The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Inevitably, of course, the infractions start piling up. A missed
appointment. A smoked joint. Another missed appointment. A speeding ticket.
What does the officer do? Few agencies want to give a parolee a second
chance after a failed drug test, on the off-chance that that person will go
off and commit a crime. The public outcry, after all, would be deafening.
Meanwhile, the agency is under constant pressure to reduce costs and keep
under budget. It costs a fair bit for an officer to check up on a parolee
who just missed an appointment-and that might be merely one among hundreds
of cases on his or her desk. On the other hand, it costs the parole agency
nothing, nothing at all, to send the parolee back to prison on a technical
violation. No one complains. No one asks questions. The prison system has a
virtually unlimited budget. Who wouldn't make that choice?

Of all the problems with the U.S. criminal correction system, why should
anyone bother paying attention to parole agencies? Surely, one might say,
the problems go much deeper than that. There are the raw numbers: The United
States locks up a greater percentage of its population than any other
country on earth. Or the inequity: 1 in 3 black males, and 1 in 6 Hispanic
males will spend some time in prison over the course of a lifetime, compared
to 1 in 17 white males. Recent social research has described the vast and
largely detrimental effects of high incarceration rates on local
communities: children lose fathers and/or mothers, families fall apart, and
while ex-prisoners often find it difficult to find jobs and re-enter
society. Meanwhile, state budgets are feeling the strain: between 1988 and
2001, the corrections system was the only government function that grew as a
percentage of state budgets-swallowing money that could have been used for
education, or infrastructure, or public assistance. All of this would be
worth it, of course, if the all-devouring prison network actually reduced
crime. But the evidence on this score, while still subject to dispute, is
admittedly slim.

To see where parole fits into this picture, consider a 2002 Department of
Justice study on recidivism, the largest ever undertaken, which found that
51.8 percent of criminals end up back in prison within three years. (There's
not a lot of solid data on recidivism, but it doesn't appear that this
number has dropped at all since a previous study done a decade before.) Of
those, over half (26.4 percent) are sent back not for criminal behavior, but
for violating a technical condition of parole-a missed appointment, a failed
drug test, not landing a job. In many states, as many as a third of all
prison admissions each year result from decisions like that of our fictional
parole officer described above.

In a new book, Downsizing Prisons, Michael Jacobson offers an innovative
approach to reducing the strain on America's overcrowded prisons: namely, by
fixing the dysfunctional parole systems in states around the country. Having
first worked in New York City's Budget Office, Jacobson became Commissioner
of the New York City Departments of Correction and Probation in 1995, and
saw firsthand how difficult it would be to reform the prison system-and at
the same time, how wholly necessary.

As an ex-bureaucrat, Jacobson understands a key reality: When it comes to
crime control, sensible policy rarely wins out. Experts and academics may
agree that state correctional policies are misguided, and they may even
reach a wide consensus on alternative rehabilitation methods that work, like
"community policing" or college degree programs in prison. But laws are
usually influenced by public outrage and horrifying anecdotes, like the
murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, which led to California's "three strikes"
sentencing policy. Moreover, prison growth has a powerful constituency:
private prison contractors and the mighty corrections unions may not agree
on much, but they both have a keen interest in keeping prisons expanding
indefinitely, and lobby accordingly. State legislators, for their part, know
full well how the budget game is played, and realize that in times of
budgetary belt-tightening, any proposal to invest more money in prisoners-no
matter how well-intentioned or far-sighted-while schools and health services
are being cut, is the surest way to lose one's seat. Radical change becomes
nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, Jacobson argues that the recent wave of state budget
crunches-the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently tallied state
deficits at a whopping $190 billion over the past three years-may have
created an opening for more incremental reforms. (Indeed, even the Montana
state legislature, typically one of the "toughest" on crime, recently vowed
to rethink its prison budget.) It's also worth noting that since September
11, crime has largely faded as a hot-button issue among voters, according to
a Pew Survey released last month, and polls show that Americans no longer
value a "tough on crime" stance quite so much as they once did. Even
President Bush, in his 2005 State of the Union address, paid lip service to
"prisoners' rights" issues such as special training for public defenders, a
stance that would have been political suicide just ten years ago. The
foundation for a new order has been laid, and the most practical place to
start, Jacobson argues, is with parole agencies.

One number should immediately jump out at any would-be reformer. The cost,
on average, of supervising one person on probation or parole is about $200
per year, as compared to $20,000 for keeping that same person behind bars.
And yet prisons continue to get the lion's share of state funding. Moreover,
it's much easier for state governors to reorganize parole agencies-which
answer primarily to the executive branch-than to ram changes in sentencing
policy through legislatures. So why does the current system persist? In
conversations with state legislators around the country, Jacobson noticed a
simple pattern: politicians simply "do not recognize that technical parole
violations are costing their states so much money." Yet differences among
state parole policies can be stark. In Mississippi, for instance, 83 percent
of parolees successfully complete parole, whereas in California, the success
rate is a mere 21 percent. It's no surprise, then, that a whopping 58
percent of all new admissions to California prisons are parole violators,
versus 14 percent in Mississippi.

Jacobson argues that discrepancies like these can't be accounted for by the
sorts of criminals found in each state, or even discrepancies in funding
among parole agencies (California actually spends far more per parolee), the
difference lies purely with "policies, procedures, and organizational
cultures." So what actually works? Jacobson knows better than to lay out his
Platonic ideal policy. Hence, he doesn't advise states to eliminate parole
supervision altogether, as some have proposed-it's too politically risky.
Nor does he think, realistically, that legislatures can get away with
investing millions more in drug treatment and job training, even if that
makes sense.

Instead, he proposes several relatively easy changes that can make a real
difference. For starters, states should front-load existing parole resources
into the first several months after release, since "parolees tend to violate
quickly." The money can be focused on early-transition programs, and after
the first year, when chances of success increase, monitoring can be reduced.
Also, more sophisticated risk instruments (formulas like those used by
insurance companies) can help offices predict which parolees will need more
supervision than others. Jacobson argues that "incarceration should be a
decision of last resort" for parolees, and technical violations ought to be
met with incremental sanctions, rather than automatic prison time. Finally,
he notes, states will see more parolees succeed if they reduce many of the
barriers prisoners face upon reentering society. Felons should not be barred
from voting, nor ex-prisoners prevented from securing jobs or receiving food
stamps, college loans, or other public assistance.

What makes proposals like these so exciting is that they're mostly quite
boring. That is, they're precisely the wonky, technocratic, yet ultimately
realistic, sort of proposals that can actually pass. Indeed, Jacobson writes
the last quarter of his book almost exclusively for state policymakers,
offering step-by-step suggestions for navigating the complexities of
budgetary reform. In California, for instance, he suggests that legislators
put a "cap" on the length of time that technical parole violators stay in
prison. The savings here-up to $190 million-could then be partially
reinvested in drug treatment and employment training, with the rest freed up
for non-corrections programs. Likewise, if California sent fewer technical
parole violators back to prison immediately, the state could save up to $750
million. Again, a portion of this money could be reinvested in
community-based programs for ex-felons, thus further improving criminal
rehabilitation programs, while the rest could be spent elsewhere. What's not
to love?

Jacobson's book comes at exactly the right time. State legislatures around
the country are currently debating various ways to reduce their prison
populations, from reducing sentences for non-violent offenders (in Montana)
to increasing funds for prisoner rehabilitation (in Massachusetts) to
expanding private prisons (in Georgia). As yet, however, only a few
states-most notably Texas-have begun looking more carefully at one of the
easiest and most sensible places to start: the overburdened parole agencies
that are filling prisons with technical violators. As Leighton Iles, the
director of a new and Jacobson-esque probation program in Fort Bend, Texas,
told a local paper: "What we are doing here is a simple concept. Simple
works."

Bradford Plumer is the assistant editor of MotherJones.com.