STANDING ROOM ONLY : What to do about prison overcrowding - Brief Article

Commonweal, Jan 25, 2002 by Ed Marciniak

Until very recently, the U.S. prison system has been our fastest-growing industry, expanding from 500,000 prisoners in 1978 to nearly 2 million in 2001. The U.S. incarceration rate leads the world. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds 25 percent of the globe's prisoners. The yearly cost of operating U.S. prisons and jails is estimated at $40 billion and constitutes the nation's largest, costliest program in human services.

What brought on this upsurge, and what can be done to revise it? "Could it be that America's massive prison expansion is becoming another Vietnam, an intractable war full of lies and viciousness that eventually lacerates the entire society before finally collapsing in defeat?" Christian Parenti asked in the Chicago Sun-Times (April 15, 2001).

Although about a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States since 1980, most are already dangerously overcrowded. Two examples: The Cook County, Illinois, jail has a court-ordered capacity of 9,798. In May 2001, its population was 11,803. Many prisoners sleep on the floors; others wait to be sent to prisons in downstate Illinois. Under consideration are proposals to convert the gymnasium into barracks, and during the summer to house inmates in tents. And in Decatur, Alabama, the Morgan County jail squeezes 256 inmates into a facility built for 96; most sleep on the floor.

Because of the growth of American prisons, it is not surprising that they have come to be viewed as magnets for economic development. Illinois Governor George Ryan explained last April that a new maximum-security prison was being built in a downstate community "because it will be an important shot in the arm for a poor community badly in need of economic investment." The sixteen-hundred-bed prison, he said, would generate 800 jobs and an annual payroll of $40 million. Not education or transportation but correctional services ($1.3 billion a year) continue to be the largest item in the Illinois state budget. And in Sayre, Oklahoma, the city manager recently concluded, "In my mind there's no more recession-proof form of economic development....Nothing is going to stop crime." He was referring to a recently built, $37 million, 1,440-inmate, 270-employee all-male prison.

It will not be easy to reduce significantly this rise in imprisonment. Many and conflicting trends would have to be reversed to begin depopulating our prisons.

* According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, tougher sentencing is being justified, in part, by the widespread belief that incarceration is the chief reason violent crime declined in U.S. cities during the 1990s. Rehabilitation is out; retribution is in. An ounce of prevention has given way to a pound of punishment. Furthermore, serious urban crime may be going down but the publicity about it in the mass media has not.

* The largest single group in local jails comprises those incarcerated, directly or indirectly, because of alcohol, crack cocaine, marijuana, or heroin use. This situation testifies to the reality that not only is our national campaign against drug abuse failing, but that, as the U.S. Department of Justice reports, seven out of ten inmates now in state or federal prisons are there for drug abuse and other nonviolent offenses. We treat nonviolent drug offenders as criminals when they should be patients.

* Nationwide, women prisoners have more than doubled since 1990, mainly for drug-related offenses. In New York state, 80 percent of the women incarcerated were mothers with children. And the number of juveniles under the age of eighteen in adult prisons continues to grow.

* Because of the serious shortage of public and private living quarters for the mentally ill, city and county jails have become the local "hospitals" and caretakers. Schizophrenics and persons with a bipolar disorder are more likely to be arrested for conduct related to their ailments. In dozens of U.S. cities, the largest institution for sheltering them is now the local jail.

* Some fifteen states have eliminated parole boards, and those that retain them have become reluctant to grant paroles. As might be expected in an environment where rehabilitation is underemphasized and underfunded, the number of former inmates who return to prison for parole violations keeps growing.

If taken, however, two steps would almost halve our prison population. First, repeal state laws that now mandate the incarceration of drug offenders and develop instead many more public and private treatment centers to which nonviolent drug abusers can be referred. Second, stop using jails or prisons to house the mentally ill.

Recently, several states, including New York, Illinois, and California, have actively sought to develop ways to send fewer nonviolent offenders to prison, hoping to refer them to treatment centers instead. Were this incipient trend to become widespread, the number of prisoners nationwide would plummet. But progress is slow because most states have a serious shortage of needed mental hospitals and treatment centers. Drug addiction is undeniably the nation's foremost health problem. It should be treated as such. Prisons are for criminals.