The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Despite the beliefs of jailers, when the public is polled, as they were in a study by Peter Hart (''Changing Public Attitudes Toward the Criminal Justice System,'' February 2002), they say incarceration cannot solve the deep social and economic problems that drive crime, nor is criminalizing addiction more viable than treating it as an illness. Jailing women does not set them free. It also drains money from programs that could treat drug addiction, prevent and treat childhood sexual abuse, and fund quality education.

Quality education and good jobs are real crime deterrents. These are long-term solutions; but right now we can alleviate the need for new bigger jails. Approximately half of the women being held at the Hampden County jail are there because they are too poor to make $200-$500 bail. Often their inability to make bail means that they and their children will become homeless and remain homeless, further destabilizing their life and the life of their children. Sheriffs around the country are creating programs that help rather than hinder a person's ability to get their life back on track. Improving release procedures, creating bail reform and pre-trial diversion programs, allows for release pending trial, freeing jail space for those who might abscond or the few women who are truly dangerous.

The women to be incarcerated in the new regional jail in Chicopee will come from four counties: Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin and Berkshire. While the jail location will change, the life-histories of the women will remain the same. Kate Decou, the former assistant superintendent of the Hampden County jail, wrote in the Journal of Correctional Health in 1998 ''that 75 percent of women reported histories of sexual and physical violence, 82 percent were arrested for drug offences, 15 percent had severe mental illness, 50 percent reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, 33 percent were homeless upon arrest and 85 percent were mothers.''

It now costs more than $3,600 for one woman to stay in jail for one month. Eighty-two percent of women at the Hampden County jail - pre-trial and sentenced - are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. A May 2006 NIH study found ''that society earns $7 in benefits for every $1 spent on addiction treatment.'' Researchers found that the average stay in treatment costs $1,600. For each person included in a nine-month period, treatment yielded $11,500 in benefits, including $7,500 in savings on crime and incarceration-related costs and $3,400 in increased earnings.

If new programs sound expensive, just the opposite is true. The yearly cost of western Massachusetts jails is more than $80 million. When the new regional jail for women opens in Chicopee, the yearly total will reach more than $100 million.

While $100 million for four jails is a lot of money, it represents only a fraction of the actual costs. A group of researchers have spent the past two years attempting to calculate social costs of incarcerating a parent who is convicted of a drug felony. The calculation includes the cost of policing, prison, private and public defense, child care, foster care, and parole/probation supervision, and loss of productively of the sentenced person. The astounding total is $776,297 per person. The research project is ongoing because the list of costs continues to grow.

Research demonstrates that the most expensive and least effective approach to addiction is incarceration. Yet in Massachusetts and throughout the country, funds for substance abuse treatment have been severely reduced. The inevitable question is: Why is addiction criminalized instead of addressed as a public health issue?

In 1975, the total jail and prison population in the United States was 250,000 men and women. Today the United States is the largest incarcerator worldwide, with 2.2 million people in jails and prisons. Between 1986 and 1999, the incarceration rate for women for drug offences grew by 888 percent. This unprecedented rise is due to the War on Drugs, which replaced judicial discretion in sentencing with long mandatory sentences and over-policing in poor, African American and Hispanic neighborhoods. Drug arrests are easier to make in inner-city neighborhoods where drug markets operate more openly than in middle- class areas. Policing that targets inner-city neighborhoods as the primary method for addressing the drug problem generates arrests of drug users and small-time dealers and fills the jails but does little to curb the drug trade.

Women especially have been caught in the War on Drugs since the war has been fought not against drug ''kingpins'' but on small drug dealers and drug users who sell small quantities of drugs to maintain their own habits. Often women receive long sentences because they do not have information to trade in plea bargains and end up getting longer sentences than those with larger amounts of drugs.

In Hamden County especially, the use of ''school zone'' sentencing enhancements have resulted in longer sentences for women. In 1989, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law requiring a two-year minimum mandatory incarceration for dealing or possessing drugs within 1,000 feet of a primary, secondary or vocational school. The two years are in addition to any other punishment imposed. ''An Empirical Study of School Zone Law in 3 Cities in MA'' found that in Springfield, ''Although less than 1 percent of the drug dealing cases involved sales to minors, approximately 80 percent occurred within school zones.'' This is because in Springfield, like other urban areas, almost the entire city constitutes a ''school zone.'' For women in Springfield, this means that when they are arrested for possession, they accept a plea bargain of two years jail time. The prosecution and use of school zone ''enhancements'' pack the jail.

The War on Drugs and the destruction it causes to individuals, families and communities falls disproportionately on African Americans. As researched by the Washington-based Sentencing Project, African Americans constitute 12 percent of the nation's drug users, the same percentage as white and Hispanic drug users. However, African Americans are 38 percent of those arrested for drug possession; receive 59 percent of drug possession convictions and are 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession.

All of us need to be outraged by the double standard of justice reflected in a drug policy that drives mass incarceration. The War on Drugs, its policing, prosecution and sentencing could not exist without the racism which fuels it.

Lois Ahrens, a Northampton resident, is director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project, a national organization working for prison reform. Its Web site is at www.realcostofprisons.org