The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

This week, the Pew Center on the States released a report that found that states spent $47 billion on prisons last year, with spending rising faster than that for education. The spending continues to rise, even as crime rates have fallen by 25 percent over the last 20 years. States spend an average of $29,000 annually on each prisoner, 10 times what they spend on parolees and 23 times what they spend on those on probation. The great irony, of course, is that $29,000 is not only much more than in-state college tuition, it is more like the annual cost of tuition at a private university.

The waste has reached a point where in California, for instance, federal judges have ordered the release of one-third of the state's 150,000 inmates because the health services available in the grossly overcrowded system violate the constitution. At the beginning of the Reagan administration, one in 77 Americans was in prison, on parole, or on probation. Today the ratio is one in 31, led by one in 13 adults in Georgia and one in 18 in Idaho. Massachusetts ranks fifth at one in 24.

Huge percentages of the 1.5 million people in prison, particularly African-Americans (one in 11 African-Americans are under some form of correction), are there for nonviolent drug offenses that call out not for barbed wire, but for treatment, education, and job opportunities. The Pew study found that nine of every 10 corrections dollars went to prisons, not for rehabilitation programs.

So it is no surprise that another report released this week by Human Rights Watch found that in every year since 1980, African-Americans have been arrested on drug charges between 2.8 to 5.5 times more, relative to the population, than white Americans. This is despite the long, conveniently ignored fact that Americans consume illegal drugs at roughly their racial percentage of the national population. Drug possession made up 64 percent of drug arrests, with annual percentages reaching 80 percent in the just-concluded Bush years.

Part of the reason this spun out of control is nearly three decades of blind eyes and cowardice in the White House. What the conservative administrations of Reagan and the first President Bush started, President Clinton continued by capitulating to the conservative chorus in Congress in the 1990s to lock in laws that punished crack cocaine possession far more harshly than possession of powdered cocaine. There was no hope for change under the second President Bush.

In a meeting with columnists in 2007, Obama said the disparate crack-to-powder laws were a "mistake." He needs to tell Holder to work with Congress to rectify the mistake. The warehousing of those arrested for drug possession has been worse than a misguided zero-sum game with our liberties. For the cost of private college tuition per prisoner, we do more harm than good, removing tens of thousands of people from the path to productivity in their communities.

Ironically, Holder created a mild stir by saying America has been a nation of cowards on race. While the statement was largely needless, given that the nation now has a black president, he suddenly has a huge say in eliminating the most powerful symbol of the cowardice that remains. The issue of American prisoners will tell us how brave Holder and Obama will be.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/07/rectifying_a_mistake_in_drug_sentencing/