Sonny's Corner: Correcting corrections: The failed U.S. prison system and how to make it right

Sonny Foster "Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.

We hope this provocative essay stimulates future discussion in this paper, the corrections fields and beyond.

By John Krejci
Show me your prisons and jails and I will tell you what kind of a people you are! The classes of citizens we choose to incarcerate reveal volumes about our society. Christopher Shea, writing in the Boston Globe, said,

“For years, sociologists saw prisons—with their disproportionately poor, black, and uneducated populations—partly as mirrors of the social and economic disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of books and articles are looking at the penal system not just as a reflection of society, but as a force that shapes it.

“In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job skills and stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to find jobs, slashes their wages when they do find them, and brands them as bad future spouses. The effects of imprisonment ripple out from prisoners, breaking up families and further impoverishing neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down the road.”

We have paid and continue to pay a high price for the get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s. Unfortunately, these attitudes still persist in our society and in lawmakers who do not spend enough time analyzing this complicated subject. Since the 1990s after “three strikes and you’re out” was created and maximum-minimum sentence laws were enacted, more persons than ever before have been sent to prison. The price is one of human limitation and degradation. Prison populations have skyrocketed to the point that we now incarcerate 2.2 million people.

According to recent data provided by Hendrix Van den Berg, professor of economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States has the highest rate of incarceration rate of any country in the world, 738 per 100,000 population—almost seven times that of China, whose rate is 117 per 100,000. Even countries not normally viewed as having strong human rights polices have much lower incarceration rates. Syria’s rate is 93 per 100,000, Egypt’s is 121 and Algeria is 110. Nebraska, whose incarceration rate was 421 in 2005, much lower than the national average, has four to seven times the rate of Western European democracies. For example, Norway incarcerates 59, Ireland 85, Germany 98, Netherlands and Italy 100. When compared to countries with a legal heritage similar to our own, the United States compares poorly. Australia has a rate of 115, New Zealand’s is 155, and Canada’s is 116.

And whom do we imprison? More than 50 percent of our prison population is minorities—black Americans have by far the highest rate. More black Americans are in prison than attend college. One in three black males, ages 18–25, is in some relationship with the law—in jail, on probation or on parole. Hispanics and American Indians are also imprisoned disproportionate to their numbers. In addition, an alarming number of those in prison have been involved with drugs and alcohol. Eighty percent have had some involvement or problem with substance abuse and as many as 30 percent are incarcerated because of drug offenses. What might be the most tragic statistic of all is that a full 25 percent of inmates have serious mental health problems. In one maximum-security prison in Nebraska, 27 percent of inmates were on psychotropic drugs in 2007.

So who inhabits our prisons and jails? Minorities, people with drug problems and the mentally ill—and most of these are also poor. In fairness, I should add that a few of these are violent offenders and a danger to society. Society needs to be protected against these individuals, for example, sociopaths, habitual criminals, sexual predators and those who have shown a pattern of violent behavior.

The cost of corrections is accelerating with no end in sight. Like most corrections departments, the annual budget of the Nebraska Department of Corrections has more than doubled in the past decade. Projections estimate the cost of building and staffing future prisons in Nebraska will be in the hundreds of millions. Nebraska is a small state with a relatively modest incarceration rate, as I stated above, about half the national average. The prison industry nationally has a $60-billion-a-year price tag and is one of the biggest growth industries in the country. Large states like California and Texas face an almost insurmountable challenge if they continue to follow the current policies of incarceration. Corrections are in danger of bankrupting political entities and are causing cutbacks in other services, such as parks, health, services to children, roads and education. We might ask ourselves: Is this the social policy that we want to pursue? Is it achieving its objectives? And, more importantly, are there alternatives?

How have we put ourselves into this situation? It began, as I noted, with fear and an obsession with public safety, which resulted in our punishing-the-bad-guys policies. This mentality went hand-in-hand with the war on drugs and the media’s focus on drug violence (which has also been an expensive disaster). Politicians found that if they played on this fear and promised to get tough on crime, they would more easily be elected and re-elected. Laws were passed, law enforcement proceeded to do their job, judges were hamstrung by mandatory sentencing policies, prisons overflowed and new ones were quickly built in the hope that we could “build ourselves out of this problem.” What we are beginning to realize is that we can’t.

However, what is a bane for government and taxpayers is a boon for those who make their living from the prison industry. The profit motive has taken on a life of its own and is voraciously feeding on the lock-’em-up frenzy of the ’90s. There is money to be made in the prison business. Architects; planners; builders; private providers of food, medical services, uniforms, electronic devices, security of all kinds, training and a myriad of other services have grown up around the prison industry. Not to mention job opportunities for guards, administrators, social service workers and support staff. Small counties that are economically stressed often float bonds to construct new county jails. I addressed this practice in “Jails for profit: A moral outrage in Nebraska” (“Nebraska Criminal Justice Review,” September 2006). The strategy is to overbuild the jail and then rent out space to other jurisdictions, such as the federal government or a large city with an overcrowded jail. In this way, the jail is filled, the bonds are paid off and some economic development is provided for the struggling town … all at some other jurisdiction’s taxpayers’ expense.

But enough of the negative. What can be done to slow the trend to incarcerate more and more? Amazing as it may seem, the solution-—or at least a large part of the solution—is available right now and the cost is about one-tenth that of building prisons. And even more surprising, it is being tried in many parts of the country and also right here in Nebraska. The umbrella term for the solution is “community corrections.” Community corrections refer to a number of alternatives to incarceration. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of the inmates in our prisons, and particularly in our county jails, are nonviolent offenders who pose little threat to society and would be much better served with some alternative to incarceration. Electronic monitoring, house arrest, probation, quicker bonding out of pretrial detainees and work release are but a few examples that are available to judges.

In 2004 the Nebraska Legislature passed the Community Corrections Act, which set up a council of stakeholders from corrections, law enforcement, the courts and social services, along with representatives from the Legislature. Their task was “the implementation of a comprehensive community corrections strategy in Nebraska for the purpose of reducing the incarceration of certain targeted felony offenders while supporting the use of a continuum of community facilities and programs.” In the four years since the legislation, the council has kept over 200 felony drug offenders out of prison, i.e., on probation, and set up an intensive supervision and treatment program for each person. Each is carefully monitored and evaluated. If they fail to follow their probation guidelines, they go back to court and could be incarcerated. Although as yet there is no definitive confirmation of the effectiveness of this program, there have been few failures and the Nebraska prison population has decreased for the first time in many years.

In conclusion, and to end on a positive note, we have painted ourselves into a very expensive corner by following the law-and-order model of corrections. But there is a way out. As one cartoonist conceived it, we can stand up in our corner, draw a door on the wall, mark it “Community Corrections,” open the door and walk away from the no-win get-tough-on-crime model of the ’90s. It will not be as easy at that, but it is possible, and we need to seriously try community corrections or we will face the consequences. For more information on community corrections in Nebraska, go to the Web site of the Nebraska Crime Commission. Look for the link to the Community Corrections Council.

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