Get Out of Jail – Free

It costs a lot of money to keep and inmate in jail (averaging around $80/day) and not a whole lot of money to supervise a parolee ($3.50 per day average). Politicians got elected on a “get tough on crime” policy, stiffening sentences, denying leniency and clamping down on those on the wrong side of the tracks. The sentencing reform acts that staggered through the states and the federal government in the last two decades led to the United States having some of the longest sentences on earth, and for a nation with about 5% of the earth’s total population, we have about a quarter of her incarcerated inmates!

The federal criminal justice system doesn’t even have parole, and except for about a 15% reduction for “good behavior,” a felon under the federal system can pretty much rest (pun intended) assured that they will serve the entirety of his/her sentence. When you see absurdly long sentences, like 150 years for Bernie Madoff, it’s all about the kind of prison they will serve in, since even a 20 year sentence would likely exceed Mr. Madoff’s “best case” life expectancy. He’s not doing time in a minimum security facility!

Drugs, directly or indirectly, account for most of those behind bars – dealers, users, folks stealing to get drugs, people committing violent crimes while under the influence of drugs, gangs dedicated to the shipment and distribution of drugs, turf wars over drug routes and “drug territory,” etc. Former Mexican President, Vicente Fox, stopped a measure that would have decriminalized some drug crimes back in 2006, but with the renewed violence in his home country, he recently suggested that the taxation and decriminalization of such crimes are issues that need to be revisited.

Even California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, called for a review of the State’s position on marijuana: “It's time for a debate... I think all of those ideas of creating extra revenues, I'm always for an open debate on it. And I think we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other drugs,” he said in May of this year. A change of political heart or an economic necessity as states are running out of money to house inmates?

Alternative sentencing structures, the New York “drug courts” (where treatment under threat of incarceration is applied to many cases) and shorter times in prison are all on the table these days. The July 13^th Washington Post: “States have also begun to shorten probation and to reduce the number of people sent to prison for technical violations, such as missing appointments. Some states are also more readily granting parole to prisoners as they become eligible, reversing a trend that kept even parole-eligible inmates locked up longer.

“These trends are showing up almost everywhere as a direct response to governors and state legislatures looking with alarm at prison costs eating up increasing shares of their budgets. According to Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project for the Pew Center on the States, more than half the states and the District are trying to reduce the growth in their prison populations through alternative sentencing and through new probation and parole procedures… ‘The economy is bringing a lot of states to the table,’ Gelb said, ‘and the research has pointed to a path for them to more public safety at less cost.’”

When states are entertaining mass releases of inmates from prison to recue costs, you really have to wonder why we had to spend all that money, build all those prisons, and increase mandatory time in prison for various crimes in the first place. A bandwagon seems to be a very bad place to launch legislation that we will, sooner or later, come to regret.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.