Dear Readers, Did you know that there are nearly 2.3 million Americans incarcerated, while there are only about 1.8 million Europeans incarcerated? Yep, if you count all inmates in Europe and all of Russia, there are still far more Americans in jails and prisons.
This illness shows no end in sight; in 20 years (1987 to 2006), we went from approximately 500,000 persons in prisons to over 1.5 million, a three-fold increase.
Did you know that China, with far more citizens and a repressive government, has less than a million of its citizens in jail, making it a distant second to the U.S.? Yes, our great “free” country locks up far more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Sadly, we have crossed a number of embarrassing thresholds; more than one out of every 100 Americans is incarcerated, more than one of every 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34, and a disgusting one in every nine black men in this same age group.
These grim statistics, and more, are available in an unsettling study published by the Pew Center on the States called the Public Safety Performance Project. The goal of this report was to examine prison statistics and consider the drag our criminal justice policies has had on our state budgets.
As with any report of this nature, it draws several controversial conclusions from its analysis.
On a purely statistical basis, imprisonment does not appear to have any effect on recidivism rates, age does (recidivism rates drop dramatically as a percentage of older Americans).
The report also concludes that increasing imprisonment rates have been driven by policy decisions, rather than crime rates; the latter have decreased, yet incarceration rates continue to sky-rocket. Spikes in prison populations can be traced to the passing of popular “three strikes” mandatory imprisonment provisions.
However, a contributing factor for incarceration rates has been, increasingly, the use of prison as a punishment mechanism for repeat offenders, e.g., nearly one half of those released from prison are back within three years of release for a new crime or rules violations.
There are some dim long-term consequences for our seeming addiction to longer sentences and re-incarceration. The costs of housing prisoners have far outpaced inflation, particularly due to ridiculously soaring medical costs for older prisoners.
This strains state discretionary expenditures leaving less money available for education, transportation, and healthcare. From 1987 to 2006, there was a 127 percent national increase in spending on corrections, where there was only a 21 percent increase in higher education.
Prison operations are not cheap. With capital improvements considered, each bed space costs close to $65,000 per year to operate. Georgia actually spends less of its general funding budget (5.4 percent) than the national average of nearly 7 percent of budget on corrections.
These numbers are a bit deceptive, as they do not account for heavy Federal subsidies – this is certainly true with education (there is also the Georgia Lottery), health and transportation.
Ultimately, in Georgia (which has the second highest rate of incarceration, behind only Louisiana), for every budget-dollar spent on higher education, 50 cents was spent on corrections (in 1987, it was less than 25 cents), and nearly 16 percent of our state workforce is employed in corrections. The Pew Study suggests there may be some ways to reduce costs, or slow growth, by funding alternative programs (drug education, closer parole/ probation monitoring, diversion centers).
The value of such approaches, however, is often lost in the siren call of the politically expedient and popular “tough on crime.” Still, we have to do something different, we have to do better.
Local attorney Jim Rockefeller owns the Rockefeller Law Center and is a former Houston County Chief Assistant District Attorney, and a former Miami Prosecutor. E-mail confidential legal questions to ajr@rockefellerlawcenter.com. Visit www.rockefellerlawcenter.com for Frequently Asked Questions and Jim’s blog, The Rockefeller Report.
