In 1980-2000, the number of state prisons more then doubled. Even during periods of overall prison growth, you’d expect to see some prisons closed (for example, facilities that had become obsolete or unsafe, in a bad location, etc.).
Yes, it most certainly does increase funding. It may not directly and proportionately increase funding, but if you add prisoners over time prison funding will go up. National statistics reflect this: in the same period that the number of state prisons doubled, prison spending quadrupled.
True, but if there are fewer prisons you’d need fewer people to staff them. I don’t know how anyone could look at the California Prison Guard’s union and say that no one is worried about job security–they’re notorious for fighting VERY hard for theirs, even if it means opposing measures that would reduce the number of inmates and supporting those that would increase the number of inmates. I’m not as familiar with other states, but a bit of googling shows plenty of instances of organizations (guard unions, companies that contract with prisons, etc.) that do have a vested interest in seeing the number of inmates grow or at least maintaining the status quo.
A nefarious example would be PHS, or Prison Health Services, a controversy-ridden prison health care provider with contracts in several states. They have both a record of shoddy care and plenty of political clout.
Until you get enough inmates that you need to build another prison, which is what’s been happening (at least on a national level–individual states and regions may vary).
Lissa, you’ve mentioned your husband before in other threads, and it’s often interesting to hear an “insiders” take on the system. He sounds like a good guy, and prisoners would probably be a lot better off if the industry was full of people like him. That said, when you’re examining national trends anecdotal evidence can sometimes not be the most reliable source…
Indeed. Jonah Goldberg noted the mental calesthenics that would be required to explain the logical opposite, which would be a headline that read “Crime Rate Soars Despite Falling Prison Population.”
You can’t see that putting criminals in prison reduces the number of crimes they commit? I must be misreading that, and I apologize for it. Please rephrase if you feel further discussion is warrented.
In fact, now that we’ve put so many bad guys away, these days non-violent crime rates are higher in many countries with lower prison populations. Rape is also a large problem in many developed countries with low incarceration rates, though the US rate remains much higer. That’s a particularly tricky crime to compare across borders because of different rates of non-reporting – basically the US has gone to extensive lengths to “de-stigmatize” rape victims and encourage them to report crimes against them whereas other countries have done so to differing degrees. There may also be legal or cultural definitional differences as to what is a crime in other countries.
Where the US exceeds other countries crime-wise is in crimes of violence and in drug offenses. I can’t give you the exact reasons, but a couple of observations. We’ve always had something of a violent streak in this country. Our murder rate is much higher than other countries with similar firearms laws, for example. It could be a flaw in the national character that too many of us are too easy to piss off.
As for drugs, I think it’s because our laws are a mismatch with our national character – lots of us really want to do drugs even though it’s illegal. Many people think of our drug laws as draconian - perhaps they are. But there are other developed countries with much harsher drug laws (France comes to mind) which don’t have nearly as many people incarcerated for it. So either we’ve got a lot more people so wanting to do drugs that they’ll risk a big sentence or we’ve got a much better developed law enforcement infrastructure. I suspect both of those are true but that the first is the more influential.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the murder rate and the drug usage rates are inextricably intertwined. Particularly in urban areas a lot of the murders are about or perpetrated by persons under the influence of or financially motivated by drugs. There’s a differing sentence for crack and powder cocaine not because of racism (though I agree that that is an unintended consequence of the difference) but because powder cocaine users weren’t holding up bodegas or killing cabbies for their fares.
No, I’d say they “get it” just fine; maybe they’re just less than clear about spelling it out.
The national prison and jail population has quadrupled since 1980; to the extent that this is due to increased incarceration of people who are likely to commit further crimes against persons and property, imprisoning people yesterday should reduce crime rates today.
So far, so hoopy.
But the next step is that reduced crime rates today - which we have - should result in a reduced number of new incarcerations. Less crime means less people to imprison for crimes, right?
Yet our prison/jail poulation is growing at a rate more than double that of the general population: the US population is growing at about 1% annually, yet the prison/jail population grew at a rate of ~2.45% annually between 1999 and 2003.
How far do crime rates have to drop so that our prison population isn’t growing any faster than the population as a whole? At some point, success in one area should turn into success in the other. The real question is, why haven’t we reached that point yet, and what will it take to do so?
I get what you’re saying, and you may be right, but it seems like a bit of an over-simplification to me. RTFirefly’s follow-up post is essentially what I am suspicious about here. At some point, the number of people incarcerated should stop rising so significantly if crime rates are falling. So why is that not the case right now?
What I think we need here, and which I am unsure how to find, are statistics comparing crime rates from differing western countries of similar economic status (Canada, Australia, Western Europe) to the US. Then we could see what the comparisons are between violent crime, petty crime, drug-related offences, etc and incarceration rates are, and get an idea of what’s what. I just don’t think it’s that simple as to say that putting more “bad guys” away means less crime.
To make a further point, here’s what is getting to me about this: if, according to the report, 50,000 people have been added to the prison system in the past year (of the report’s study period) and this is higher than in previous years, and also higher than the level of population growth, yet fewer crimes are being reported, where are these extra prisoners coming from? See that’s where the answer probably lies. Are there more people being sentenced for crimes that they might not have been sentenced for before? Are harsher sentencing laws sending more people to prison than in the past? Because there doesn’t seem to be more people committing crimes and thus getting caught and sentenced.
I guess my question would go like this: if 1000 people committed crimes and were caught in, say, 2003, and 50% of them were sentenced, then the prison population would rise by 500 (assuming the existing population stayed the same). But if in 2004 only 800 people committed crimes and were caught, but 80% of them were sentenced, the prison population would rise by 640 (same assumptions). So there’s less crime, but more sentencing. Is this what’s going on now? If so, it doesn’t seem to me to speak to the reason why crime rates are dropping, it just indicates sentencing is getting tougher.
Not when the Pubbies are KNOWN to have used Choice Point to develop lists of disenfranchised “felons” in Fla. that was systematically distorted so that thousands of non-felons were excluded from voting. Felons = blacks and Hispanics= disproportionately Democratic voters. (Except in Floriday, where the Cuban community votes Republican – and where in 2004 the felon lists were found to have few or no Hispanics, despite the fact that Hispanics make up a disproportionately large part of the prison population.)
Geez, ya think that the Repubs can’t figure out that disenfranchising people by locking them ujp for minor drug offenses works to their favor? Where have YOU been over the last couple of elections?
Ok, scule, I got your question now. That’ll learn me to post before the coffee kicks in.
The answer is “I dunno.” But I’ll bet we’re actually close on most crimes. One would need to see the data laid out a lot more specifically than in that report, but the large increases in jail and federal incarcerations relative to state prison incarcerations leads me to guess that most of the increase above population growth is low-level users (jail) and dealers (Club Fed) of drugs. Increasing incarceration rates for women relative to men lead me to guess the same thing. As noted, we’ve still got an awful lot of people willing to risk a substantial penalty to take their illegal drugs. I’d bet if that category were stripped out we’d see our incarcaration growth rate right in line with our developed-country peers. If we keep up on the same path for the drug crimes when will the total incarceration rate stabilize? I also don’t have a good answer to that. I will say that it’s my belief that illegal drug use in the United States still vastly outweighs law enforcement’s ability to catch the perpetrators, so there’s probably a way to go on that front. At some point a balance will have to be struck – either we will tolerate an ever-increasing number of people in jail, cultural pressures will build to avoid jail by eschewing illegal drug use and/or people will pressure government to change its laws and/or enforcement strategies.
Metacom, I’m confident that the increased price resulting from criminalization is a part of it, but it can’t be much of it when measuring relative to other countries. France, as noted, has extremely tough drug laws and I heard that hash cost about a billion Francs last time I was there, and yet they don’t have incarceration rates nearly as high as ours. So is the difference less enforcement, or less usage, or what?
(Again, I am only familiar with my state, not overall national trends.) The prisons they closed here were not obsolete, nor did they build any new ones to replace the ones they closed-- they just crammed the inmates into already over-crowded insitutions.
I’m just guessing, but the issues here may be security levels. The prison in which my husband works is a medium security insitution, The insitutions being built in other states may be the new SuperMax institutions (which are monstrously expensive to construct and operate) or minimum security facilities. (Sometimes they convert old jails into minimum security facilities.) Building/opening either one of these woud raise the “number of prisons” but few inmates are housed there.
No new prisons (that I know of) have opened in my state for several years. All we’ve seen are closings.
Prison spending has to increase in certain areas every year-- it’s unavoidable. Health care costs, for example-- inmates have to have access to medical care and those costs increase every year. Utility costs can also rise dramatically. (The prison in which my husband works is heated by natural gas. The complex is made up of cavernous old buildings which are extremely ineffecient, energy-wise. You can imagine that bill!) These two costs alone can cause the overall budget to show an increase. Spread across every institution in the state, and you’ve got a pretty hefty number.
The thing is, prison budgets are structured. My husband understands it all-- I don’t, so I’ll try to explain it as he “dumbed it down” for me. The budget monies are seperated into different funds. You can’t use the utility fund to fix the roof, for example. There might be an increase in one area, but where the money is needed sees no extra funds.
Just as an example, they’ve been experiencing periodic “hiring freezes” during which only bare-bones essential staff can be hired, such as guards. (And they’re always hiring guards. There’s a big turn-over.) The other staff (case managers, “paperwork staff” and the like) are frozen-- meaning that if someone leaves, their position remains open until the freeze is lifted. You can imagine how this throws a monkey wrench into the works.
Union employees get their raises according to contract (but the contracts are always being renegotiated.) Unclassified (non-union) employees, though, haven’t seen a raise in years. (They’re supposed to get small “step” increases every year up to a certain dollar amount.)
Just knowing correctional workers as I do, I’m very puzzled by their union fighting, say, drug treatment legislation. I’d really have to look into it, but I’d say there has to be another reason for their rejection of that issue. Perhaps it was tied to a budget cut or something else that would directly affect their lives.
Remember, too, that guards have families, and being around inmates every day can lead to certain prejudices. If the treatment facility was to be located near their neighborhood, I can see why they would object. I can also see a “tough on crime” attitude, because they don’t want to see these kinds of people walking the streets with their kids. I’m not saying this kind of attitude is correct, just that being around inmates every day can make a person very bitter.
I’m not a fan of private prisons, myself. I think they’re dangerous, and possibly Unconstitutional.
In more prosperous times, more inmates may mean more jobs and more prisons, but in budget crunches, all it means is more crowding and more danger to the employees themselves.
I don’t know these groups, and I don’t know their motivations, but maybe they’re thinking that if there are more inmates, they can then turn around and make a stink about overcrowding. I think it’s a very foolish tactic if that’s what they’re doing.
The money comes from politicians, and politicians are ruled by public opinion. In the public’s opinion, the more uncomfortable the inmates are, the better. Overcrowded conditions are not a hotbutton that makes the public write letters.
Medical care is extremely difficult in a prison. A doctor or nurse might see twice the number of patients that a normal doctor would see.
My husband was over that area in his prison for a while. He found instances where the doctors and nurses were neglecting to do certain things one would think automatic because they were so harried. There was no harm caused by it, but an investigation would have sent up red flags.
Prisons do the best they can with what they have. Doctors and nurses certainly don’t work in prisons for the money. They could make plenty more on the outside. Inmates get better care on the inside than they probably ever would on the outside. (Some of them had never been to a docor or dentist in their lives before being incarcerated.)
That said, I’m not a fan of private for-profit companies dispensing medical care in an institution for a lot of reasons.
I’ve mentioned that my husband’s institution is at 250% capactity. They’ve made it known they’re willing to accept more inmates to make the institution less attractive of a target for closing.
In the past, they’ve put bunk beds in the hallways. They will again, if need be.
No one wants to say “we’re full-- we can’t take any more!” As long as bodies can be crammed in, there won’t be new prisons built.
Sure, I understand.
My only problem with all of this is that sometimes it feels like in these threads that some people feel that correctional employees are the “bad guys” who want to gather people up by the boatload simply out of greed. The correctional system has problems-- I’ll be the first to admit that, but the people who work for it are not evil. Most of them just want to “do their eight and hit the gate.”
Their main concern is for the community. Most offenders in my husband’s prison spend les than nine months in there-- very little time to give them any sort of treatment or training. Corrections professionals bust their asses trying to help the inmates, hoping that they won’t see them again.
All I can relate to you about budgets and the like is what my husband experiences as a direct result of them. As I said, trends may show one thing, but things certainly look different from the ground.
Could it be, because of the harsher sentencing laws, that, while not as many are entering the prison system, still fewer are coming out? This would make the yearly net increase larger.
Quote:
Originally Posted by even sven
However, a huge number- perhaps even the majority- of prisons are private, and there is a huge incentive to imprison people.
Cite?
Not the majority. The majority are still state and county operated, but there is a move toward privatization. The legal nightmares are myriad, but they are considered by policy-makers, who know nothing of the subject, to be economical bandaids…that is, until the civil rights litigation starts rolling in.
regarding the over-all complexion (pardon the pun) of the correctional indistry and criminal justice in general, I would refer you to “The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Prison” by Reiman. Reiman is a critical criminologist, but even as one of that ilk, I find some of his suggestions hard to swallow and utopian. Nonetheless, a short book, well researched and well worth the time of an informed citizen of our pseudo-democracy.
well, I sure can’t. Unless you intend to keep everyone convicted of a crime is prison for their entire life, there’s nothing to prevent them from returning to criminal activity straight away after their release. It doesn’t matter if incarceration lasted for one year or twenty years. The problem is that our society pushes a large class of people into a life of crime because they have no other reasonable options. And if a person is dropped into prison for a long time, they don’t get changed in any way that will reduce their motivation to commit crimes upon release.
Except that some states are trying innovative things in this area too.
The InnerChange program at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison in Sugar Land has a two-year recidivism rate of 8%, a significant reduction from the normal 20%. The program is entirely voluntary, and works by combining 18 months of in-prison biblical instruction and six months of post-release mentoring.