History > 2008 > USA > Jail, Prison (I)

Illustration: Daniel Stolle

The Population of America’s Prisons

NYT

16.3.2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/l16prison.html

Igor Kopelnitsky

Are Too Many Americans in Prison?        NYT        27.4.2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/opinion/l27inmates.html

Letters

Are Too Many Americans in Prison?

April 27, 2008
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ ” (front page, April 23):

Increased prison privatization in recent decades is a hidden factor behind America’s obscene spike in incarceration rates. It is unrealistic to believe that the money generated by highly profitable companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group has no influence on increasing the prison population.

As long as there is a profit motive to lock people up for private gain, the prison population will inevitably continue to be unfairly — and unethically — inflated.

Gabe Kirchheimer
New York, April 23, 2008

•

To the Editor:

It seems plain that guns are the common denominator in explaining why so many Americans are imprisoned.

If Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey is concerned about the violence of crack addicts, it is largely because of their access to guns. If politicians are sensitive to voters’ demands for tougher sentencing, it is also true that voters are afraid of being victims of crimes involving guns.

If America is an essential “tough place,” this is worsened by the easy availability of guns.

With all of the other costs this nation is facing — the war, global warming, a crumbling infrastructure, an aging population, the list goes on — the question of easy availability of guns (so that people can hunt badgers with pistols?) becomes, “Can we still afford the luxury of a pistol in every pocket?”

Tracy Brooking
Kennesaw, Ga., April 23, 2008

•

To the Editor:

You report that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

You say that while at one time the United States was considered a model nation that other countries studied for its outstanding justice system, this is no longer the case. You mention a few factors that contribute to this phenomenon, such as democracy (for example, public pressure on elected judges to make harsher rulings).

One thing you don’t mention is the importance of the media in this country, in particular television, in spreading and reinforcing the occurrence of violent crime in the United States.

Our assault on drug dealers in this nation is a healthy thing. Ask parents who have lost their child to the insidiousness of the ills created by drugs. The heart and soul of the United States often appears to have a large and growing darker side, as mass murders and child molestation cases increase.

To secure the fruits of a civil society, perhaps it is a good thing that incarceration rates and detention periods have recently increased in the United States.

Bob Jack
North Las Vegas, April 23, 2008

•

To the Editor:

There is an important point to add. The United States has, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country — almost 20 percent.

Unlike other industrialized countries, quality and affordable child care in our country is largely unavailable for low- and moderate-income families.

Further, many of these low-income kids attend underperforming schools and drop out of high school at very high rates. To nobody’s surprise, a lot of these ignored, jobless and poorly educated youngsters then engage in destructive and criminal activity.

Perhaps if we adequately invested in the low-income children of this country, we could produce citizens who work and pay taxes, rather than criminals who cost us $50,000 a year to incarcerate.

Bernie Sanders
U.S. Senator from Vermont
Washington, April 23, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Among the more depressing statistics you state is the fact that the murder rate in the United States is about four times that of many nations in Western Europe, despite our astronomically high incarceration rate.

That, in a nutshell, is the heavy price we pay for our continued support of an 18th-century anachronism: the Second Amendment.

Misha Weidman
San Francisco, April 23, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Though they are often overlooked, women have been hard hit by the United States’ incarceration boom.

There are now more than 200,000 women behind bars in this country, and their numbers continue to rise.

Nearly two-thirds of women in state prisons are there for nonviolent offenses; most are mothers. Their children face the emotional and developmental effects of separation, and the public incurs additional costs related to the child welfare system.

Most women in prison report histories of substance abuse, mental health issues and past trauma — factors that contribute to the crimes they commit. Prison does little to address these issues or to decrease the likelihood of recidivism.

We should increase our investment in community-based alternatives to incarceration programs. These programs provide treatment and support services under court supervision.

The United States cannot afford to remain the world’s most ardent incarcerator. The cost to incarcerated individuals, their families and whole communities is far too high, while the rate of return on our investment in prisons is too low.

Sarah B. From
Dir., Public Policy and Communications
Women’s Prison Association
New York, April 24, 2008

    Are Too Many Americans in Prison?, NYT, 27.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/opinion/l27inmates.html

American Exception

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

April 23, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”

“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.

“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”

    Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’, NYT, 23.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?hp

Several Injuries in Texas Prison Riot

March 28, 2008
Filed at 11:50 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

THREE RIVERS, Texas (AP) -- Authorities say several inmates have been injured in a prison riot in south Texas.

Dispatchers with the Live Oak County Sheriff's Office say multiple inmates are being treated for wounds from the riot Friday morning.

Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley says no personnel were hurt and guards brought the riot under control quickly.

San Antonio emergency responders are assisting authorities in the small rural county. The medium-security prison about 80 miles south of San Antonio has roughly 1,200 inmates.

The riot is the second in Texas in recent weeks. Authorities used a stun grenade two weeks ago to break up a riot involving 80 inmates at the federal prison in downtown Houston.

(This version corrects the spokeswoman's name to Billingsley instead of Billings.)

    Several Injuries in Texas Prison Riot, NYT, 28.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Prison-Riot.html

Dozens of children in U.S. face life in prison

Fri Mar 21, 2008
4:09am EDT
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

ALABASTER, Alabama (Reuters) - Underage criminals cannot face the death penalty in the United States but dozens of offenders imprisoned for crimes committed when they were young teenagers will still die behind bars.

The U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors in 2005 but 19 states permit "life-means-life" sentences for those under 18, according to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).

In all, 2,225 people are sentenced to die in U.S. prisons for crimes they committed as minors and 73 of them were aged 13 and 14 at the time of the crime, according to the group, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama.

Elsewhere in the world, life sentences with no chance of parole are rare for underage offenders. Human Rights Watch estimates that only 12 people outside the United States face such sentences.

Judicial reform advocates say the U.S. provision is an example of how harsh sentences have helped cause a jump in incarceration rates since the 1970s. The United States jails a higher percentage of its population than anywhere else in the industrialized world, these advocates say.

"These kids have been swept up in this tide of carceral control that is unparalleled in American history," said Bryan Stevenson, director of the EJI. "We have become quite comfortable about throwing people away," he said.

Others defend the statute, arguing it is popular with voters and gives comfort to victims to know that perpetrators of serious crimes against them will not one day walk free.

They also use an "adult crime, adult time" argument -- minors who commit adult crimes should be punished as adults.

"I SAW HER IN FLAMES"

The case of Ashley Jones, who was 14 when she killed, illustrates the seriousness of many crimes that result in for-life sentences.

One night in August 1999, Jones and her 16-year-old boyfriend, Geramie Hart, angered by her family's disapproval of their relationship, went to her home in Birmingham, Alabama. They set her grandfather on fire with lighter fluid, stabbed him and shot him dead.

They also stabbed and shot dead Jones' aunt in her bedroom and set her grandmother on fire.

Jones' 10-year-old sister, Mary, was asleep in bed but they dragged her to the kitchen to see the attack on her family.

"I had to sit there and watch her (Ashley) torture my grandmother. I saw her in flames," said Mary Jones, recounting her ordeal in an interview in Alabaster, Alabama.

"Geramie ... picked me up by my neck and pointed a gun at me and said: 'This is how you are going to die.' Ashley said: 'No, wait. I'll do her.'"

They stabbed Mary Jones repeatedly, puncturing a lung, and drove off leaving her and her grandmother, whose injuries included burns, stab and gunshot wounds, to stagger outside.

The questions raised by criminal cases involving teenagers are difficult to answer.

Is a young teenager responsible for crimes in the same way as an adult and to what extent, if at all, should courts consider a minor's family situation and background?

"It goes against human inclinations to give up completely on a young teenager. It's impossible for a court to say that any 14-year-old never has the possibility to live in society," said Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

"LOST ALL HOPE"

The Equal Justice Initiative has filed suits in six states challenging the life-without-parole sentences and has brought a case in federal court in northern Alabama over the Jones case, arguing it represents cruel and unusual punishment.

Hart is also serving the same sentence.

The group says a disproportionate number of the minors serving the sentence are black or Hispanic and many were tried as adults with inadequate legal counsel. Also, it says up to 70 percent were given mandatory sentences.

Not all those serving life-means-life sentences for crimes committed as minors are convicted killers.

Antonio Nunez was convicted of multiple counts of attempted murder and also aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to life without parole for his role in a kidnap, police chase and shootout in April, 2001, in which nobody was injured.

Nunez, aged 14 at the time of the crime, grew up in a part of Los Angeles where gang activity was common. In 2000, he was wounded and his brother killed in a gang-related shooting.

His sister Cindy Nunez said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles the life sentence devastated her family.

"He has lost all hope .... We try to keep his spirits up by saying something will change in the law," she said.

Mary Jones, now 19, is attempting to reconstruct her life. She testified against her sister in court but has visited her in jail. She blames Hart for changing her sister from "the sweetest girl" into a murderer.

"She should have a chance to have a life. Her life shouldn't just be taken away from her like that. Sometimes I'm kind of mad and then I'm sad," she said. "I practically lost her too because she is in prison."

(Reporting by Matthew Bigg; Editing by Michael Christie and Eddie Evans)

    Dozens of children in U.S. face life in prison, R, 21.3.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1045443520080321

Letters

The Population of America’s Prisons

March 16, 2008
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Prison Nation” (editorial, March 10):

The United States prison population is out of control. Minimalist efforts such as alternatives to incarceration and parole reform may be politically palatable, but they will have no significant effect.

The real magnitude of this issue can best be grasped through comparison with incarceration rates in Western Europe. The United States incarceration rate is five times that of Britain or Spain. If we reduced our prison population in half, then in half again, and finally in half again, we would have fewer than 300,000 men, women and children in our prisons and jails, rather than 2.3 million, yet our incarceration rate would still be greater than that of Germany and France.

The only way to meaningfully reduce our prison population is to decriminalize drug use and provide drug substitution and treatment to those in need. A national program of harm reduction is the only way to reverse what you have aptly described as a “Prison Nation.”

Robert L. Cohen
New York, March 11, 2008

The writer, a former medical director of the Montefiore Rikers Island Health Services, was appointed by the federal courts in Michigan, Connecticut and New York to monitor the medical care of prisoners.

•

To the Editor:

Nobody can argue with the fact that “recycled prisoners” make up the bulk of those behind bars in this country. In fact, the Justice Department consistently forecasts that two-thirds of the 650,000 prisoners released every year wind up right back in the criminal justice system.

Initiatives that permanently end this cycle can reduce the spiraling prison population without divisive legislative battles over sentencing. Study after study has shown that work-based re-entry programs keep newly released prisoners from recommitting crimes, which in turn improves public safety and saves taxpayers the heavy cost of prosecution and incarceration.

The Doe Fund operates a successful, work-based program here in New York and has had astounding results: only 4.8 percent of our program graduates are re-arrested a year after their release, compared with 44 percent nationally. And what’s more, our program is about half the cost of incarceration.

George T. McDonald
President, The Doe Fund
New York, March 10, 2008

•

To the Editor:

As your editorial says, this country’s high incarceration rates “point to a terrible waste of money and lives.” Even worse, men and women in detention are subjected to devastating sexual abuse at the hands of corrections officials and other inmates.

Last December, the Bureau of Justice Statistics established the pervasive nature of this type of violence with a national inmate survey. It found that 4.5 percent of the people held in federal and state prisons reported being sexually assaulted in the previous 12 months alone.

That figure confirms what Stop Prisoner Rape has learned from the more than 900 letters we have received from prisoner rape survivors in the past few years: sexual abuse derails justice and shatters the dignity of its victims, in contravention of domestic law and international human rights standards.

Lovisa Stannow
Los Angeles, March 10, 2008

The writer is executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape.

•

To the Editor:

When it comes to criminal sentencing reform, distinguishing merely between violent and nonviolent crime is not sufficient. A better distinction, albeit old-fashioned, is between predatory and nonpredatory crime — that is, between conduct that violates the rights of others and conduct that doesn’t.

Embezzlers, for example, deserve incarceration; most drug offenders deserve our scorn, but not the exorbitantly expensive hospitality of taxpayers.

Richard M. Evans
Northampton, Mass., March 10, 2008

•

To the Editor:

America’s burgeoning prison population can be traced directly back to the “war on drugs.” The economic impact of the drug war is also staggering.

Yet illegal drugs are readily available across America. Indeed, the drug war appears to act as nothing more than a price support for the criminals who profit off the drug trade. Worse, the drug war fuels violent crime, just as Prohibition did.

Sam Ehrlichman
Ithaca, N.Y., March 10, 2008

•

To the Editor:

The often ignored toll from placing so many nonviolent people behind bars is the disastrous effects on their loved ones on the outside.

If there are 1.6 million people in our prisons, there are millions more who are left behind without any services to provide for the difficulty of navigating society when a family member is incarcerated. They are the innocent victims of crime, and they pay for the stigma of having someone in jail.

Often young children are left behind as a parent visits his or her partner many hours away, or they are brought along to sit in waiting rooms. This presents a huge emotional and financial burden, because often it means a parent or guardian has to leave work or pay for day care. It also means there is great potential for creating an entire underclass that continues the cycle from one generation to the next.

It is time for society to look at the total effects of unnecessary incarceration.

Doug Kreeger
Rye, N.Y., March 10, 2008

    The Population of America’s Prisons, NYT, 16.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/l16prison.html

New Jersey Serial Killer Biegenwald Dies

March 11, 2008
Filed at 12:35 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Richard Biegenwald, the ''Thrill Killer'' who took the lives of at least five people but quashed the state's attempts to execute him, died Monday, a state official said. He was 67.

Biegenwald died at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, said Corrections Department spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer. He had been ill, but the cause of death was not determined Monday, she said.

Biegenwald tried to burn down his family's home at age 5 and was taken to a psychiatric hospital in New York. Three years later, records from a private school for disturbed children showed he had a drinking problem, according to a 1983 New York Times article.

Biegenwald was 18 when he killed Stephen Sladowski, a store owner in Bayonne and an assistant city prosecutor, in a robbery in 1958. He was paroled in 1975 and spent the next several years in and out of jail for parole violations.

In 1980, he married and moved with his wife to Point Pleasant Beach and later Asbury Park. But eventually, he killed again.

He was convicted of killing three female teenagers and a man, drug dealer William Ward, in 1981 and 1982. A prosecutor once said Biegenwald lured Ward to his car and shot him four times in the head because he wanted to see someone die.

The bodies of two of his victims, Maria Caillella and Deborah Osborne, were found dismembered and buried in the same shallow grave in the yard of Biegenwald's mother in New York City's Staten Island.

He was also suspected in at least one other killing but was never charged with it.

He was sentenced to death twice for the killing of Anna Olesiewicz, whom he lured from the Asbury Park boardwalk with the promise of marijuana. It was among the earliest death sentences handed down in New Jersey after the state reinstated the death penalty in 1982.

The state Supreme Court overturned the death sentences, and last year the Legislature abolished capital punishment. The state did not execute anyone in the 25 years that it had the penalty.

Biegenwald remained incarcerated for the rest of his life.

    New Jersey Serial Killer Biegenwald Dies, NYT, 11.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-Biegenwald.html

Editorial

Prison Nation

March 10, 2008
The New York Times

After three decades of explosive growth, the nation’s prison population has reached some grim milestones: More than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. One in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures. The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987. Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon devote as much money or more to corrections as they do to higher education.

These statistics, contained in a new report from the Pew Center on the States, point to a terrible waste of money and lives. They underscore the urgent challenge facing the federal government and cash-strapped states to reduce their overreliance on incarceration without sacrificing public safety. The key, as some states are learning, is getting smarter about distinguishing between violent criminals and dangerous repeat offenders, who need a prison cell, and low-risk offenders, who can be handled with effective community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug treatment programs, combined in some cases with shorter sentences.

Persuading public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective approach to prison policy is a daunting prospect, however, not least because building and running jailhouses has become a major industry.

Criminal behavior partly explains the size of the prison population, but incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen. Any effort to reduce the prison population must consider the blunderbuss impact of get-tough sentencing laws adopted across the United States beginning in the 1970’s. Many Americans have come to believe, wrongly, that keeping an outsized chunk of the population locked up is essential for sustaining a historic crime drop since the 1990’s.

In fact, the relationship between imprisonment and crime control is murky. Some portion of the decline is attributable to tough sentencing and release policies. But crime is also affected by things like economic trends and employment and drug-abuse rates. States that lagged behind the national average in rising incarceration rates during the 1990’s actually experienced a steeper decline in crime rates than states above the national average, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group.

A rising number of states are broadening their criminal sanctions with new options for low-risk offenders that are a lot cheaper than incarceration but still protect the public and hold offenders accountable. In New York, the crime rate has continued to drop despite efforts to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison.

The Pew report spotlights policy changes in Texas and Kansas that have started to reduce their outsized prison populations and address recidivism by investing in ways to improve the success rates for community supervision, expanding treatment and diversion programs, and increasing use of sanctions other than prison for minor parole and probation violations. Recently, the Supreme Court and the United States Sentencing Commission announced sensible changes in the application of harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

These are signs that the country may finally be waking up to the fiscal and moral costs of bulging prisons.

    Prison Nation, NYT, 10.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/opinion/10mon1.html

 1 in 100 Americans Are Behind Bars, Study Says        NYT        28.2.2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?hp

1 in 100 Americans Are Behind Bars,

Study Says

February 28, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars, but that one in 100 black women is.

The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration.”

“We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,” Ms. Urahn continued. “Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Now, with fewer resources available to the states, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bond issues and from the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

It cost an average of $23,876 to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year for each inmate in Rhode Island to just $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, a rate that will accelerate as the prison population ages.

About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.

The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000 inmates. But the Texas legislature approved broad changes to the state’s corrections system, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.

“Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.”

He gave an example.

“We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.”

The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners.

Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.”

    1 in 100 Americans Are Behind Bars, Study Says, NYT, 28.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?hp

Record - High Ratio of Americans in Prison

February 28, 2008
Filed at 11:12 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

The steadily growing inmate population ''is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime,'' said the report.

Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are prompting officials in many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft in crime.

''We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets,'' she said in an interview. ''They want to be tough on crime, they want to be a law-and-order state -- but they also want to save money, and they want to be effective.''

The report cited Kansas and Texas as states which have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. Their actions include greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for ex-offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

''The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens,'' the report said.

According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.

The largest percentage increase -- 12 percent -- was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

The Pew report was compiled by the Center on the State's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working directly with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.

''For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety,'' said the project's director, Adam Gelb. ''More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers.''

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as ''three-strikes'' laws, that result in longer prison stays.

''For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling,'' the report said. ''While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.''

The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails -- a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.

The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

------

On the Net:

www.pewcenteronthestates.org .

    Record - High Ratio of Americans in Prison, NYT, 28.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Prison-Population.html

Man in ’86 Police Gunfight Is Killed

February 21, 2008
Filed at 8:35 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- A man who gained notoriety after wounding six police officers in a 1986 gunfight that led to a nationwide manhunt was killed in prison, corrections officials said Thursday.

Larry Davis, serving 25 years to life on a murder conviction in an unrelated case, was stabbed to death around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday during a recreational break at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, said Erik Kriss, a spokesman for the state Department of Correctional Services.

Davis was stabbed repeatedly with a 12-inch long, half-inch wide homemade metal shank in the arms, head, back, upper thigh and chest, Kriss said.

''I don't know what was happening at this exact moment,'' he said, adding that prison staff were in the yard when a fight was observed and inmates began congregating. ''Things happen quickly.''

Another inmate at the prison 80 miles north of the city was being questioned in Davis' death by state police and the inspector general for corrections and had been placed in a segregated cell, Kriss said. The inmate had not been charged in Davis' death as of early Thursday.

Davis, 41, had most recently been convicted in 1991 of fatally shooting a suspected drug dealer in the Bronx.

Five years earlier, police had gone to an apartment to arrest him as a suspect in the slayings of five other drug dealers.

During the ensuing shootout, Davis escaped unhurt through a window, setting off a 17-day manhunt that involved hundreds of officers. He eventually surrendered to police after being tracked to a housing project where one of his sisters lived, where he held a woman and her children hostage in an all-night standoff before giving up, police said at the time.

At his trial, the defense contended that the officers were trying to kill Davis because he had knowledge about police corruption, and that he opened fire in self-defense. Prosecutors said Davis was trying to evade arrest by shooting at the officers.

A jury acquitted him of attempted murder and aggravated assault. He was instead convicted on weapons charges and sentenced to five to 15 years in prison.

The gunfight and Davis' flight from the law made him a folk hero to some and a symbol of outrage to others, especially law enforcement. More than 1,500 officers incensed by the verdict gathered outside the courthouse to demand the maximum penalty.

(This version CORRECTS size of shank.)

    Man in ’86 Police Gunfight Is Killed, NYT, 21.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Shootout-Fugitive-Killed.html