Expensive Steel Bars, Superb Instruction in Crime, Little Deterrent Value

Expensive Steel Bars, Superb Instruction in Crime, Little Deterrent Value

Put someone behind bars, and you pretty much have decimated their ability to get a solid job later, with rare exceptions. We are incarceration crazy, with long sentences, we have a criminal justice system that works primarily out of under-represented defendants taking plea bargains knowing that the numbers are against them even if they are innocent and takes prisoners into a highly gang-infested prison world and teaches them how to be better criminals. 

Nothing illustrates our love of incarceration more than a recent decision made by the state of Alabama, with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country: “Amid a national debate over the use of pandemic relief funds, Alabama lawmakers swiftly approved a plan Friday [10/1] to tap $400 million from the [federal] American Rescue Plan to help build two super-size prisons, brushing off criticism from congressional Democrats that the money was not intended for such projects.” NBC News, October 2nd. Indeed, for a nation with 4% of the world’s population, we have a quarter of its incarcerated inmates. 

According to the Federal Register, “Based on FY [fiscal year] 2020 data, the average annual COIF [cost of incarceration fee] for a Federal inmate in a Federal facility in FY 2020 was $39,158 ($120.59 per day). The average annual COIF for a Federal inmate in a Residential Reentry Center for FY 2020 was $35,663 ($97.44 per day).” Some states have vastly higher costs; California for example triples the federal cost per inmate for a year. Average annual state per capita incarceration costs are generally 20-25% higher than federal costs. Those accused of a capital crime generate seven figures of extra costs of mandated judicial review, special facilities and the execution itself… forgetting about the horrors of the process itself and the occasional execution of an innocent individual. But the numbers tell you what a prison experience does to the average inmate. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, “About 66% of prisoners released across 24 states in 2008 were arrested within 3 years, and 82% were arrested within 10 years.” 

Decriminalization of marijuana possession in some states and shifting addicts into treatment programs has mollified some of these numbers, but it seems pretty obvious that whatever we are going is just plain not working. For society. For those incarcerated. For their families. And for taxpayers. We’ve even killed off more than a few corrections officers and inmates by callous disregard of COVID realities. Ever since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when so many mental treatment hospitals were closed down, prisons have been the fallback institutions with over 30% of those incarcerated with serious mental illness. Yet prisons are dramatically unprepared to deal with that issue. The choice for many with serious mental impairment is prison or life on the streets.

For some states and even the federal government, reliance on private “for-profit” prisons has alleviated some of the cost of building new facilities. Many states, like Mississippi, require that private prison charge a per inmate cost must be less than the average then-existing state cost. “Private prisons, which currently hold about 10 percent of the U.S. population behind bars, were originally promoted as a way to reduce operating costs of America’s system of incarceration and save taxpayers money. 

“In fact, according to a study in the  American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, whatever savings they have achieved have been mostly eclipsed by the fact that private prison inmates typically serve longer sentences…

“According to the study, it costs a private prison about $45,000 a year to house a prisoner, compared to the general cost of about $50,000 annually per inmate in a public prison, resulting in roughly $5,000 in savings per year.” TheCrimeReport.org (8/21/20). Conditions in private prisons are, on average, much worse than in public prisons. And since private prisons must generate a profit, delays in release and “add-on” time for infractions, typically add at least an extra 90 days to the average sentence, according to the above report, generate more money to that private prison… without any improvement in recidivism. So much for savings. As the federal government is withdrawing from private incarceration, some states are ramping up the practice. Our entire criminal justice system is just one huge failure, even in bright blue California.

Three criminal justice experts – former Los Angeles County district attorneys, Gil Garcetti and Ira Reiner, and executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution and a former federal prosecutor Miriam Aroni Krinsky – use an OpEd in the Los Angeles Times (October 24th) to address the slowly changing role of the earlier “get tough on crime” efforts that upped average sentence time and, under the now reversed “three strikes and you’re a lifer” statutes in a modern world: “In the 1980s and ’90s, California embarked on a disastrous social experiment. Legislators embraced reactionary law-and-order policies that ratcheted up punishment in criminal cases. The negative effect of these policies overwhelmingly fell on poor, Black and brown communities. Sentence lengths and the corresponding cost to taxpayers skyrocketed, with California’s prison population ballooning to more than 160,000 by 1999 from 23,000 in 1980.

“Although the number of people behind bars has dropped since then, more than 157,000 Californians are still under some form of supervision, costing the state more than $13 billion annually, with local jurisdictions spending billions more on jails, police and sheriff’s deputies. California’s addiction to incarceration has created a moral crisis and an economic sink hole as well.

“Proponents of ‘tough-on-crime’ policies continue to sell the public a false promise that more punishment means greater safety. But their math doesn’t add up. When California and other states reduced their prison populations over the last two decades, their crime rates declined to lows not seen since the 1960s. And despite fearmongering claims, there is no evidence that the recent increase in certain serious crimes — and in particular homicide — is associated with criminal justice reforms. (The increases occurred in places where reforms were embraced and where they were not.)” The challenge of a completely failed criminal justice system, rotten from top to bottom and hardly serving the taxpayers of this nation, is so huge that tackling the issues has been addressed piecemeal. And still conservative politicians and tough prosecutors do not want to change the system. 

What can be done? Well, the above troika of experts have at least one suggestion as a starting place: “Most of the projected savings would come from eliminating the use of many sentencing enhancements. It’s within prosecutors’ well-established discretion to add extra time to standard sentences. According to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it costs taxpayers $103,498 to incarcerate an individual annually in California. So just one extra year for each of the 72,852 people currently serving a prison sentence lengthened by an enhancement would cost Californians more than $7.5 billion. And more than 15,000 of these individuals are serving a sentence where the time added by enhancements is more than 15 years.

“It’s not just that this is a lot of money, it’s also that these billions of dollars are being spent on an ineffective response to crime. Research shows that excessive sentences may actually increase rates of reoffense, and therefore diminish public safety and create more victims of crime… In fact, people tend to age out of crime as they reach their 30s and 40s, so continuing to lock people up well into their 50s, 60s and beyond does not affect crime; it does, however, add significant costs as healthcare needs often increase with age… Despite the astronomical costs to taxpayers, the lack of evidence that sentencing enhancements make us safer, and the support from Los Angeles voters to get rid of them, some are still digging in their heels to protect the status quo.”

We just can no longer afford our incarceration-centric deviant approach to crime (when compared with the rest of the world). It is cruel. It does not work. And it only makes matters so much worse. Those who keep obstructing necessary reform just need to get out of the way!

I’m Peter Dekom, and in an era where tax dollars are needed for vastly more productive arenas, this colossal waste on ineffective criminal justice is simply too expensive to retain.