And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: "Taoss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Once you have a society committed to building new
prisons and keeping them, it's very difficult to close them
down," said Mauer. "Particularly in rural areas that come
to depend on them. It's like trying to close a military
base."
My friends,
Here is what we are up against. See article below.
Taoss
-----Original Message-----
From: Carl William Spitzer IV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Jean Auldridge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wednesday, April 07, 1999 1:13 PM
Subject: WS>>Less Crime, More Criminals
March 7, 1999, NYTimes, Week in Review
Less Crime, More Criminals
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Later this month, the U.S. government will release new
figures showing how many Americans are behind bars, and the
numbers will reveal that the bull market for prisons is
still charging ahead. Nearly 1 of every 150 people in the
United States is in prison or jail, the Justice Department
will announce, a figure that no other democracy comes close
to matching.
Soon, the total number of people locked up in federal
and state prisons and local jails will likely reach the 2
million mark, almost double the number a decade ago, as the
ranks of prisoners grow enough each year -- to fill Yankee
Stadium and then some. For an American born this year, the
chance of living some part of life in a correction facility
is 1 in 20; for black Americans, it is 1 in 4.
Most experts failed to predict that the inmate popula-
tion would triple from 1980, and now nobody seems to know
how to stop the buildup. By all logic, prisons should be
experiencing a few vacancies, and the cost of arresting,
prosecuting and putting away an army of criminals should be
at ebb. After all, the economy could hardly be better, and
crime has fallen steeply six years in a row. But a prison
peace dividend is nowhere in sight. Instead, the guessing
game now is: At what point does the world's largest penal
system hit a plateau -- 2.5 million inmates, 3 million?
Surely, if crime continues to fall, the number of new pris-
oners must also fall.
Not quite. No matter how much crime plummets, the
United States will still have to add the equivalent of a new
1,000-bed jail or prison every week -- for perhaps another
decade, federal officials say. Some even believe the prison
boom could be permanent, at least for another generation. A
big reason is that so many of the new inmates are drug
offenders. In the federal system, nearly 60 percent of all
people behind bars are doing time for drug violations; in
state prisons and local jails, the figure is 22 percent.
These numbers are triple the rate of 15 years ago.
Americans do not use more drugs, on average, than
people in other nations; but the United States, virtually
alone among Western democracies, has chosen a path of incar-
ceration for drug offenders. More than 400,000 people are
behind bars for drug crimes -- and nearly a third of them
are locked up for simply possessing an illicit drug.
"America's internal gulag," is what Gen. Barry McCaf-
frey, the nation's drug czar, calls the expanding mass of
drug inmates. Many of those have committed any number of
crimes. But a growing number of them have broken no laws
other than the ones on drug use.
In the 1980s, Congress and the states passed drug laws
that required judges to put people in prison -- even first-
time offenders, or those caught with small amounts of an
illicit substance. Mandatory minimum sentences, as they are
called, leave no room for a judge to consider special cir-
cumstances, or options such as treatment instead of jail.
The idea was that more arrests would lead to more
convictions, which would put more people in jail, and the
crime rate would fall. That did happen. Another dividend
was supposed to be a drop in drug use, but that has not
happened. Arrests of people who use drugs just hit an all-
time high, the FBI reported. At the same time, drug use has
gone up among the young, and for drugs like heroin or meth-
amphetamines. Over all, drug use has not budged for 10
years. For virtually all other crimes, of course, the fig-
ures are stunning -- with huge drops in murder, robbery and
assault. Whether this is because the United States will
soon have 2 million people locked up is subject to much
debate.
But many of the authorities who argue that the prison
boom has taken the worst criminals out of circulation -- and
has thus been the biggest factor in reducing crime -- are at
a loss to explain the drug-use figures. "I am in favor of
the federal government ceasing and desisting the war on
drugs," said Dr. Morgan Reynolds, director of the Criminal
Justice Center at the Dallas branch of the National Center
for Policy Analysis, a free-market think tank.
He described himself as being on the conservative side
of the debate over prisons and crime; he says the crime drop
can be directly attributed to the prison boom.
But he is less sure that the federal government's war
on drugs has an effect on crime rates and drug use.
For liberals and libertarians who have long claimed
incarceration has failed to do anything but run up the bill
in the drug war, conservative cover is welcome. Last week,
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., introduced a bill to restore
discretion for judges in sentencing low-level, nonviolent
drug offenders.
"We may be getting to the point of diminishing returns
-- the more you expand the prison system, the more small fry
you put in there," said Marc Mauer, assistant director of
the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group that has been
critical of the prison buildup.
Even some of the architects of punitive drug policies
now argue that stuffing the prisons with ever more drug
offenders is not a wise investment. Edwin Meese, who was
attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, when most of
the drug laws were rewritten, has started to look favorably
on treatment for low-level offenders rather than jail.
"I think mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders
ought to be reviewed," said Meese in an interview. "We have
to see who has been incarcerated and what has come from it."
Beyond the laws that send drug offenders to prison with
reflexive certainty, there are now institutional incentives
to keep locking up more people -- a trend that some people
call the prison industrial complex.
The stock price of the Corrections Corporation of
America, the nation's largest private jailer, has increased
tenfold since 1994. The company's stock is now privately
held. But Corrections Corp. has created a popular real-
estate investment fund to get a return on all those new
prisons being built at the rate of one a week.
Unions representing prison guards are the fastest-
growing public employee associations in many states. In
California last year, the union was given a raise of 12
percent, which brought the salary for a seasoned prison
guard up to $51,000.
It is the rare rural community that rejects a new
prison in its backyard, with the prospect of permanent,
high-paying, benefit-rich government jobs.
The prisons in California, as in virtually every other
state, are near capacity, even though the state has built 21
new institutions in the last 15 years. Soon, it will cost
nearly $4 billion a year to run the state's prison system.
Should the Legislature propose some change in the law that
might bring down the growth in prisons, they are likely to
hear howls of outrage from the union that has most benefited
from the growth in prisons.
"Once you have a society committed to building new
prisons and keeping them, it's very difficult to close them
down," said Mauer. "Particularly in rural areas that come
to depend on them. It's like trying to close a military
base."
The states also have an incentive to keep people in
jail a long time. A federal law passed in 1994 provides
matching funds to states to keep violent criminals in prison
longer by denying parole. This act and other so-called
truth-in-sentencing laws are reasons why the ranks of pris-
oners will not soon drop, even as crime levels off.
"We've got crime going in one direction, and social
policy going in the other," said Dr. Allen Beck, the Jus-
tice Department's lead statistician on criminal justice
trends.
The one thing that may finally slow prison growth, said
Beck, are budget concerns. It costs taxpayers $20,000 a
year to house and feed every new inmate -- and that does not
include the cost of building new prisons and jails. The
states are spending nearly $30 billion to keep people in
jail -- about double the rate of 10 years ago.
Some states are starting to balk. California legisla-
tive leaders say they will build no new prisons in coming
years, but they have not said what they will do with excess
prisoners. In Washington state, a bill that would abolish
mandatory minimum prison terms for drug offenders has gained
support from judges, prosecutors and tough-on-crime Republi-
cans.
Washington was a pioneer state in enacting laws requir-
ing long lockups, with no chance of early release or leeway
for judges to consider other options. But prisons now are
the state's fastest-growing part of the budget -- even as
crime has nearly bottomed out.
But it will be difficult to change the pattern, with
new prisons rising in depressed rural areas. Cleaning up
after a crusade, some lawmakers said, has proven much harder
than they anticipated. Together we can do what we cannot
alone.
Charles Sparks [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Penn-Pals home page http://www.pennpals.org
Chat room: www.pennpals.org/chat.html --TGIF Party every
Friday evening
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