Jailbait

Oh how Americans love to show how tough on crime they can be and don’t seem remotely loathe to spend the $40,000 or so it costs to keep an average inmate in prison for a single year. Line ‘em up and and slap ‘em in the pokey, ‘specially if they are African American. I’ll repeat the harsh statistic I brought out in my February 28^th blog:

The bottom of the socioeconomic ladder has been particularly brutal for young Black males: “Approximately 12%-13% of the American population is African-American, but they make up 40% of the almost 2.1 million male inmates in jail or prison (U.S. Department of Justice, 2009)…

·         A black male born in 1991 has a 29% chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life.

·         Nearly one in three African American males aged 20–29 are under some form of criminal justice supervision whether imprisoned, jailed, on parole or probation.

·         One out of nine African American men will be incarcerated between the ages of 20 and 34.

·         Black males ages 30 to 34 have the highest incarceration rate of any race/ethnicity.” Wikipedia. The numbers remain consistent right through into the present day.

And as an African-American Attorney General, plagued by too many complaints about the government’s intrusive surveillance policies, Eric Holder seems to be focused on making his second term mark in three critical areas: battling the Tea Party movement as it tries to restrict and repeal voting rights (with a conservative Supreme Court towing the line), fighting for gay rights particularly same sex marriages and making some sense out of our amazingly stupid and prohibitively costly sentencing laws, a practice that has the United States with 5% of the world’s population and yet a quarter of its incarcerated prisoners.

As recreational drug use that once drew severe prison terms slowly becomes legal, as the social stigma on such usage – to which the President of the United States admits he has indulged – dissipates, it seems that the easiest sentencing issue to address is how we cover non-violent drug offenders. Given the above incarceration realities of African-American offenders, it seems that this review of sentencing practices is as much a racial as it is a cost concern. When the impact on getting a job is fairly well decimated with a felony conviction, we seem to be unnecessarily creating a permanent underclass that will only tax every aspect of the criminal justice system and the welfare state.

We have already begun the process: “In 2010, Congress unanimously voted to abolish the 100-to-1 disparity between sentences for crack cocaine offenses and those for powdered cocaine, a vestige of the crack epidemic. Now, the Obama administration and its allies in Congress are pushing to go even further. Mr. Holder wants to make prisoners eligible for early release if they were sentenced under the now-abolished crack guidelines. And he wants judges to have more discretion when it comes to sentencing nonviolent drug offenders…

“Libertarian-minded Republicans see long prison sentences as an ineffective and expensive way to address crime… ‘This is the definition of how you get bipartisan agreement,’ [Kentucky Republican Rand] Paul said in an interview. ‘It’s not splitting the difference. It’s finding areas of common interest.’

“Mr. Paul is backing a sentencing overhaul bill, also supported by Mr. Holder and the Obama administration, that he predicts will pass the Senate with support from up to half of its Republicans. The bill’s sponsors include Democratic stalwarts such as Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee chairman, as well as Republicans with strong Tea Party credentials like Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.” New York Times, March 3^rd. If this can reduce federal costs, help unburden the welfare state, and add a modicum of rationality to  our out-of-control criminal justice system… while uniting the big divide between both sides of the aisle, we need to support if not champion the effort.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and this is the kind of bi-partisan togetherness that serves everyone well.