actually serve 45% of a state sentence for a mean prison stint of 2 years and 4 months, and 85% of a federal sentence for a stint of 4 years and 5 months. Once they are released, the recidivism rates are high. According to Lin (2000), "incarceration, as it stands, does not prevent recidivism" (p. 4). In addition, even if the released prisoners do not commit another crime, it does not mean that they become self-supporting and contribute to their community as much as possible.

.Lin (2000) argues that it is not clear that prisons, as institutions, have the capacity to provide the type of environment required for preparation of returning to the outside world. Prisons are not presently designed to be schools or factories, most do not have any facility for providing advisors who can counsel or environments where family ties and support can be nurtured. The history of work, counseling, and family programs in prisons does not bode well for the future. The programs that do exist are difficult to evaluate, often operated arbitrarily, and continually wondering if rehabilitation actually works. The prison is an institution marked by great staying power but modest achievement.

Johnson, in his book Hard Time: Understanding and Reforming the Prison (xxxx) quotes Hawthorne who, at the turn of the 20th century, described his prison experience in an article called "Our barbarous Penal System." Hawthorne was writing about Atlanta Federal penitentiary, but his focus was that all prisons were basically corrupt. To Hawthorne, prison reform is impossible. As noted above, many prison critics share these views. They would believe that the American penal systems will never serve any constructive purpose. Prisons are just taking people off the streets and warehousing them. According to Johnson (xxxx), most Americans favor prisons that offer a combination of punishment and treatment. They believe that prisoners should get their punishment, get well with education and training and then get on with their lives.

Johnson (xxxx) explains that prison reform has at least two present connotations. The first is restructuring sentencing to assure that only the more serious offenders go to prison, perhaps for longer terms than presently and the development of intermediate and other sanctions to take up the sagging of the smaller prison system. Johnson's emphasis is on the second connotation of prison reform, or improving individual prisons. He states that reformed prisons must provide Spartan but responsive conditions of confinement that have access to programs, because these promote personal autonomy, security and relatedness to others and allow offenders to assume responsibility for their own conduct and "get on" constructively with their lives. Even a bloated prison system, Johnson explains, which has decent prisons, is a major improvement over warehousing. Johnson adds that this means understanding the pains of the prison system. The goal of prison reform is to develop mature adults who are able to live productively in a society and cope with daily problems they face in life without harming others and to attempt to become productive citizens who are willing take responsibility for their community and work for its progress.

One of the more successful programs that Johnson (xxxx) uses as an example is the Quay classification system, which consists of a reliable and valid measure of the prisoner's current behavior by looking at his or her past behavior. The Quay system provides prison officers with a tool that they can use to provide a quick and reliable account of a prisoner's current behavior. This vehicle can be used in a number of ways: to track changes in a prisoner's behavior over time, to compare the behavioral characteristics of the populations of different prisons and determine the degree of displayed aggressive behavior, to measure the change in the behavior of a group of prisoners following a change in regimen, to be part of a classification system that will ensure that prisoners are not held above a necessary level of security, to protect certain vulnerable prisoners.

Another example that Johnson (xxxx) provides is unit management, with the purpose of determining inmate program needs and monitoring involvement to encourage pro-social institution and community behaviors to benefit inmates, victims and society. Unit management stress a multi-disciplinary unit team, with staff offices located within each inmate housing unit, which are responsible for responding to emergencies and disturbances and assuming necessary correctional officer posts. These unit managers are responsible for directing and supervising a housing unit and total administration in addition to planning, developing, and implementing programs to meet the inmates' particular needs. Innovative programming requires close supervision and evaluation. Correctional Counselors develop and implement these programs, provide counseling and serve as the unit expert and coordinator of inmate.

Dealing with stress is another necessity, Johnson (xxxx) notes, and points to Toch who has suggested an orientation program for incoming prisoners. In an ideal situation, no one would send inmates into an unfamiliar environment where the prisoners cannot monitor the consequences of decisions. Environmental circumstances are another issue to face. Johnson (xxx) writes about defining ecological settings that are conducive to the prisoner. For example, prisoners who are prone to violence would be assigned to settings that combined the ecological dimensions of freedom and support. It is necessary to place people in proper environments and have constructive activities from learning how to cope with daily adjustment problems to participation in formal correctional programs.