Becoming Our Own Jailers
“Get tough on crime” has been a common
mantra in the U.S. since the 1970’s and, indeed, we have. We
now have over 2.3 million people locked up on any
given day, approximately the same number as China and Russia
combined. More than one in every one hundred adults in America
is presently in jail or prison. Nationally, our prison industrial
complex is a $60 billion-a-year industry.
This incarceration binge is destroying the fabric
of our communities, some more than others. One in every 15
African American men lives in a prison or jail cell. If
you are an African American male between the ages of 20 and 34, the
ratio is one in nine. Hispanics are disproportionately affected as
well. As of 2006, one in 36 Hispanic adults was behind bars.
Over the last 30 years more acts have been classified
as crimes, many prison sentences have become mandatory, as well as
longer, and early release for good conduct has been all but eliminated.
Some defense attorneys advise their clients to plead guilty to crimes
they didn’t commit, reasoning that a short sentence for a lesser
crime is better than risking decades behind bars that would be mandated
if convicted of a more serious offense.
Few stop to think that, when the costs are added up, every
year an inmate spends in jail or prison costs us about the equivalent
of one teacher’s salary. This choice between hiring
teachers and locking people up hits our young people hard. Our
tax dollars pay to incarcerate one in every 53 of Americans in
their twenties. As more tax dollars are used for incarceration
instead of supporting colleges and universities, tuition is rising
so fast, fewer and fewer young people can afford to attend. Some
officials even demand zero tolerance to deal with behavioral problems
in our grade schools and high schools, giving our children an early
taste of how readily our culture uses punishment to secure compliance.
As life sentences and sentences that span decades
are now common, the elderly experience it, as well. Although criminal
activity generally decreases dramatically with age, between 1992
and 2001, the number of state and federal inmates aged fifty
or older almost doubled. The cost of keeping an older prisoner
locked up is around $70,000 a year or more—not one, but two,
teacher’s salaries.
Before ever being judged guilty, many people held
in jail (not prison) are awaiting trial. Those who can afford to
post bail are generally released pending trial. Those who can’t
post bail remain locked up in what amounts to a modern debtor’s
prison. In 2006, more than 60 percent of those who spent
time in jail were not convicted, a number that
continues to grow.
In this punitive world, prisons have taken up the
slack for the state and county hospitals that released millions of mental
patients between the 1950s and 1980s. Because the majority
of people behind bars in the United States have some type of mental
illness, our prisons and jails are our “new asylums.”
Not everyone in the system is locked up for a long
time. When you add up all the people who go in and out, about ten
million cycle through our jails and prisons every year. They bring
the lessons they’ve learned, the diseases they’ve contracted,
and the trauma they’ve experienced back to our communities. We
have become a nation of jailers, not only of petty offenders and
serious criminals, but also of ourselves.
The increasing incarceration rate far exceeds increases
in the rate of crime. During an interview with Kentucky Governor
Steve Beshear in 2008, he stated that in the last thirty years, his
state’s crime rate had increased about 3 percent, but its inmate
population had increased by 600 percent.
It’s true, there are periods of escalating crime,
and assuring the safety of our communities requires that some offenders—murderers,
serial killers, psychopaths—be kept behind bars for long periods
of time and perhaps for life. We have lost sight of the fact that
these types of offenders are the exception.
