HispanicLink, News Report, Alex Meneses Miyashita, Posted: Jul 15, 2009
Criminal immigration violation charges are being filed by the federal government at unprecedented levels this year, a report by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reveals.
The study released in June reports there were 9,350 immigration prosecutions in March, representing a 50 percent surge from the month before, based on official records obtained by the group. When compared to a year ago, the increase was 73 percent.
The independent, nonpartisan group attributes the rise to intensified federal policies under the so-called “Operation Streamline” initiative which launched as a pilot project in Del Rio, Texas, in December 2005.
]]>The vast majority of cases referred for prosecution, 99 percent, were charged by U.S. attorneys. The median sentence was about a month, the report indicates.
The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement notes that immigration violations are normally civil offenses prosecuted by immigration judges,adding that under Operation Streamline, the federal government has criminalized these offenses, barring immigrants from future legalization.
“Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable,” stated LCLAA president Milton Rosado. “The administration’s current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals.”
The report states the vast majority of the cases were prosecuted in southwest border districts.
In the Western District of Texas, for instance, prosecutions increased from 626 in January to 3,555 in March. All but 142 were in U.S.-Mexico border districts.
The main charges brought against immigrants in March were for illegal re-entry, bringing in or harboring certain immigrants, entry at improper time or place, visa and document fraud, and misuse and conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States.
Other charges included fraudulent statements or entries, false personification as a U.S. citizen, false statement in application and use of passport, and forgery.
The largest increase in prosecution from a year ago (96.2 percent) was for conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States. Document falsification and related activities has seen the largest surge over the past five years (74.4 percent).
The LCLAA said it is “extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public.”
The organization maintained that criminalizing immigrants will strengthen the myth that ties immigrants to crime even if research has claimed that they tend to commit less crime than other groups.
Rosado attributed the large flow of immigrants to harmful economic policies that have affected workers throughout the hemisphere “causing dislocation and displacement.“
“We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions,” he added.
Related Articles at the URL below
Interpreting the Largest ICE Raid in U.S. History: A Personal Account
After Iowa Raid, Families in Limbo
Immigration Raids Lead U.S. to a Moral, Legal Crisis
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a13e17407782c1d2b32067b91183ed1d
7/13/2008
When the doors swing open on the Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility next month, inmates will file in , new employees will start collecting paychecks and a tiny corner of the state will become its own small economic engine.
The opening marks another milestone as well. Once Clayton is online, the number of inmates living in the state's privately run prisons will almost match the number living in state-run slammers.
To be exact: 46.5 percent of male inmates will be in prisons run by private companies. The other 53.5 percent will be in state-run prisons. One hundred percent of female inmates will be in private facilities.
Indeed, the prison near the Rabbit Ear Mountains in Clayton, just shy of the border with Oklahoma and Texas in northeastern New Mexico, caps a major shift in state policy over the past three decades of housing an increasing number of criminals in privately run prisons.
Since 1980, the year a deadly prison riot made awful headlines for the state, the number of inmates has increased 440 percent. Including Clayton, the number of prisons has gone from one to 11, a figure that doesn't include Camino Nuevo, a privately operated prison that has opened and closed since then.
And questions about whether privatizing was the best choice have mounted.
As the state's inmate population grew, so did lawmakers' interest in private prisons, seen by proponents as a way to save money and outsource some of the state's toughest jobs.
Ten years ago, the state had only two privately run prisons — the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants, open since 1989, and the Hobbs prison, which opened in 1998.
Now, when Clayton opens, it will have five, spread out around the state.
The change in inmate-management policy didn't happen overnight, and hasn't happened without controversy. It also couldn't have happened without two New Mexico governors, most notably former Gov. Gary Johnson, who kicked off the privatization push, and Gov. Bill Richardson, who has kept the trend alive.
It was under Johnson's watch that the 1,200-bed lockup in Hobbs opened in 1998. A year later came the 600-bed Santa Rosa prison. Both are run by The GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut.
Those weren't good times; both facilities suffered deadly confrontations. Three inmates were killed in Hobbs and a prison guard was murdered in a riot in Santa Rosa in less than a year. Before that, an inmate in Santa Rosa died after he was beaten with a laundry bag full of rocks.
New Mexico hadn't seen so much prison violence since the 1980 riot at the state penitentiary, where 33 people died.
No new state prisons?
When Richardson ran for office in 2002, he pledged there would be no new state prisons built on his watch.
"The governor said he would not build new state prisons, and he has not done so," spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said in a statement to The New Mexican.
"All of the capital money that would have been used for new state prisons has instead been invested in new schools, modernizing highways and updating infrastructure in communities across the state."
Still, since he's been governor, 240 beds have been added to the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility near Santa Rosa, run by The GEO Group. The Camino Nuevo Correctional Center in Albuquerque, operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, opened in 2006. In 2007 came the 234-bed, minimum-security Springer Correctional Center, which is run by the state. And then came Clayton.
The town of Clayton is paying to build the facility, which will house 625 inmates, nearly all of them state prisoners.
The town is using $63 million in revenue bonds to finance the project. Clayton officials have welcomed the prison — and its jobs — as a major source of economic activity in the outpost of about 2,500.
Critics, however, say the lockup is essentially a state prison.
"I guess it's a debate in semantics, but it's holding state prisoners," said Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Deming Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
"I guess the governor gets a certain amount of satisfaction in saying the state didn't build it, but from a functional point of view, the state might as well have built it," he said.
Gallegos said that's not the case.
"Of course it's not a state prison. The town of Clayton and GEO can house county or federal inmates," he said. "Beds were available for medium-security inmates, and the Corrections Department chose to take advantage of the new facility for some of its inmates."
Of the 625 beds, 600 will be used for state prisoners.
Others suggest Richardson chose to support the Clayton project to curry favor in the heavily Republican Union County.
"We could have added a wing or pods to other facilities that could have been expanded," said Senate Minority Whip Leonard Lee Rawson, R-Las Cruces. Adding on to places such as Santa Rosa or Hobbs would have been cheaper and quicker than building a new prison, he added.
"But the governor decided he wanted to build in Clayton for political purposes. We can say it's good economic development, but I don't think it was the best choice for the public," he said.
The Governor's Office denied that, saying Richardson "already had great relationships with Democrats and Republicans in Clayton."
And, Corrections Department Secretary Joe Williams said, building the Clayton prison was "absolutely the right decision."
"When we signed those agreements, we were operating at well over 100 percent capacity," he said. "We were busting at the seams when we did that."
In the past two years, however, the state's prison population has dropped 6.6 percent, a recent report found.
Williams said even though population projections are now much lower than they were when talk of Clayton first surfaced, the state still needs the facility, particularly because it will provide beds for medium-custody, or level 3, inmates.
"That's where we need the bed space, and that's what Clayton will provide us," he said.
Inmates from a variety of facilities will be moved to Clayton, which is expected to be full within 60 days of opening.
Questions about Clayton
As it gets ready to open, there are other questions about the cost of building the new prison.
A review done for the Legislative Finance Committee in 2007 found that the prison's actual cost will be much higher than the construction costs, which at the time of the report were estimated to be $61 million.
Over twenty years, the state will pay $132 million in construction and finance charges, but will not own the building, according to the report.
As part of the $95.33 per diem the state will pay to house inmates in the new prison, $27.81 will go to pay construction costs.
The high cost of building private prisons has left some lawmakers concerned about whether the state can afford to keep so many inmates there.
Williams said a big part of the reason the building cost was so high was because construction costs have gone way up.
"You look at the cost of a gallon of gas and then you look at the cost of a new prison bed, and everything is going to have its increases and it is inflationary," he said.
Williams also pointed out that the cost of labor has gone up since prisons were built 10 years ago in Hobbs and Santa Rosa.
Other lawmakers have a philosophical opposition to the opening of the Clayton prison, and to private prisons in general, saying it's the job of the government, not corporations, to house prisoners.
"I don't believe it's the right way, I don't think they should be for profit," said Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, D-Belen. Sanchez said prisons are the state's responsibility.
"Hopefully Clayton will be the last one," he said.
An inmate drought?
It's unclear, however, when the state will need another new prison.
The state was expected to run out of bed space in August of 2011 for males and in March of 2012 for females, but that's no longer the case.
The most recent projections show the state is expected to run out of space in 2017 for men and in 2015 for women. The department warns, however, that those projections are subject to change.
"Our projections totally changed from last year to this year where we were on a spike up, and now we're growing but at a much smaller pace," Williams said.
While it has dropped off recently, the population is expected to grow by about 1.4 percent in the coming years.
"We're in a great state as far as corrections go for the first time in many, many years, I think," he said. "I think we're in a position a lot of states wish they were. We have room and capacity to grow."
So why is the prison population — long on the increase — now decreasing?
A recent report by the New Mexico Sentencing Commission shows the state's prison population has dropped for several reasons.
The study, released last week, said one reason is a Corrections Department policy that is increasingly imposing sanctions other than prison for technical parole violations such as missing a counseling session.
The study also said a 2006 state law that allows the department to let nonviolent inmates earn time off during the first 60 days of their stay is leading to some inmates getting out of prison sooner. Previously, inmates had to wait to start earning time.
It also said felony drug courts were playing a role. The state now has 31, and the report says that although the courts are not a diversion option for prison, they may indirectly keep offenders from being rearrested and going to prison. The courts provide treatment, mandatory drug testing and judicial oversight, among other things.
But if the projections are now lower than they have been, that might be a good thing for the Corrections Department.
When it did its report, the LFC found the department wasn't ready for projected growth.
"The department lacks active long-term planning to accommodate inmate growth, leading to a disjointed approach to acquiring bed space that proves costly," according to the report. The committee asked the department to put together a 10-year plan, which it has.
But, Williams said, the plan was outdated almost as soon as it was written.
"I didn't like 10-year plans because things are ever-changing in the department, projections, forecasts," he said. "It's hard enough to predict year to year or two years."
Williams also pointed out that there are advantages to having some space available in the state's prisons. The state now has enough room — and the cash — to refurbish some cells at the state penitentiary and Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, work that has been a long time coming, he said.
In addition, Williams said the state is considering implementing recent recommendations of a prison reform task force appointed by Richardson.
"The plan is hopefully this prison reform might change the way we do business forever," he said. "If we are diverting people into drug courts and mental health courts and our re-entry initiatives are successful, it could be a while before we see a new prison."
Contact Kate Nash at 986-3036 or knash@sfnewmexican.com. Read her blog, Green Chile Chatter, at www.sfnewmexican.com.
New Clayton prison at a glance
Name: Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility
Cost to build: $63 million, paid by the town of Clayton using revenue bonds. Clayton will own the building.
Cost per inmate per night: $95.33, the most expensive privately run prison in the state.
Capacity: 625 beds, 600 of which will be used by the state Department of Corrections.
Square footage: 228,000 square feet; sits on more than 60 acres of land owned by the town of Clayton.
Jobs created: Expected to employ 191 people. Jobs include correctional officers, clerical work, food service, education and business management. Correctional officers will start at $12.26 an hour.
High-tech feature: The prison is built with gas ports in the ceiling, which would be used to help in a disturbance.
Expected opening date: Aug. 1
Sources: The GEO Group, Inc., the state Corrections Department
More on this site:
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SantaFeNorthernNM/prisonclayton--ready-
Stories:
* Prison firms donate thousands to Richardson
* Who is in prison?
* State figures show private prisons cheaper to run, but N.M. pays more than others.
SACRAMENTO, Calif.‹A state watchdog commission has recommended that
California phase out its antiquated juvenile prisons by 2011, replacing them with regional lockups run by the counties.
The regional centers would hold only the most dangerous offenders under the proposal unveiled Monday by the watchdog Little Hoover Commission. Less serious offenders would be housed at local juvenile halls.
Commissioners said the state also should end its three-year experiment with combining youth and adult prisons under the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Authority over youth prisons would be placed under an Office of Juvenile Justice reporting to the governor until the state ends its involvement.
]]>The report also suggests that the youth prisons do little in the way of rehabilitation, saying three of four freed young offenders commit new crimes within three years.
"Californians may fairly ask what they are getting for this outlay and
whether other strategies can better deliver public safety and youth
rehabilitation," commission chairman Daniel Hancock wrote.
It will cost taxpayers $378 million next year to care for the state's 1,500 juvenile inmates, the panel said in a report to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders.
A law that took effect in September already requires the state to transfer all but the most serious offenders to counties' jurisdiction.
That leaves state taxpayers paying for six large, aging institutions that hold far fewer offenders, commissioners said. They said the state will have to pay to replace those crumbling youth prisons unless the system is changed.
The report said giving counties responsibility for housing juvenile
offenders would bring substantial savings but doesn't estimate how much that would be.
The commission found that the state has made some progress in reforming its youth prison system, which some national experts have described as draconian. Next week, an Alameda County judge will consider whether those reforms are taking too long. If so, the judge might appoint a receiver with broad oversight powers.
Improvements have been slowed because the juvenile justice arm is dwarfed by the adult prison system under a single corrections department, commissioners said. Combining the adult and juvenile prisons was part of Schwarzenegger's campaign promise to "blow up" bureaucratic boxes once he became governor.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/07/15/report_says_calif_shou
ld_end_juvenile_prisons/
Fayette County officials said Wednesday the state could build one of two new prisons in German Township to handle overcrowding within the Department of Corrections system, which expects to run out of space for inmates by 2010.
State, county and township officials met twice this year with corrections department Secretary Jeffrey Beard at the German Township Municipal Building to discuss two potential sites for a 2,000-bed prison that would create more than 500 jobs.
"It's 99.9 percent" certain a prison will be built in Fayette, said state Rep. Tim Mahoney of South Union. "In politics, nothing is a sure thing until it's done."
Mahoney expects the state to make a decision by fall.
"I'd rather be talking about building a GM plant, but we're not," he said. "It looks good, but it ain't real until it breaks dirt."
Zapotosky said the prison would be similar in design to SCI-Fayette in Luzerne, Fayette County.
"I'm hoping an announcement will be forthcoming. It will mean more than 500 jobs," he said.
German Township Supervisor Robert Croushore said the municipality "put out the welcome mat for the prison."
"We worked hard to get it here," he said.
Croushore said the two locations being considered are near routes 21 and 166. One parcel is owned by Mario Tiberi and his family. The other is owned by Manfried Wolf, of Flemington, N.J., a farmer and real estate developer who purchased his property about 16 years ago.
Wolf confirmed that the state is interested in his land, but "I haven't even seen a contract."
Neither Tiberi nor Mike Krajovic, president of Fay-Penn, responded to a request for comment.
The recently passed state budget contains $200 million to build a prison but lists a number of other potential sites, including Armstrong, Centre, Huntingdon, Philadelphia, Luzerne and Northumberland counties.
Susan McNaughton, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said the state needs to build one prison immediately and then decide if a second is needed.
"We need at least one in the near future," she said. "We need a prison now. We're reviewing all the different sites and will go from there."
During Senate budget hearings in May, Beard testified the prison system is about 4,400 inmates above capacity now and could run out of bed space by 2010. He said if a new prison isn't approved soon, it may not be ready until 2011.
The German Township sites are located about eight miles west of Uniontown, near the Greene County border. With a population of 5,595, the municipality is rural and has a median family income of $32,428, according to U.S. Census data.
SCI-Fayette opened in 2003 and houses about 2,000 inmates, according to the state. SCI-Pittsburgh closed in 2005 but was reopened last year to handle overcrowding.
As of May, the state's inmate population was more than 46,000, which is 2,000 above capacity. Since 1990, the state has added 23,000 beds to the system.
In the 1990s, the state went on a building binge, constructing five prisons in Erie, Somerset, Northumberland, Schuylkill and Greene counties, which eventually cost taxpayers $1 billion.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/state/s_576852.html
SLAMMED
Inside America's broken—and broke—prison system
Welcome to the Age of Incarceration Welcome to the Age of Incarceration
We are locking up 1 in every 100 American adults—and going bankrupt in the process.
By Jennifer Gonnerman
California's convict crisis Worst of the Worst
California's convict crisis
By James Sterngold
A guard's change of heart Taming of the Screws
A guard's change of heart
By Sasha Abramsky
The booming immigrant detention industry Texas Hold 'Em
The booming immigrant detention industry
By Stephanie Mencimer
Probation for Profit Probation for Profit
In Georgia's outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole.
By Celia Perry
Kids doing time for tantrums Hard Time Out
Kids doing time for tantrums
By David Goodman
Prison problems? Not in Kansas anymore. The Shawnee Redemption
Prison problems? Not in Kansas anymore.
By Justine Sharrock
______
Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas,(URL below) a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.
The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.
What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.
Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.
“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”
He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”
No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.
Court interpreters are normally impartial participants and keep their opinions to themselves. But Dr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, said he was so offended by the cruelty of the prosecutions that he felt compelled to break his silence. “A line was crossed at Postville,” he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13sun2.html?ei=5087&em=&en=098eabaf7e4d48a7&ex=1216094400&pagewanted=print
One of the nation's largest correctional institutions is spending $3.3 million to install an RFID inmate tracking system to track and monitor over 2,000 of its inmates—making it the largest installation of RFID technology to track and monitor people anywhere in the world.
According to the president of the company installing the tracking system, the technology will provide the Washington, D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) facility with a state-of-the-art investigative tool and safety system for its 450-plus staff.
"They approached us because they recognized the value of the technology and enhancing their ability to manage inmates," said Greg M. Oester, president of Alanco/TSI PRISM, Inc.
The tracking system, expected to be installed by the end of the year, combines TSI PRISM's RFID Inmate Tracking System with Wi-Fi compatible RTLS technology from AeroScout, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alanco/TSI PRISM, Inc., a subsidiary of Alanco Technologies, Inc., pioneered the use of RFID inmate tracking technology in August 2000. Currently, ten prisons throughout the world are using its tracking technology, including facilities in California, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, and Australia. Three others, including the Washington, D.C. DOC, are installing the technology this year.
How it works
TSI PRISM is comprised of three primary components: tamper detecting tags, readers, and a host computer employing the TSI PRISM software.
"Everyone in the prison facility wears a transmitter of one form or another," explained Oester. "The inmates wear a tamper detecting device on the wrist that looks like a large industrial wristwatch. This device sends a beacon every two seconds and has multiple levels of tamper detection. So you can’t remove it. The officers and prison staff wear a transmitter device that looks like a pager on their utility belts and it has multiple levels of duress notifications. So if an officer is attacked or is in trouble in the prison facility, he can push the distress button and we instantly know who he is, where he is and what the threat level is."
All of these signals are collected by an array of antennae that have been installed around the prison facility and uses triangulation methodology.
"We know precisely where everyone is throughout the facility, so we can identify people by name and their location, who they’re standing next to, and so on," said Oester. "All of this data is archived into a database so we can determine where someone is in about a two-second keystroke. We can also go back into the database and find out where that particular individual was yesterday or two months ago."
The greater good
Two of the primary benefits of the technology are that it promotes and forces inmate accountability and becomes a strong investigative resource for resolving incidences.
"The inmates know that they are being tracked," Oester said. "They know that they can be caught and it can be determined if they were involved in a rules violation. If there’s an incident to be investigated, we can conclusively determine who was in the immediate proximity of the event, which shortens the witness list considerably. It denies inmates the ability to say that they were not at a particular event. We capture them off-screen and it provides staff with a very useful tool to positively and conclusively resolve incidents or participation by inmates in particular incidences."
Another added benefit is the creation of operational savings. RFID technology enables correctional institutions to reduce manual tasks that normally require valuable staff time."If a particular inmate in a 200-bed facility doesn’t show up for work detail or classroom assignment, it would take a staff person about 30 to 40 minutes to conduct a physical search," said Oester. "With our technology, we know where everyone is with a keystroke. That frees up the staff from mundane search work. It allows them to do drug screening or security sweeps that frequently there’s not enough time in a day to do. It becomes a very comprehensive management tool."
Privacy concerns
Constant monitoring, of course, means that inmates have even less privacy and freedom of movement than before the RFID system was put in place. Oester’s position is that in a prison environment, an individual’s right to privacy has already been taken away.
"They can strip the individual and search them at will," he said. "Prison facilities can utilize cameras in every area of the prison, except perhaps the bathroom or shower area. Our technology is a security enhancement to the facility. We don't actually depict the human body on screen so unlike cameras, we can track an individual into a bathroom or shower area."
Bill Covington, a professor of clinical law at the University of Washington Law School, runs The Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic, has no issues with the real-time tracking technology."I'm hard pressed to see the ethical violations in terms of wanting to know physically where the inmates are located at all times in those facilities," he said.
Jeffrey B. Killino, an attorney with the Philadelphia law firm, Woloshin & Killino, P.C., agrees.
"From my standpoint, an RFID tag is no more intrusive and no more invasive than a prison uniform or handcuffs or shackles," he said. "It's a tag that they are wearing, whether it's on their arms or legs, and that is completely and ethically appropriate. Like many Americans, I take our right to privacy very seriously, but when you have been convicted of a crime and you are in a prison, I don't see how you have the right to argue this."
What will draw the line, according to Killino, is embedding an RFID tag into a human being. In 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved of an RFID chip that can be implanted in humans for medical purposes.
"I don't know if they would ever go that far in our lifetime," said Killino. "That would put you into the argument of cruel and unusual punishment that prisoners typically raise and it's too much of the invasion of the person and privacy by having that tag in there. You'll have people up in arms and there will be a knockdown-drag-out fight should that occur."
Oester said that is an unlikely scenario.
"It will never happen because it’s a privacy issue," he said. "Injecting a foreign device into a human body is something that can only be done with the consent of the individual and I don’t see that ever taking place on a wholesale basis. There’s no benefit to the inmate and there’s no benefit to the facility. There’s currently a device that would work in this environment anyway and it’s not something that we would attempt to do."
One concern that Covington raises is whether the technology is 100 percent effective.
"There would be ethical problems if you tell prisoners that they'll be safe, that they won't be beaten or raped, because you have this technology that will allow you to know where they are," he said. "This is a sort of guarantee of safety to the prisoner and their family. I don't know if it's reached the point where we can declare that to them. I don't know where you can have 100 percent accuracy at all times in all situations."
However, TSI PRISM utilizes a broadband system for real-time tracking that is more effective than a narrowband system that some companies use. Narrowband systems transmit slower signals and may not track the actual movement reliably.
Broadband systems are capable of transmitting fast signals at frequent intervals. At two-second intervals, each transmitter is sending a signal 43,200 times per day. By tracking an inmate in these two-second intervals, the broadband depicts the subject's actual movement along their pathway of travel. Contrast that to a narrowband, which usually transmits every 30 seconds. An inmate can move up to 50 yards, assault someone, and return without being detected.
According to the company, several key statistics from correctional institutions using its system prove its effectiveness:
· Incidents of force and violence were reduced by more than 65 percent.
· Failures to report to job incidents were reduced from 29 to 0.
· Theft and destruction of state property incidents were reduced by more than 40 percent.
"Adoption of this technology is increasing and accelerating," said Oester. "I’m very confident that once this DC installation is completed, it will adequately showcase the value of the technology in a very large, densely populated institution."
Daniel Casciato is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, PA. In addition to writing for Wi-FiPlanet, he writes legal, medical, real estate and technology-related articles for trade and consumer publications and recently launched his own copywriting business. For more information, visit www.danielcasciato.com.
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3758456
GEO Group will incarcerate more immigrants.
Posted: Jul 10, 2008 by John Herbert
NORTHWEST DETENTION CENTER: More immigrants will cross these tracks.
Tacoma officials have confirmed that Florida-based private prison corporation the GEO Group has plans to expand a prison for immigrants on the Tacoma tide flats by 50 percent, providing capacity for more than 1,500 prisoners.
With capacity for 1,000 prisoners, the Northwest Detention Center is already the largest GEO private prison on the West Coast. Aggressive, ongoing efforts to expel illegal immigrants from the United States have created an overwhelming demand for private prisons, which generally charge the federal government about $100 per day to keep immigrants locked up while awaiting deportation.
“The widespread detention of individuals because of civil violations of immigration law is one of the clearest examples of how our current immigration system is failing,” says Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Director Jorge L. Barón in a public statement denouncing expansion of the facility. “Although many people in our community do not realize this, a significant proportion of the individuals detained at the Tacoma detention center have resided in the United States for many years and have either no criminal record or a record composed of only traffic offenses. Detaining these individuals while their cases are processed before the immigration court results in the needless separation of family members and makes it harder for people to obtain legal representation.”
Local activists have called for closure of the facility on grounds that it doesn’t meet fundamental safety standards, and hasn’t produced required evacuation plans or documents. City officials contend they have no right to limit the expansion of the facility because it meets essential public facility standards as outlined in the state’s Growth Management Act. Groups such as Tacoma Smash I.C.E. and the Bill of Rights Defense Network Tacoma continue to oppose the facility’s presence, claiming that conditions there are unhealthy and that some prisoners are abused, while others are denied medical care while detained.
Stories offered by human rights advocates from inside the center do not paint a pretty picture.
The Detention Watch Network, for example, tells the story of a couple taken and imprisoned in the facility this past May. The daughter of the couple claims that her mother relayed stories of pregnant prisoners being denied proper medical care, and were forced to sleep on hard, thin mattresses and eat prison slop. The woman, whose name was not provided, told her daughter that people in the facility have died because their jailers refused to answer requests for medical care. Two pregnant prisoners experiencing medical complications were taken to the emergency room and examined in chains, on orders from accompanying prison officials.
The woman relaying the tales was later released, having been imprisoned for months.
http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/article/for_print/2417/
WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.
Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.
In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.
]]>He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.
“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”
During fast-paced hearings in May, 262 of the illegal immigrants pleaded guilty in one week and were sentenced to prison — most for five months — for knowingly using false Social Security cards or legal residence documents to gain jobs at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in nearby Postville. It was the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.
The essay has provoked new questions about the Agriprocessors proceedings, which had been criticized by criminal defense and immigration lawyers as failing to uphold the immigrants’ right to due process. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said she would hold a hearing on the prosecutions and call Professor Camayd-Freixas as a witness.
“The essay raises questions about whether the charges brought were supported by the facts,” Ms. Lofgren said.
Bob Teig, a spokesman for Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, said the immigrants’ constitutional rights were not compromised.
“All defendants were provided with experienced criminal attorneys and interpreters before they made any decisions in their criminal cases,” Mr. Teig said. “Once they made their choices, two independent judicial officers determined the defendants were making their choices freely and voluntarily, were satisfied with their attorney, and were, in fact, guilty.”
Mr. Teig said the judges in the cases were satisfied with the guilty pleas.
“The judges had the right and duty to reject any guilty plea where a defendant was not guilty,” Mr. Teig said. “No plea was rejected.”
The essay by Professor Camayd-Freixas, who is the director of a program to train language interpreters at the university, has also caused a stir among legal interpreters. In telephone calls and debates through e-mail, they have discussed whether it was appropriate for a translator to speak publicly about conversations with criminal defendants who were covered by legal confidentiality.
“It is quite unusual that a legal interpreter would go to this length of writing up an essay and taking a strong stance,” said Nataly Kelly, an analyst with Common Sense Advisory, a marketing research company focused on language services. Ms. Kelly is a certified legal interpreter who is the author of a manual about interpreting.
The Agriprocessors hearings were held in temporary courtrooms in mobile trailers and a ballroom at the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds here in Waterloo. Professor Camayd-Freixas worked with one defense lawyer, Sara L. Smith, translating her discussions with nine clients she represented. He also worked in courtrooms during plea and sentencing hearings.
Ms. Smith praised Professor Camayd-Freixas’s essay, saying it captured the immigrants’ distress during “the surreal two weeks” of the proceedings. She said he had not revealed information that was detrimental to her cases.
But she cautioned that interpreters should not commonly speak publicly about conversations between lawyers and clients. “It is not a practice that I would generally advocate as I could envision circumstances under which such revelations could be damaging to a client’s case,” Ms. Smith said.
Professor Camayd-Freixas said he had considered withdrawing from the assignment, but decided instead that he could play a valuable role by witnessing the proceedings and making them known.
He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,” he wrote.
He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said.
Ms. Smith went repeatedly over the charges and the options available to her clients, Professor Camayd-Freixas said. He cited the reaction of one Guatemalan, Isaías Pérez Martínez: “No matter how many times his attorney explained it, he kept saying, ‘I’m illegal, I have no rights. I’m nobody in this country. Just do whatever you want with me.’ ”
Professor Camayd-Freixas said Mr. Pérez Martínez wept during much of his meeting with Ms. Smith.
Ms. Smith, like more than a dozen other court-appointed defense lawyers, concluded that none of the immigrants’ legal options were good. Prosecutors had evidence showing they had presented fraudulent documents when they were hired at Agriprocessors.
In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported.
Worried about families they had been supporting with their wages, the immigrants readily chose to plead guilty because they did understand that was the fastest way to return home, Professor Camayd-Freixas said.
“They were hoping and they were begging everybody to deport them,” he said.
Ms. Smith said she was convinced after examining the prosecutors’ evidence that it was not in her clients’ interests to go to trial.
“I think they understood what their options were,” she said. “I tried to make it very clear.”
Legal interpreters familiar with the profession said that Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay, while a notable departure from the norm, did not violate professional standards.
Isabel Framer, a certified legal interpreter from Ohio who is chairwoman of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, said Professor Camayd-Freixas did not go public while the cases were still in court or reveal information that could not be discerned from the record. Ms. Framer said she was speaking for herself because her organization had not taken an official position on the essay.
“Interpreters, just like judges and attorneys, have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the process,” she said. “But they don’t check their ethical standards at the door.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11immig.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215788693-AFbZ6gGAM8xzoFc/rEQsWw&pagewanted=print
JULY/AUGUST 2008, Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/BR33.4/perkinson.php
Guarded Hope
Lessons from the history of the prison boom Robert Perkinson
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Johnson’s belligerent anticrime talk rings familiar, but the policy changes ultimately put forward by his expert panel in 1967 hail, seemingly, from another country. Nowhere among the Katzenbach commission’s 200-plus recommendations were the sorts of punitive fixes presently in vogue. Rather than augmenting law-enforcement powers, the panelists urged greater respect for civil liberties and a national commitment to police fairness and professionalism, complete with in-service training courses like “The civil rights movement and history of the Negro.” Instead of strengthening the hands of prosecutors, the commissioners recommended greater evidence sharing, eliminating most bail charges, and expanding legal services for low-income defendants. Instead of tougher criminal sentencing, they suggested rolling back mandatory-minimum drug penalties passed in the 1950s and shifting resources from imprisonment to probation and parole.
Although the panelists advocated more money for law enforcement and criminological research, they insisted, above all, that “the challenge of crime in a free society” could only be met by stressing prevention over punishment. “We will not have dealt effectively with crime until we have alleviated the conditions that stimulate it,” they wrote. Reflecting what would become an unfashionable belief that government intervention can alleviate social problems by means other than tax cuts or privatization, the president’s advisors asserted that the Great Society represented the best solution to crime:
[The Commission] has no doubt whatever that the most significant action that can be taken against crime is action designed to eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure every American is given the opportunities and the freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.
Rather than building cellblocks, they called for building communities. Throwing down the gauntlet before the incipient law-and-order Right, LBJ’s best and brightest called “for a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”
What they got was counterrevolution. By 1968, when the report was translated into law, Lyndon Johnson’s once formidable social-democratic coalition had fragmented, a casualty not only of Vietnam but of the riotous, long, hot summers at home. The domestic homicide rate was soaring, and as public anxiety mounted, resurgent Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats took control of the crime issue in Congress, drafting sweeping legislation that bore little resemblance to Johnson’s. Instead of crafting myriad federal programs, the revised bill would channel some $400 million into locally controlled “block grants” for law enforcement, a nod to states’ rights. Instead of “warring on poverty,” as the commissioners urged, the congressional package took aim at the Warren Court, eliminating restrictions on wiretapping and authorizing police to interrogate suspects without the pesky involvement of defense attorneys (Miranda v. Arizona had been decided in 1966).
Johnson’s allies disliked the bill—the New York Times decried the “vicious” legislation’s “sectional politics, facile solutions, and clearly discernable prejudices against the ignorant and the poor”—but after it motored through the House and Senate, the lame-duck president held his nose and signed. What had started out as an effort to outfox the Right—to commandeer Barry Goldwater’s divisive talking points to buttress the Left’s anti-poverty and civil rights agenda—had instead destabilized liberalism and shifted the national conversation from social services to just deserts.
Whether or not the final version of the quaintly named Safe Streets Act represented “a giant leap toward a police state,” as one contemporary feared, the law would serve as a blueprint for anticrime legislation from the late ’60s forward. Under President Nixon, who took Goldwater’s rhetoric about crime to the White House, and then under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush the Crusader, the federal government promulgated ever harsher, more expansive, and more expensive versions of Johnson’s runaway bill. They declared and redeclared wars on drugs. They extended sentences, curtailed parole, facilitated capital punishment, hobbled judges and defense attorneys, and dispensed billions of dollars for prison construction. This was the story in Washington, but even harsher measures developed in the states—think New York’s Rockefeller drug laws or California’s three-strikes initiative—with the result that a prison nation grew up from the wreckage of the Great Society.
Even as the social safety net frayed—and then unraveled from the Reagan administration forward—America invested generously in criminal justice, especially prisons. Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. inmate population increased sixfold. By 2008 the total surpassed 2.3 million, more than the populations of Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco combined. The United States, a republic founded on the notion of liberty, became the most incarcerated nation on earth.
But why?
Social scientists have put forward a grab bag of answers. Some depict the transformation as a reasoned response to violence, others as a panicked reaction to cable news crime coverage. Some blame postwar economic restructuring, others the populist peculiarities of American democracy. Three recent books assert comprehensive explanations—one zeroing in on the cultural causes of criminal justice severity, one surveying the political geography of the prison boom, and one assessing the country’s changing terrain of law and governance. All three greatly enrich the conversation, but none are likely to settle the argument.
***
Sasha Abramsky’s American Furies (2007) is less a causal account of what he labels “the Age of Mass Imprisonment” than a cri de coeur against it. He laments that the guiding principles of U.S. social policy—with respect to criminal justice but also education, welfare, and taxes—have shifted from equal opportunity to stratification, from social integration to retribution, and he presents a wide-ranging examination of the consequences. A peripatetic journalist and author of two previous books on crime and punishment, Abramsky takes readers on a tour of America’s carceral landscape, from law-enforcement trade shows to corrupt private prisons to sweltering outdoor jails, and he shakes his head in dismay wherever he goes.
Abramsky finds particularly disturbing the decline of prisoner treatment programs and the ascendance of their antitheses, supermaximum-security control units, which have proliferated even more rapidly than conventional cellblocks. Designed to curtail prison disorder by stripping refractory prisoners of even vestigial human agency, these special housing units now contain tens of thousands of inmates, many of them severely mentally ill, in a state of almost perfect isolation. In the harshest facilities—places like California’s Pelican Bay or Texas’s Estelle High Security—prisoners are locked into spare concrete boxes for twenty-three hours a day; they take their meals through slots and experience human touch only to be shackled. Abramsky calls these places “storehouses of the living dead.”
Lawmakers and their constituents like to imagine that only the worst of the worst are subject to hardline, high-tech justice, but a substantial majority of prison and jail inmates in the United States, more than 1.3 million, have been convicted of non-violent offenses. According to a 2003 Human Rights Watch study coauthored by Abramsky, between 200,000 and 300,000 prisoners are mentally ill, with many more in jails. Even greater numbers have been snared by the War on Drugs. In 1967 the Katzenbach commission urged more money for drug treatment and even hinted at decriminalization of marijuana. But unyielding criminalization became the rule, such that drug offenses now account for roughly two million annual arrests, some 40 percent of them for pot possession. For those charged with dealing narcotics, especially crack cocaine, Abramsky reports that mandatory prison terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
Juveniles, too, are going to prison in record numbers. By 2003 more than one hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen were incarcerated in the United States. Most are held in juvenile facilities or reform schools, inventions of the Progressive Era, but in recent years, prosecutors and judges have diverted thousands of them to adult prisons. As Abramsky reports, Florida led the charge, attracting national attention for sentencing a twelve year-old to life without parole (later overturned) and for routinely charging school-age delinquents, from pot smokers to shoplifters, with adult felonies.
The new approach that emerged from the 1960s signaled not just a declining tolerance for risk and disorder in an increasingly atomized society, but also a sea change in public policy presumptions. No longer would criminal-justice institutions strive, however incapably, to reclaim and reintegrate lawbreakers. Instead, tough justice in the post-civil rights era would seek to segregate offenders from free society, subject them to extended controls, and, ultimately, relegate them to a permanently subordinate class of citizenship as defined by conviction status. This time, as before, race would figure prominently. “The harsh attitudes towards kids right now in the United States is a harsh attitude to black and Latino kids,” a juvenile justice expert tells Abramsky. “Those other kids.”
Mandatory prison terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
Abramsky puts the blame everywhere and nowhere. He assails conservative academics like James Q. Wilson, who distorted the admittedly mixed performance of prison treatment initiatives to imply that “nothing works” in the field of criminal rehabilitation. He censures the victims’ rights movement for channeling personal anguish into calls for public vengeance, and he condemns “Bible Belt fundamentalists” who preach “eternal damnation.” He dismisses law-and-order reactionaries as “media whores” and lambastes “rant radio” for feeding Americans “a diet of vitriol that would put some paranoid schizophrenics to shame.” Finally, he resorts to metaphor, invoking Hobbes, Hitler, and, for his title, Greek mythology. Having slept through the age of rehabilitation, Abramsky submits, an American incarnation of the blood-thirsty Erinyes, or Furies, “shook themselves out of their slumbers” in the 1970s and now hover over a land “consumed by its desire for revenge.” They have built Tartarus on earth.
***
This rendition of the punitive turn as mass hysteria is precisely the view that Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor at the University of Southern California, aims to counter in her book Golden Gulag (2007). A political geographer with a Marxist compass, she argues that super-sized imprisonment is more rational than emotional, more structural than cultural. It represents not just a rightward jag in political discourse, she holds, but a fundamental transformation of the country’s political economy.
Gilmore grounds her study on a single, exceptionally large and dynamic state: California. The choice both complicates and strengthens her claims. It creates difficulties because California, thanks largely to its powerful guard union, has resisted prison privatization and because neither the state nor private contractors make much use of convict labor. This limits opportunities for profit, Gilmore acknowledges, thereby undermining simplistic descriptions of a “prison industrial complex” or a “new slavery.”
On the other hand, California has experienced phenomenally expensive prison growth over the past three decades. Since Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation to fix sentencing and eliminate parole in 1977, the state’s prisoner population has shot up 790 percent. Since George Deukmejian took the helm in 1983, California has built twenty-four major new prisons, making its “golden gulag” the biggest state penal system in the United States. Once famous for its public universities, California’s largest state agency is now its department of corrections, with an annual budget of $10 billion.
Most analysts, including Abramsky, who wrote an engaging 2002 book on California’s crime panic, Hard Time Blues, attribute the state’s prison boom to political factors from the Reagan revolt to the three-strikes campaign. Gilmore, on the other hand, points to three types of “surpluses” that made it possible: land, labor, and capital. Rural land once used to grow crops for agribusiness now cultivates prisons, she finds, while chronic unemployment in urban areas helps produce the bodies to fill them. Prison construction, at $280 to $350 million a pop, has also put big money to work, not only in the traditional pork-contractor circuit, but by providing investors low-risk, tax-exempt government bonds. As the military-Keynesian order faltered in the 1970s, Gilmore asserts, a “prison fix” steadied the state-capitalist machine. Prison building was not a conspiracy, she says, but it did “put certain state capacities into motion, make use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.”
Such reasoning may smack of economic determinism, but Gilmore’s book contains a welter of nuanced, well-researched insights. By following the money, she reveals who gains (Central Valley largeholders and municipal bond brokerages, among them) and who loses (impoverished residents in both rural and urban communities) in California’s prison construction frenzy. Because so much trickery was involved in the credit-market financing, she speculates that California’s crackdown may have been less populist than its ballot initiatives suggest; in short, voters never saw the bill.
Through careful case studies of two prison zones—Los Angeles, a convict exporter, and Corcoran, an inmate importer—Gilmore also shows how large-scale imprisonment constitutes a form of forced urban-to-rural migration; how tax dollars are unfairly diverted from blighted urban cores to withering farm towns; and how prison host communities, despite the transfer, rarely receive their promised economic windfall. As a rural development scheme, Gilmore counsels, imprisonment rarely delivers. The best paid employees commute rather than relocate, and family members who trek to visit their incarcerated loved ones rarely drop enough cash to stimulate the service sector.
Overall, Gilmore’s somewhat demanding text convincingly identifies powerful interests that lined up to haul California’s tough-on-crime bandwagon. What Golden Gulag fails to explain is why the band started playing in the first place.
***
Here Jonathan Simon, a Berkeley law professor, steps into the conversation, turning it from base to superstructure. His ambitious and carefully reasoned new book, Governing through Crime (2007), the most thought-provoking of the crop, argues that what sociologists are calling “mass imprisonment” (because such a large portion of the population is now involved) signals not only a new approach to managing crime, but to managing society.
In the criminal justice arena, Simon shows how prosecutors have gained power as courts have become “judgment machines,” constrained by mandatory sentencing, and how prisons, absent the promise of rehabilitation, have proliferated as “human toxic waste dumps.” The most innovative sections of his book, however, outline how an increasingly insular, risk averse, and punitive social ethic has reshaped not only how the other half lives but how the top half does as well.
In deunionized workplaces, he finds that blue and white-collar employees alike are subject to more surveillance, more restrictions on behavior (both on and off the clock), and more legalistic discipline than in the past. He regrets that in schools music and art classes have given way to metal detectors and locker searches. Even the family, he argues, has become “a nexus of crime.” On one hand, family members are regarded as potential criminals, a partial consequence of feminist campaigns against domestic violence. On the other, well-heeled parents spend heavily to fortify their homes against external threats, purchasing intruder-alert systems, nanny cams, and, if their teens stray, home drug testing kits. As much as the 5,000 prisons that now punctuate the American landscape, gated communities and battleship SUVs symbolize the birth of a fearful nation.
Americans’ collective reactions to violent crime—especially homicide, which rocketed upward in the 1960s, leveled off in the 1980s, and fell back toward earth in the 1990s—are so pervasive, Simon contends, that crime fighting has become a paradigmatic means of governing, a dominant pathway to authority and legitimacy for policymakers. Governors and presidents, even more so after 9/11, have increasingly posed as lawmen on the campaign trail, while crime victims have become an idealized class of citizens deemed especially worthy of government intervention.
The result is not only a bloated penal system but an erosion of civil society. As war (whether against crime or terror) becomes a leading metaphor for governing, as politicians swap civil liberties for the elusive promise of security, as sanctions replace supports in the nation’s social welfare toolkit, and as fear eclipses hope as an impetus to political action, the edifice of a free society quakes, Simon argues. “Governing through crime does not, and I believe, cannot make us more secure,” he writes. Instead, it cycles hundreds of thousands of troubled young people, “a shocking percentage of them descendants of . . . slaves,” through criminogenic jails. It “is making America less democratic and more racially polarized.”
Simon maintains that “the signal event marking the end of the Great Society era” and the rise of its punitive successor was the 1968 passage of the Safe Streets Act. “Crime was driving a stake through the heart of the Democrats’ urban coalition,” and the government’s response was to refabricate the welfare state into the penal state.
There were other options. Simon muses counterfactually that political leaders could have redoubled the war on poverty or launched determined campaigns against cancer or pollution. Any of these would have been preferable arenas for government mobilization, Simon says, and he is somewhat puzzled that policymakers did not see it that way. So he maps out obstacles along the roads not taken—corporate opposition to environmentalism and constitutional impediments to a European-style social welfare state, for instance—thus suggesting that crime prevailed at least partly by default, because it “offered the least political or legal resistance to government action.” But this depiction of the Great American Crime Crackdown as mere expedience minimizes its structural supports (Gilmore’s point), as well as its political utility, especially to the New Right (witness the Willie Horton ads of 1988 or this season’s insinuations that “Barack Hussein Obama” will be soft on terrorists).
As the perennial role of fear in racially charged political campaigns suggests, Simon might have expanded on an alternative explanation that he entertains but never fully endorses: that governing through crime developed largely as a reaction against civil rights. This is the argument described by Glenn Loury in a recent Boston Review essay, and there is considerable evidence for it. As Simon points out, it was states’-rights conservatives, inspired by George Wallace, who first seized on crime as a polarizing issue in national politics; the Republican Right thereafter picked up the baton and used it as a cudgel against liberalism for almost half a century. It was in the South, moreover, in the same jurisdictions that avidly resisted integration, where prison populations first started to grow (in the late 1960s vs. the mid-1970s nationally) and where they swelled most intensely; California may manage the largest state penal system in the country in absolute terms, but states like Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas have by far the highest rates of incarceration. Southern states, too, have taken the lead in resurrecting dour penalties that allude nostalgically to Jim Crow: chain gangs, striped uniforms, for-profit prisons, and reactivated death houses.
Simon’s categorization of history into distinct policymaking regimes also lends credence to this backlash hypothesis, though it requires an alternate interpretive lens. In Simon’s schema, political leadership has periodically coalesced to support favored groups of citizens that come to stand for the nation: yeoman farmers in the early republic, freedmen after emancipation, industrial workers in the Great Depression, and finally, victims of crime. The trouble with this genealogy of government assistance, however, is that it underemphasizes a grim counter-story. In truth, the helping hand of government has always been accompanied by a closed fist—with the latter all too often out front. In the Antebellum Era, slaveholders in fact commanded greater political influence than yeoman farmers, whatever the promises of Jacksonian Democracy. After the Civil War, it was the Klansman who ultimately prevailed over the agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau—and the robber baron who ended up on top. Out of the New Deal and World War II came not just stronger labor unions but McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley.
One of the reasons this alternative history of American repression is worth remembering is that it more logically leads to our punitive present. In a Whiggish storyline built around reform, America’s late twentieth-century prison boom materializes as a shocking, self-defeating aberration. If we redirect our spotlight from the history of social welfare to the equally pronounced, if less commemorated, history of social subjugation, however, mass imprisonment suddenly appears less inexplicable. Rather, it unfolds as the latest chapter in a centuries-long struggle between the ideal of equal citizenship and the reality of unequal power. It represents a reaction against democratic efflorescence akin to so many other reactions in U.S. history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts forward.
In particular, the late twentieth-century punitive turn bears troubling resemblance to another rightward pivot in American history, one that took place almost exactly a century before: the resurrection of neo-Confederate rule from the ashes of Reconstruction. Just as convict leasing, lynching, and finally segregation developed in the turbulent wake of emancipation and the first African-American freedom movement, mass imprisonment took hold in reaction to the second. Put simply, as white conservatives surrendered on integration, they insisted on getting much tougher on crime, to which they symbolically chained a host of developments they found troubling, from civil disobedience to urban rebellions.
The consequence was unprecedented prison growth, but of a particular sort. In 1960 the U.S. prison population was 60 percent white. By 2005 it was 70 percent non-white. By most measures of racial disparity, American criminal justice is more separate and unequal today than it was when Martin Luther King proclaimed from the Lincoln Memorial: “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”
This contextualization of the prison boom within the tragically conflicted saga of American race relations matters not so much because it offers a singular, definitive account of causation, but because it helps point the way forward. If racially skewed prison warehousing represents the latest incarnation of American racism, then political mobilization and social transformation on the scale of the civil rights movement may be necessary to dislodge it.
***
At the close of the Bush era, there are scattered signs that America’s prison paroxysm may have run its course. Although the country’s inmate population continues to rise (climbing 16 percent between 2000 and 2006, not counting the advent of U.S. detention abroad, from Guantánamo to Bagram), budget crises are forcing an array of politicians to reckon with what their tough-on-crime posturing has created. In New York the state assembly has been revising the Rockefeller drug laws to make them more forgiving. In Kansas, parole officers are no longer automatically reincarcerating their charges for low-level violations like failing a urine test. In Iowa lawmakers are requiring that all new sentencing laws be assessed for potentially negative racial impacts, and in Nevada politicians have started rolling back mandatory minimums. Across the country and on both sides of the aisle, increasing numbers of policymakers are starting to agree with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who told the American Bar Association in 2003 that “our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long.”
Navigating these uncertain waters, Abramsky, Gilmore, and Simon all conclude with guarded hope. Although California’s penal system has become one of the nation’s most crowded and dysfunctional in recent years, Abramsky cautiously praises Governor Schwarzenegger for revisiting the concept of prison-based rehabilitation. (Not long after American Furies went to press, the governor proposed sending 22,000 inmates home early to save money.) For his part, Simon hopes that aging baby boomers and the Katrina debacle will force a redirection of government attention from crime control to health care and infrastructure, a shift he believes will reinforce rather than erode social solidarity and public trust. Gilmore closes with a glowing case study of the grassroots political action group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, an organization with almost no resources that has formulated a far-reaching anti-racist agenda that Gilmore proffers as a template for anti-prison activists everywhere. At the same time, nonprofits like the Sentencing Project and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation have produced a blizzard of white papers proposing how carefully calibrated treatment programs, a return to judicial discretion, alternatives to incarceration, and robust reentry programs can enhance public safety while cutting costs. Bruce Western discusses some of these proposals in this issue.
Katzenbach said, "I'm old and maybe I can't learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice system has to be rational and fair."
One of the most ambitious of these non-governmental efforts, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in American Prisons, was headed by none other than Nicholas Katzenbach, now in his eighties. Forty years had passed since he first surveyed American criminal justice on behalf of the country’s last liberal administration, when in 2005 he was asked by the Vera Institute, a mid-size think tank, to undertake a limited follow-up. What Katzenbach found appalled him. Over the decades, state and federal policymakers had indeed acted on most of his original recommendations but had invariably done the opposite. The outcome, he and his small staff concluded after a round of national hearings, was that the hard end of the criminal justice system had grown larger, meaner, and, in their view, more socially corrosive. Prison turbulence had declined since the late ’60s, but rape, crowding, infectious disease, and acute mental illness remained endemic—and on a monumental scale. Each year, some 13.5 million people cycle through the country’s adult jails and prisons, they observed. They go in “poor, undereducated, and unhealthy,” and they come out worse.
With a constricted mandate to study only prison conditions, Katzenbach’s second survey coupled strong criticisms—“We should be astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and saddened by the waste of human potential”—with sensibly modest policy recommendations: more funding for corrections staff, better health care, independent oversight, and less reliance on supermax isolation.
Yet critics of America’s criminal justice system—which now devours $204 billion a year and circumscribes 7.2 million lives, counting offenders on probation and parole—would do well to spend more time with Katzenbach’s original report than its cautious sequel. In the first study, this early advocate for civil rights within the Justice Department, who once famously faced down George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, called not only for more professional, more treatment-oriented prisons, but fewer of them. Imprisonment should be a sanction of last rather than first resort, he proposed. At the same time, he and his first commissioners advocated a more expansive understanding of crime: “The criminal justice system has great potential for dealing with individual instances of crime, but it was not designed to eliminate the conditions in which most crime breeds.” “It needs help,” they argued, in the form of better schools, better housing, better jobs, and genuinely equal citizenship.
In a phone interview, Katzenbach, whose memoir Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ will be published this fall, says that he still believes this Great Society approach is the best one. “I’m old and maybe I can’t learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice system has to be rational and fair,” he told me. “Harsh punishment is satisfying, but our system has to do more than that. It ought to reflect the type of society we want to be. It ought to stand for decency.”
In 1967 Katzenbach titled his report “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” and he still contends in his forthcoming autobiography that “every law has to satisfy both sides of the equation”—it needs to confront lawlessness but also safeguard civil liberties and social justice. To do so, as Katzenbach proposed more than a generation ago, will require more than technocratic remedies confined to the criminal justice arena. We will need to embark upon “a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”
No Further Harm
What we owe to incarcerated fathers by Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Mary Lyndon Shanley
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Guarded Hope
Lessons from the history of the prison boom by Robert Perkinson
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Reentry
Reversing mass imprisonment by Bruce Western
The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.
]]> For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.
Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.
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The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.
The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration—a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.
Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.
Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the ’90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.
So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.
More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs—the broken homes, unemployment, and crime—that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?
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We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here. The origins of today’s mass incarceration can be traced to basic political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime—the traditional target of the penal system—was an important part of these urban social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from 1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the penal system was used to manage many of the byproducts of persistent poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness, chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fuelled incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and parole violators.
As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.
The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of homicide victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest through conviction and sentencing. As a result the prison walls we built with such industry in the 1980s and ’90s did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.
Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and ’70s. They ignored the illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.
The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them, certain city blocks received millions of dollars in “correctional investment”—spending on the removal of local residents by incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor; the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.
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Getting tough on crime created a sustained public policy mistake of immense proportions. If the prison boom was indeed produced by a historic collision between the jobless ghetto and a punitive politics of civil rights backlash, retreating from mass incarceration will involve equally fundamental shifts in politics and economics. What would a new politics of criminal justice look like, and what policies would it promote?
There are small signs of change in the public conversation about crime, punishment, and poverty, though bold ideas have not yet penetrated the mainstream. By supporting education and treatment programs for prisoners, leaders from both parties have offered one answer to Senator Webb’s question about the future of punishment in America. In April this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which funds literacy programs, drug treatment, and other services for prisoners and ex-prisoners. While prison reform advocates supported Second Chance, a bipartisan majority was ensured by Christian conservatives like Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who spoke up for a law that promoted a message of redemption and faith-based prison programs.
Second Chance can be viewed as one achievement in a broader movement for improved prisoner reentry policy. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been a leading voice in naming the social problem of prisoner reentry and proposing policy solutions. In his 2005 book But They All Come Back Travis writes: “The reality of mass incarceration translates into the reality of reentry . . . [T]he harmful effects of high rates of incarceration and reentry call for . . . policies that promote reintegration, not retribution.” Here the reentry movement challenges mass incarceration by reasserting the importance of rehabilitation, but deliberately stops short of recommending a reduction in prison populations.
If the employment problems of young minority men in poor urban neighborhoods are a prime precondition for mass incarceration, prisoner reentry programs that promote employment may offer a way out of the street-prison cycle in which so many are caught. A wide variety of programs aim to help people move from prison to the labor market. GED classes, vocational training, prison work-programs, and job readiness instruction all seek to improve prisoners’ preparation for working life. In part, the wide variety of programs reflects the sheer range of behavioral and cognitive deficits of the prison population.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for these programs is that many men and women coming out of prison—most in their thirties or older—have never held a steady job. The newly released behave awkwardly around coworkers and have never cultivated daily work habits; these shortcomings may be no less debilitating than illiteracy or a shortage of vocational skills. Social scientists refer to the necessary traits of reliability, motivation, and sociability as “non-cognitive skills.” While education programs in prison can help develop the cognitive skills of math and verbal ability, the non-cognitive skills that promote success in free society are hard to develop while incarcerated. To learn these skills, people coming out of prison must repeatedly rehearse the habits of regular work. But precisely because they have so little work experience and carry the added penalty of a criminal record, formerly incarcerated men and women have little access to the steady jobs that can make them more productive. For ex-prisoners, extreme economic insecurity is a trap that prevents them accumulating the kind of work experience that enables a return to mainstream social life.
Building everyday work habits means working every day; instead of relying only on a wary labor market, some programs try to break the cycle of economic insecurity by offering jobs immediately after release from prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in New York provides transitional jobs in combination with job placement services to move prisoners into the open labor market. CEO takes people straight out of prison, and puts them in a week-long training program before assigning them to a seven-hour day, four-day week in small supervised crews doing groundskeeping and other manual work at the New York minimum wage of $7.15 an hour. On the fifth day of each week, the CEO participants take vocational and job readiness classes that prepare them for job searching and interviews. CEO’s transitional jobs generally last a month or two and program graduates receive transport and supermarket vouchers if they remain employed.
CEO, in a move rare among reentry programs, has sought to study the effectiveness of its program through experimentation. The experiment randomly assigned parolees either to transitional jobs or to a control group composed of former inmates who received job-search assistance from the support staff, but not transitional work. Parolees who took on transitional jobs within three months of release from prison saw their arrest rates reduced by about 20 percent compared to the control group. However, parolees who entered the transitional jobs more than 3 months after prison release experience no reductions in recidivism. It seems that timely intervention, immediately after prison, provides the greatest benefits.
CEO’s method shows promising results, but is narrowly directed toward alleviating unemployment. A small but intensive program run by the Brooklyn District Attorney suggests how a more comprehensive program might operate. Charles “Joe” Hynes is unusual among prosecutors. He actively incorporates alternatives to incarceration into the work of his office. Beginning in 1990 Hynes promoted a diversion program that sent nonviolent drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead of prison. By the later part of the decade, the D.A. was convening regular meetings of community groups throughout Brooklyn to connect parolees and probationers to drug treatment, housing, and jobs.
The meetings were run by Hynes’s energetic First Assistant District Attorney, Patricia Gatling. Gatling did not saw the D.A.’s role as simply seeking the toughest justice for Brooklyn’s criminal defendants. In her view, the D.A. is a community lawyer, charged with strengthening neighborhoods and improving public safety in a broad sense. The community meetings in Brooklyn’s poor neighborhoods were Gatling’s effort to replenish the area’s flagging social capital—the web of networks and supports that greases the wheels of social life. After a few years, Hynes hired a full-time social worker and developed his own prisoner reentry program. At first it operated only in a few precincts with high parole caseloads, but later it spread across the whole borough.
Called ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together), the program provides parolees with drug treatment, transitional employment, and housing. Most ComALERT participants, have prior convictions for drugs or violence, and all have been ordered into drug treatment. Some homeless parolees enter the Ready Willing and Able (RWA) program that provides a full year of employment and supportive housing in return for a promise of complete drug and alcohol abstinence and a biweekly regime of drug testing. RWA participants work in street cleaning and other unskilled jobs for $7.50 an hour, share small apartments, and receive drug counseling and educational programming. A recent evaluation found that two years after release from prison, ComALERT clients were 18 percent less likely to be rearrested than a comparison group with a similar history of crime and drug use. ComALERT participants also earned about $1000 more each quarter and were about 20 percent more likely to be employed.
A large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America's new carceral class.
These positive outcomes suggest three policy lessons. First, transitional jobs are large-dose interventions that can reduce recidivism at least for a while by providing close supervision and paying wages. Regular work habits cannot be built cheap, though these programs are still less expensive than incarceration. Second, the programs that work best are comprehensive, bundling together a variety of services including drug treatment and housing. Because released prisoners often cope with a range of problems, additional supports must be in place for transitional jobs to help. Third, timely intervention is imperative; successful schemes provide a job immediately out of prison.
While the results from transitional jobs and supplementary programs are encouraging, we must be realistic about what these projects can achieve. Most initiatives operate at the local level. Sometimes their efforts span a city, but more often several neighborhoods. The high quality results that stem from local efforts will not scale to counties and states. Even in the best-case scenario, if recidivism is reduced by 10 or 20 percent, ex-prisoners would still be re-arrested at rates of around 40 percent or more.
Still, a large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America’s new carceral class. Instead of focusing assessment of reentry programs narrowly on the decrease in recidivism achieved, we should account for the benefits of families reunited, the paychecks that help support the children of ex-prisoners, and the value of literacy for its effects on quality of life in addition to its role in averting crime. The cost-benefit calculus looks quite different when we include these social goods. For nonviolent drug and public-order offenders, intensive, large-dose treatment in the community (which is relatively cheap) begins to look like a good alternative to custody in prison (which is expensive). Here we count as benefits not just reductions in crime, which may be modest, but all the ways in which social life is made more normal by drawing our erstwhile outsiders back into society, instead of building more walls to keep them out.
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What would a different kind of penal system look like: one that viewed the unemployment of ex-prisoners as a key problem to solve and the deficit of noncognitive skills a central obstacle to steady work? Projecting our exemplary local programs on to the national stage, all parolees leaving prison in need of a job would move into closely supervised community-service work paying minimum wage. Like Brooklyn’s RWA program, these jobs might be offered for up to a year and coupled to job placement with the goal of parolee self-sufficiency. Those with drug problems would enroll in a rigorous program of treatment and testing. Those living on the streets would move into supportive housing.
How many would participate in this national reentry program, and at what cost? Employment statistics for prisoners suggest a national transitional jobs program would enroll about 180,000 out of the 700,000 prisoners released each year. Around 200,000 would fill new places in drug treatment programs. Another 100,000 would require housing. A national program of transitional jobs, drug treatment, and supportive housing would represent a significant expansion of the social services available to ex-prisoners. The total cost of this effort would be about $7 billion each year, roughly one-tenth of total current spending on corrections. In the present climate such a program seems entirely fanciful—how could we pay for it?
One source of funds is the vast treasury expended on large-scale incarceration itself. By cutting the size of prison populations and redirecting some of the spending on custody to community programs, we could dramatically expand services to prisoners after they have been released. Unlocking America, a recent proposal from the Washington, D.C.-based JFA Institute, recommends four ways to reduce the size of prison populations.
First, Unlocking America recommends decriminalizing drug offenses and other “victimless” crimes. The authors argue that arresting drug dealers has no crime reducing effect because new dealers will fill the vacancies opened by incarceration. Since the mid-1990s, prominent conservatives, too, have supported the view that incarceration for drug dealing fails to curb the drug trade. In 1995 John DiIulio and Anne Piehl—the former would become an appointee in the second Bush administration—wrote that their “best estimate of the incapacitation effect (number of drug sales prevented by incarcerating a drug dealer) is zero,” and they therefore “value drug crimes (sales and possession) at zero social cost.” Though the War on Drugs failed to reduce drug use or the prices of drugs, it boosted incarceration and racial disparity. Drug convictions account for about a third of the increase in state prison populations and about three-quarters of the increase in the federal prison population through the 1980s and ’90s.
Second, time served in prison can be reduced. In the mid-1970s prisoners were incarcerated for relatively short periods, given their offenses. Since then, life sentences have become common for violent offenders and those with prior felony convictions. Three-strikes provisions add long stretches of prison time for repeat convicts. Truth-in-sentencing requires felony offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. These measures serve to lengthen prison time account for about half of the growth in state prison populations over the last twenty years.
Third, the length of probation and parole-supervision periods could also be reduced. People on probation and parole are likely to return to prison, but usually as a result of a technical violation, not a new crime. Unlocking America finds little evidence that lengthy parole and probation terms reduce crime. Probationers and parolees are most likely to fail in the first twelve months. After that first year, the authors write, “supervision is more of a nuisance than a means for assisting people after prison or preventing them from committing another crime.”
Finally, the authors argue that re-imprisonment should be eliminated for technical violations of parole and probation. Parolees and probationers are released to the community subject to a large number of conditions that typically include employment, drug testing, and regular meetings with case officers. When they violate these conditions, supervising officers can send them back to prison. Many parolees and probationers are sent back to prison for failing a drug test or missing an appointment—their reappearence behind bars may have nothing to do with crime. Incarceration for technical violations of parole or probation was a significant driver of state imprisonment rates through the 1990s. In some states, like California, most of those on parole are re-incarcerated for technical violations, adding a year or more to their time in prison.
Of all the proposals to reduce prison populations, restricting re-incarceration for technical parole violators seems most politically feasible. Some states are already trying to reduce parole revocation, sometimes by imposing more intensive community supervision or a few days in lock-up instead of months and years in prison. Kansas now conducts a risk assessment for parolees. Some are assigned to a low-risk group that receives only loose supervision. Case managers place high-risk parolees in special programs, and enforce a variety of punishments short of return to prison. Since adopting these measures in 2003, Kansas has halved the number of parole violators. Half a dozen other states, like Arizona, Illinois, New York, and Texas, have also adopted a system of graduated sanctions to reduce parole revocation. At the national level, eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would reduce prison admissions by about 30 percent each year. By itself this measure could save much of the funds needed for a national prisoner reentry program.
Eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would also support a reintegrative model of corrections. Given that over half of state prisoners struggle with problems of drug addiction, we should anticipate that many will fail and become involved again in drugs or miss work or parole appointments. These failures should be viewed as a component of reentry. Relapse is part of a learning process in which new non-cognitive skills of reliability and persistence develop. If failure is a likely stop on the path to steady work, parole supervision must also allow people to fail and remain in their communities.
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So far I have argued that we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.
There are more advocates now for reentry programs than decarceration, but a real policy debate over the future of mass incarceration has barely begun. Though Congress dipped a toe in the pool of reintegrative criminal justice by passing the Second Chance Act, a national large-dose reentry program is a much larger effort. Faced with mounting correctional budgets, governors in Kansas and elsewhere have experimented with parole reform. Some states are also considering sentencing reforms. Commissions in New York and California are now reviewing three-strikes and mandatory minimums. Despite these signs of change, the reform process remains in its infancy. Few correctional facilities have closed, and incarceration rates continue to rise.
While an expanded reentry policy and a revision of the penal codes may stop the growth of prisons, the future of mass incarceration depends very much on its past. A less punitive criminal justice system cannot by itself solve the deep social problems of poor urban neighborhoods. These problems—disorder and addiction largely flowing from chronic idleness—set in motion the politics and policy choices that delivered mass incarceration. As America’s meager welfare state failed to prevent school dropout and persistent unemployment among unskilled inner-city residents, prisons and jails expanded to fill the vacuum of social control formerly occupied by the education system and the labor market. The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving the social problems of idleness, addiction, and mental illness, while also controlling their natural jurisdiction over serious crime. But they were given just a few tools: the powers of arrest and imprisonment. Mass incarceration contains an unruly population beset with trou