Incomplete Sentences

No matter how many times I repeat this statistic, it stuns me. We’re a nation that contains 5% of the earth’s population, but we house 25% of the world’s incarcerated inmates. Our sentences are long by almost any international standard, we most certainly do not rehabilitate, and other than taking criminals off the streets at an absurd cost to taxpayers, jails and prisons seem to accomplish little of what we are told they are supposed to do. Once an inmate is convicted, their employability quotient drops for life. They are pushed to the lowest occupational rungs of the economic ladder, and it they do secure employment, the work is usually the lowest paid with marginal benefits (if any) and virtually no chance for advancement.

The bitterness of being incarcerated in a gang-infested, ultra-violent world of bad food and worse conditions, amplifies over the years at the lack of any meaningful economic opportunity after the “debt to society” was paid. Not to worry, because most inmates have received all sorts of advanced training while they were doing time. They can choose from a litany of experts, ready to share their knowledge and skills. Armed robbery? Extortion and kidnapping? Credit card fraud? Hacking bank accounts? Making, smuggling, marketing and selling some hard narcotics? How to get just about any gun you could ever want? And so, so much more. Our prisons are some of the best “graduate schools of crime” imaginable. Strangely, jailing people tends to push crime rates up, so even deterrence is a questionable goal.

In an April 2014 report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics “tracked 404,638 state prisoners from 30 states who were released in 2005. It found that 67.8 percent of them were re-arrested within three years of their release and 76.6 percent were re-arrested within five years. Of the latter group, more than a third were re-arrested in the first six months after leaving prison, and more than half were arrested by the end of the first year, showing that the rate of recidivism was highest during the first year and declined every year after that.” TheDailyBeast.com, April 22, 2014. The average cost across the United States to house a single inmate is approximately $32,000. Wow!

We’ve gotten to the point where both sides of the aisle agree that the American prison system doesn’t work, we are actually creating and training criminals at a horrific cost to taxpayers and we really can no longer afford to keep building prisons and housing inmates for no particular offsetting benefit to society. We have better uses for our tax dollars. The Editorial Board of the New York Times (February 16^th) explains why we cannot seem to make any headway to solve this problem, at least as to federal crimes, in Congress.

“In the last [Congressional] session, senators introduced three bipartisan bills. Two proposed ‘front end’ reforms, like reducing or eliminating ridiculously long mandatory minimum sentences for some drug crimes. The other focused on ‘back end’ fixes, like increasing opportunities for good-time credit to allow certain prisoners early release.

“None of the bills got anywhere, but it was encouraging to see all three reintroduced in the new Republican-led Senate. At least it was until they ran into a roadblock in the shape of Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Mr. Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wields great power over any sentencing legislation… His predecessor, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is a co-sponsor of the most far-reaching bill, which would allow judges to ignore mandatory minimum sentences in certain circumstances.

“But Mr. Grassley, for reasons that defy basic fairness and empirical data, has remained an opponent of almost any reduction of those sentences. In a speech from the Senate floor this month, he called the bills ‘lenient and, frankly, dangerous,’ and he raised the specter of high-level drug traffickers spilling onto the streets.

“Mr. Grassley is as mistaken as he is powerful. Mandatory minimums have, in fact, been used to punish many lower-level offenders who were not their intended targets. Meanwhile, the persistent fantasy that locking up more people leads to less crime continues to be debunked. States from California to New York to Texas have reduced prison populations and crime rates at the same time. A report released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since 2000 putting more people behind bars has had essentially no effect on the national crime rate.”

Congress serves the people, but clearly, even with parallel voices among Dems and the GOP, a single, misinformed octogenarian is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, increasing crime rates and providing more advanced criminal education to those we wish to have such skills the least. It’s time to find a solution or let the GOP know that their committee chairman reflects terribly on us all… a reminder best given during election years.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it really is time to stand on the solid ground of hard facts and do what is necessary… and painfully obvious.