Let me ask you a question. Do you think anybody who is in their right mind could disagree with the following:
For the transition from prison to life outside to be successful, it needs to be gradual. If someone needed to be locked up yesterday, he shouldn’t be completely at liberty today. And he shouldn’t be asked to go from utter dependency to total self-sufficiency in one flying leap. He needs both more control and more support. Neither alone is likely to do the job.
Let’s look at some facts. Our incarceration rate is five times higher than it was in 1975. It’s seven times higher than the rate in Canada and Western Europe. Half of all black men who don’t have a high school diploma do time in prison before they reach the age of 30. Our homicide rate is by far the highest among countries with advanced economies. Prisons are astronomically expensive and paying for them is crowding out more promising investments, including in higher education.
We can’t reduce our prison population to anything close to what it was forty years ago unless we’re willing to flood our streets with violent criminals because more than half of the people in our prison system have committed violent crimes, and even more have violent histories. More still entered prison without a history of violence but have learned violence or gang life while serving time.
We need a new way of transitioning people from prison to society. Roughly 50% of the people we release from prison are back behind bars within three years.
When you look at these numbers, a graduated re-entry program is just common sense. Inmates should be given their freedom in stages, and they should have a lot more support while they’re going through the process.
Check out Mark Kleiman, Angela Hawken, and Ross Halperin’s proposals at Vox. They’re trying to start a conversation that we all need to have.
Amen! I have long believed that prison reform should have been a campaign topic for decades. And why not? How we treat the most disadvantaged among us speaks volumes about who we are as a nation. And the fact that prisons are jammed with people who have committed horrible crimes as well as those who have committed minor crimes boggles the mind.
Here in Ohio, Gov Kasich privatized prison meals and now the inmates don’t get enough food or find maggots in the meat. Instead of trying to pinch pennies, why not find ways to decrease the populations through true rehabilitation, education, job training, and counseling?
I am clearly not an expert on criminal incarceration. I just think there are ways to revamp and revise the way we handle people who commit crimes and figure out how to help the ones who need it.
read about that one. also privatized prisons contract for a certain number of inmates – i.e. they make their profit by incarcerating more, and if they don’t have enough prisoners they get them transferred from another state, so those inmates are now far away from family and friends. then they have them do work for below minimum wage and undercut the work force of the place they’re located.
This:
“Can we really get back to a civilized level of incarceration while continuing to push crime rates down”
Should be reversed. The way to get back to a civilized level of incarceration is to keep people out of the system to begin with.
That means:
*changing the drug laws (the reason I left the Prosecutor’s office)
*Focusing resources on the first offense which seldom results in incarceration. Some of what in the VOX article could be applied to the 20 year old who steals a car. Get them to agree to the program as a trade for deferral of the charge.
Good things are happening, and there is even some change among Tea Party types (Rick Perry is for the decriminalization of pot). Youth incarceration rates are down 45% since ’95 – partially a result of declining crime and partially a result of state programs designed to keep people out of the system.
Longer term we have a high incarceration rate because we have a high violent crime rate – and comparisons to other countries that don’t account for this miss the boat.
When you look at these numbers, a graduated re-entry program is just common sense. Inmates should be given their freedom in stages, and they should have a lot more support while they’re going through the process.
And that’s going to happen, how? Do the Vox’ers talk about how GOPer governors are slashing state budgets to the bone? People aren’t going to be able to afford college, much less rehabilitate people released from prison.
It is absolutely not the case that the majority of incarcerated people have committed violent crimes. That applies to people in state prisons only, and even there it’s barely half. Most prisoners are in county jails, and 80% of convicts in county jails are there for non-violent crimes,mostly drug offenses. In federal prison, less than 8% have committed violent crimes.
For those who don’t know, people convicted of non-federal crimes receiving sentences of more than 1 year are usually held in state prison; people with shorter sentences are usually held in jail. These are terms of art, and they are different.
I didn’t write “jails” for a reason.
Most readers won’t know the difference — they will presume you are referring to all incarcerated people. That’s why my comment.
Panopticon prisons in the digital age. Working out the kinks?
In cash-strapped School District, a hidden treasure trove of books
Now that this travesty has been discovered, the cash strapped school district plan for corrective action?
This is in a state with a functioning teachers’ union — strong enough to be a factor in ousting the loathsome Corbett a few months ago. Imagine what school basements and storerooms look like the MI, WI, and Chicago.
thanks for posting on this
Isn’t it obvious that the politicians are betting that the public doesn’t want prisoners to have any transition from prison because they want to throw away the key.
Let’s be clear. Prisons have become the modern form of the plantation to extort slave labor. And privatization of prisons is the modern form of the antebellum hiring out practice.
That is to say, the voting patterns show that enough of a majority of voters are not in their right mind and cannot consider the proposal on its merits. Moreover, current elected officials of both parties pander to the fearful.
The practices in juvenile prisons and adult prisons are not designed to have the effects of reforming violent criminals; they are to have the effects of creating more violent criminals through the internal abuses of the system. In this way prisons seek to fight crime like extraordinary rendition, torture, and Guantanamo seek to fight terrorism — ensure that the problem persists and the money keeps coming.
I think there’s another component to the out-of-their-minds part that never gets discussed: the conservative mindset wanting to divide the world into black and white, them = bad and us = good. They really oppose any kind of rehabilitation because it might work and that would threaten their world view. If those evil thugs turned out to be salvageable human beings, it might turn out that some of us respectable upstanding persons are actually hard-hearted bigots or even high-class thieves.