Today, I am not going to do much to lambast a bloated U.S. military that spends 41% of the entire world’s military budget, more than the next ten national military expenditure budgets combined, that has not won a major war since World War II and continues to embroil itself in unwinnable conflicts with sophisticated air-directed weapons that fail to take and hold territory. Sure, a lot of this comes from misdirectives from Washington.
But the spoils system of the military industrial complex – with lots of government contractors scattered among too many Congressional districts – that GOP President Dwight David Eisenhower warned us about back in the 1950s has to exceed even his worst nightmares of a patronage system predicated on overspending and spreading the resulting wealth around. The U.S. military budget has placed us in military situations that have made us the number one target of so many terrorist groups; we are hardly safer as a result. Our big expensive ships, planes and missiles don’t work so well on irregular forces.
No today’s blog primarily addresses our inability to stop sending people to prison for long periods of time such that with a mere 5% of the earth’s population, somehow we have managed to incarcerate 25% of the world’s jailed inmates, at a staggering financial and social cost. Almost every convict sent to prison has their employment prospects destroyed, their bitterness escalated by the violence they face inside (it’s not enough to be confined and deprived of freedom), and their skills enhanced by the best “how-to-commit-crimes” schools in the United States. Today, there are very few benefits to society by reason of our totally-screwed-up criminal justice system.
Born of “get tough on crime” movements over the years, littering all sides of the political spectrum, we have created one of the most expensive (probably the highest per capita cost and certainly the most expensive overall system) and least effective criminal justice systems on earth. From the need to have more judges and courtrooms – Los Angeles County has more courtrooms than all of the UK, for example – to a staggering per inmate cost to incarcerate. While the average across states is about $40K/inmate/year, the costs skyrocket for those on death row (with really expensive automatic appeals) and for some high cost cities: New York City spends a staggering $167,731/inmate (according to the Independent Budget Office).
So like our ineffective military, we are paying a lot of money for a system that actually makes things worse, a lot worse, for society. We have a lot of very angry, bitter ex-inmates, unable to make a legal living of substance, well-schooled in criminal skills, enjoying one of the highest recidivism rates of any criminal justice system on earth. They get to harm the society that held them in inhumane conditions and released them without an ability to secure real jobs. That a huge proportion of these inmates are in there for drug possession or as a result of acting out for untreated mental illnesses only makes this cruel system that much more questionable.
The situation is so bad that high-profile players from both sides of the aisle are finally saying, “enough!” We cannot afford this anymore. “More than 130 police chiefs, prosecutors and sheriffs — including some of the most prominent law enforcement officials in the country — are adding their clout to the movement to reduce the nation’s incarceration rate.
“Asserting that ‘too many people are behind bars that don’t belong there,’ the officials [announced on October 31st] that they have formed a group to push for alternatives to arrests, reducing the number of criminal laws and ending mandatory minimum prison sentences. Members of the group [have met] with President Obama [who supports this initiative and recently ordered the early release of nearly 6,000 federal inmates jailed for drug possession crimes].
“The group includes the police chiefs of the nation’s largest cities, including William J. Bratton of New York, Charlie Beck of Los Angeles and Garry F. McCarthy of Chicago, as well as prosecutors from around the country, including Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney.
“Democrats and Republicans alike have pressed to temper the economic and social costs of mass incarceration, which has been driven by harsher penalties approved by Congress and state legislatures from the 1970s to the 1990s, when crime rates were far higher than today.
“But the group, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, represents an abrupt public shift in philosophy for dozens of law enforcement officials who have sustained careers based upon tough-on-crime strategies.
“‘This is kind of the missing piece to the puzzle,’ said Inimai M. Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy group affiliated with the New York University School of Law, which helped form the organization.
“The law enforcement leaders now say reducing incarceration will improve public safety because people who need treatment for drug and alcohol problems or mental health issues will be more likely to improve and reintegrate into society if they receive consistent care, something relatively few jails or prisons offer.” New York Times, October 20th. Republicans abhor the high costs and the waste; Democrats abhor the dehumanizing side of prison and the resulting social costs. Both sides of the aisle agree thatthe system simply does not do what it is supposed to: keep society safe while rehabilitating criminals for productive lives post-incarceration.
But taking down such a massive criminal justice system is going to take decades, face the remaining vestiges of “get tough on crime” local politicians who got elected on that platform, and require answers and infrastructure to provide alternatives that simply don’t exist in sufficient scale or quality to make a difference today. The Reagan administration decommissioned most of our mental healthcare facilities back in the 1980s, and there is nothing remotely available to replace it. Still, we have to start somewhere, and the fact that people from all political persuasions are talking about it, especially at the highest levels of our government, is a very good sign. But now we have to begin implementing the required changes.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the momentum of a more than a century of failed criminal justice is a massive force to reverse and change.
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