National crime and prison policies are failures, part 01

California State Prison, Los Angeles

In a report on the failure of California’s prison policies, the New York Times reports that California now spends 10% of its budget on prison costs, and that this cost is expected to go higher. What are the causes? A study done by the Federal government shows that it is a mixture of policies that are close to creating the perfect wave of monetary meltdown for California. Among the reasons for this perfect wave are: mandatory sentencing guidelines, increased number of crimes that require incarceration, tighter parole policies, giving too much discretionary power to non-judicial authorities to return a parolee to jail without a hearing, etc.

BTW, you can see those policies at work in shows such as “Law and Order” in which parolees are regularly squeezed by the police under the threat to send them back to prison for any minor infraction that they can come up with, regardless of how small or even whether that “infraction” would normally be a crime. On some of those shows you can even see the police using their right to search or to question a parolee at any time by harassing them on the job so that they are either fired or “cooperate.” Note that in one of those shows there was even an episode where they showed an innocent parolee committing suicide as a result of the harassment and losing his job. (He was unable to “cooperate” because he was innocent and knew nothing.) The show’s character felt bad and introspective afterward, but the innocent parolee was just as dead.

On top of that the California system is beginning to lose some control over its spending policies as regards prisons. The voters of California–and many other states–consistently refuse to spend on prison infrastructure. This results in overcrowded prisons, which leads to judicial intervention. Despite the public’s outcry to remove all rights from prisoners and to punish them additionally with sub-standard living situations, food, etc., our laws do not permit such behavior. So California is under judicial decree to spend an additional 8 billion dollars. And, in prior years, they have been under decrees to reduce their prison population to acceptable levels, whether or not the prisoner is eligible for parole yet. That is, they are forbidden to incarcerate if they will not spend the money to upgrade the facilities.

But, it is not just in California that our current wave of sentencing policies have had such effects, but in the whole United States. According to the Pew Center, a conservative research institution, 1 out of 100 people in the USA were in jail at the beginning of 2008. The Pew Center states:

“In exploring such alternatives, lawmakers are learning that current prison growth is not driven primarily by a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the population at large. Rather, it flows principally from a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through popular ‘three-strikes’ measures and other sentencing enhancements, keeping them there longer. Overlaying that picture in some states has been the habitual use of prison stays to punish those who break rules governing their probation or parole. In California, for example, such violators make up a large proportion of prison admissions, churning in and out of badly overloaded facilities. Nationally, more than half of released offenders are back in prison within three years, either for a new crime or for violating the terms of their release.”

In other words, our prison population is growing without an increase in crime! In fact, for the last 10 years, crime has actually been decreasing. And, it is growing faster than the population is growing. So, how bad are our prison figures? They are so bad that the statistics show that we have the highest prison population in the world, as reported by the Washington Post, a conservative newspaper. Lest you think this is just because we are a big country, we also have the world’s highest percentage of our population in prison. No other country has either such a high total number of people in jail or such a high percentage of its residents in jail.

So, how did we get in this situation? That will be part 02.

===MORE TO COME===