View the article here05/18/2008UTAH - That just about puts America's incarceration situation in perspective.
Not to pick on the industry state, but if you were to add up the number of American adults behind bars today it would come close to Utah's total population.
The national inmate census is a tad bigger than the city of Houston.
Put another way, there are as many people locked up today as the number of voters who cast ballots in the impotent Democratic primaries in Florida and Michigan.
At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million people, bringing the U.S. to a dubious threshold:
For the first time, more than one in 100 adults now is confined in an American jail or prison, according to figures gathered and analyzed by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project.
The figures paint an arguably startling picture of an American system of crime and punishment that the study's authors assert
has transformed the land of the free into the home of the incarcerated. It is a story spanning more than three decades of governments getting
tough on crime only to see corrections budgets balloon,
jails and prison populations swell and recidivism rates rise -- seemingly with only the prospects of more prisons and escalating costs on the horizon.
It's a quandary, at least in a lot of public policy circles, that seems to provide little cause for hope.
"Few doubt the necessity of locking up violent criminals and those who repeatedly threaten community safety," the Pew report, issued in February, states. "
Increasingly, however, states are discovering that casting such a wide net for prisoners creates a vexing fiscal burden -- especially in lean times."
Further, data continue to point to
a system where the color of your skin can be a telling indicator of whether you will end up behind bars.
It's not just an urban problem, as evidenced by a seemingly endless line of overcrowded jails in rural counties from the Midwest to the deep south.
Many argue that the policy shift in holding the line on crime came only after a profound change in social mores in recent decades -- a deterioration of family values that has created generations of crime.
One thing appears certain: the escalating incarceration numbers are the result of multiple forces in play and stakeholders agree the problem requires a multifaceted solution.
Daunting numbersLast year, the U.S. prison population grew by 25,000 inmates, to about 1.6 million, according to the Pew Center for the States. Some 723,000 American adults were locked up in local jails, driving the incarcerated population to a record 2.3 million.
Still, the prison census increase, up about 1.6 percent in 2007, was a relative drop in the bucket compared to the skyrocketing figures over the past 20 years. In 1987, U.S. prisons counted a total of 585,000 inmates, more than 1 million fewer than today.
Based on the Pew Center's report, the
United States leads the world in prison population, besting second-place China, which counts 1.5 million people behind bars, while Russia places a distant third, with 890,000.
America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran, the report found. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults. In the U.S., the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.
In Wisconsin, the number of adults behind bars has grown nearly four-fold since 1990, from an average daily population of 6,533 to 23,345 in 2008.
Iowa's inmate population increased from 7,231 in fiscal year 1999 to 8,806, as of June 30, 2007. Current projections peg the population to grow to more than 9,700 prisoners by 2017, according to the Iowa Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning Forecast.
To taxpayers, the most alarming figure might be the ballooning cost of the corrections system.
Total state prison expenditures have soared from about $10.6 billion in 1987 to more than $44 billion last year, according to the Pew Center report.
- Like I've said before, prison is a business and business is good, apparently!Iowa, like just about every other state, will spend tens of millions of dollars more adding prison cells to meet the needs of its growing population.
Tough all overWhen Ken Runde began his law enforcement career more than three decades ago at the Dubuque County Sheriff's Department, the 46-bed jail rarely took in 10 "guests" a night.
Much has changed in 33 years.
Runde is now Dubuque County's sheriff, presiding over an expanded jail, with 212 beds and
built for business.
Before the facility opened in 2004, overcrowding was a daily battle. The county constantly found itself shipping inmates to other jurisdictions, a situation that racked up as much as a half-million-dollar annual bill for taxpayers.
Today, the jail counts, on average, anywhere from 80 to 100 inmates per day, far less than half its capacity. In a reversal of fortune, many of the inmates come from other jurisdictions, including the perpetually overcrowded federal corrections system.
Typically, the jail has counted on about
$1 million per year in revenue; this year, thanks to a steady flow of other people's prisoners, the jail expects to generate about
$1.7 million.
"
We didn't build the jail to make money, we built it to compensate for our needs," Runde said. "Needless to say, our population hasn't grown extensively since it opened.
"
We didn't look at this as a huge moneymaker, but it is a nice way to recoup the money we spent so many years housing people."
- In other words, it's a business and they are making a ton of money!It's safe to say, in a land of rapidly rising inmate populations and skyrocketing corrections costs, prisons and jails aren't often moneymakers for taxpayers.
Colin Fulrath, too, has seen a marked change in inmate numbers over his 31-year career with the Jo Daviess County (Ill.) Sheriff's Department.
"When I started as a jailer, we only had maybe two or three prisoners in a day," said Fulrath, who now serves as the county's chief deputy. "Right now it's about full all the time, and we can hold 26 prisoners."
The law enforcement official said the county isn't to the point where overcrowding is a common problem, but the rise in drug crimes and other offenses in the tri-states could strain Jo Daviess County resources, similar to the constant state of overcrowding the nearby Grant County (Wis.) Jail has lived under for several years -- at an escalating cost.
Something happenedSo what's driving the ever-rising incarceration rate? Experts continue to debate the causes: the prevalence of violence, the breakdown of the family,
political populism.
But one researcher asserts you can pinpoint the origin of the inmate boom to two prominent players:
Tip O'Neill and
Len Bias.
It was 1986, and University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias was seen as the next dynasty maker for the Boston Celtics, the NBA's winningest franchise. Bias had just been drafted by the Celtics when he dropped over dead, with initial reports erroneously indicating crack cocaine had killed him.
Months later a teammate testified Bias had snorted powder cocaine hours before he died, but the damage, so to speak, was done.
Fueled by angry Boston constituents incensed by what they believed to be the drug that killed their rising star, Tip O'Neill, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, led a federal effort to place stiff penalties on the distribution and use of crack -- much stiffer than those levied against the more refined powder cocaine.
"The reaction from Tip O'Neill was to jack the penalties through the roof, and a lot of states followed suit," said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States.
Mandatory minimums for crimes involving crack cocaine
quickly put tens of thousands of people behind bars for much longer periods of time.
Comparably cheaper crack, selling on the streets for as little as $5 per rock, became the drug of choice among urban minorities. Consequently, American justice over the past two-plus decades has come down to a question of color: black and brown.
The numbers tell the tale:
- 1 in 15 black men 18 and older is incarcerated in America, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
- 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars.
- 1 in 36 Hispanic men is locked up in jail or prison.
- Meanwhile, the incarceration rate for white men 18 and older is 1 in 106.
"The U.S. Department of Justice shows that for Hispanic and black men, for instance, imprisonment is far more prevalent a reality than it is for white men," the Pew Center report states.
In December, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, charged with setting guidelines for federal cases, trimmed the length of sentences on crack violations. It also voted to make the reductions retroactive, a move freeing 19,500 inmates, the vast majority black.
But Gelb and others argue that years of
politicizing crime and punishment has placed an onerous financial and social burden on the backs of taxpayers.
It's a difficult balancing act, however, in the land of political capital. In recent years,
legislatures have pushed through longer sentences for everything from the latest drug scourge of methamphetamine to sex offenses -- typically responding to a public demanding justice, often in the face of heinous, high-profile crimes.
But the tougher stance has come with a hefty cost and the payoff, many criminal justice experts assert, has been suspect at best.
"
There isn't a person in public office that's not sensitive to the accusation of being soft on crime. But
you don't have to be soft on crime to be smart in dealing with criminals," Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland said in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch on Jan. 26.
So now what?For people like Kyle Stewart, serving on the front lines of human rehabilitation, the answer to America's costly system of incarceration comes down to community.
Stewart, probation/parole supervisor for the First Judicial District Department of Correctional Services, with an office in Dubuque, supervises an office of 19 probation/parole officers and a growing lineup of community-based programming. He said it's all about what works, so-called evidence-based practices that are making a difference in successfully transitioning people from prison back into society.
"
About 96 percent (of Iowa's inmates) will get out of prison. What do you do with them?" Stewart said. "
We need to do something different. We need to find out what these individuals can do to make changes in their lives."
It begins with more meticulous assessment, gauging risk. Stewart said high-risk offenders are exactly why prisons are built, to keep society safe. But it's those in the low-risk category, the ones who just might be willing to do something with another chance, where community-based programming is earning its keep.
Initiatives involve everything from intensive probation and sex-offender tracking to drug courts and mental-health jail-diversion programs. Success can be as simple and complicated as identifying mental illnesses and the right medications, especially critical given that more than half of those arrested in the district have some form of mental-health problem, Stewart said.
- I disagree with sex offender tracking. If they are out of jail/prison, then apparently they are not a high-risk, and GPS cost tons of money and doesn't really work. If someone is high-risk and out of jail/prison, recent news articles show that they will cut off the GPS device. So if they are a threat and need to be watched constantly, why are they out of prison?The savings to taxpayers can be pronounced, according to the most recent data.
The cost to house an inmate in the Iowa prison system is more than $76 per day, according to the Iowa Department of Corrections. Standard supervision of a probation case is estimated to cost about $3.70 per day and as high as $7.59 per day for intensive supervision, Stewart said.
The Pew Center's Gelb said effective community programs can range from as little as a couple hundred dollars for anger-management sessions to as much as $7,000 for extensive probation initiatives.
Lettie Prell, research director for the Iowa Department of Corrections, said
a number of re-entry pilot programs have shown lower recidivism rates, and enhanced work-release programs are providing much-needed structure in transition.
Iowa last year saw a small decline in its prison population for the first time in several years, Prell said. But that doesn't appear to be a trend in the making.
"The prison population is expected to start increasing shortly and in the long-term because of the accumulation of long-term inmates in the prison system," Prell said, pointing to a state corrections census that includes more than 600 lifers.
Nationally, it doesn't appear the prison building boom will end anytime soon, even as governments struggle with tighter budget constraints and increasing service demands.
"
We can't continue to build prison after prison at taxpayers' expense," Stewart said. "
We have to try something different."
