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The
economics of prison
There
are too many black people in prison.
It cost $40,000 to $50,000 per annum, to keep someone in prison.
Would it not be cheaper to find that person a job, and take
back half their earnings through taxes?
NAACP
Presses for Education Over Incarceration
MONDAY, 11 APRIL 2011 05:19
By
Jasmin K. Williams, Special to the NNPA from the New York
Amsterdam News –
Education
over incarceration is the message of a report released by
the NAACP. The nation’s oldest civil rights organization
is challenging America to re-evaluate its spending priorities
in the report, titled “Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate,
Over Incarcerate,” which was introduced at the National
Press Club in Washington, D.C. In it, the NAACP calls attention
to the proven fact that excessive spending on housing prisoners
undermines education and public safety.
This
message will be reiterated in a forthcoming billboard campaign
(see below) calling out the fact that one-fourth of the world’s
prisons are located in America, while the country accounts
for just five percent of the world’s population overall.
In short, America’s “tough on crime” policies
have failed.
Not
surprisingly, most of those housed in the prison system—some
2.3 million—are people of color. Half of all state and
federal prisoners meet the criteria for drug abuse or dependency.
These inmates would be better served with treatment programs,
a more successful and economical alternative to incarceration.
It costs money to sustain the prison system—lots of it.
The NAACP says that this money can and must be better spent.
Bronx
District Attorney Robert T. Johnson said, “I have always
been of the mind that, in the long run, if we want to get
a handle on crime, we must commit to improving education and
job opportunities. Prevention and rehabilitation have to go
hand in hand with deterrence.”
Here
are some facts from the report:
•In
2009, as the nation’s economy collapsed into depression,
funding for K-12 and higher education fell while 33 states
put more money into prisons than they had the previous year.
•The
Pew Center on the States found that five states spent as much
or more on prisons as they did on education, and that 28 states
were spending 50 cents on prisons for every dollar spent on
education.
•The
cost of just two years of incarceration is staggering; by
2010, taxpayers in Texas will spend $175 million on prisoners
sentenced in 2008 from 10 of Houston’s 75 neighborhoods,
10 percent of the city’s population. In Pennsylvania,
the cost is $290 million to imprison residents from 11 neighborhoods.
New York will spend more than half a billion dollars—$539
million—to imprison residents from 24 neighborhoods.
While these inmates represent a mere 16 percent of the city’s
adult population, the state will exhaust nearly half of its
$1.1 billion budget to incarcerate them.
•These
high levels of incarceration have a direct impact on education
performance in these communities; in Los Angeles, 67 percent
of the lowest-performing schools are in neighborhoods with
high incarceration rates. In Texas, the rate is 83 percent
while in Philadelphia the rate is 66 percent.
With
these facts on the table, the NAACP has called for a downsizing
of the prison system and for those funds to be reinvested
in education.
“The
first stage is to move beyond ‘tough-on-crime policies’
that have been a proven failure and adopt ‘smarter crime’
policies that have been a proven success,” said NAACP
President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “The state of
New York has been going down this road for a while, most recently
with the evisceration of the Rockefeller Drug Laws last year.
But, it’s a trend that’s needed in states throughout
the country.
“Over
the past decade, New York’s prison population has fallen
and crime has gone down about 16 percent, while in Florida
the prison population has continued to rise precipitously
during that same time and crime has gone up about 16 percent.
You can find experiences like that across the country that
really debunk this myth that took hold in the ’90s that
the best way to reduce crime was to warehouse criminals and
law violators, no matter how small the infraction, or how
nonviolent the crime,” Jealous told the Amsterdam News.
“The first goal is to shift states from failed policies
that have resulted in the mass incarceration of citizens toward
proven policies that tend to incarcerate less, cost less,
and make us safer. We call those smarter crime policies.
“The
second is to send the savings to the public university system
and the public education system more generally,” he said.
“As
you look across the country at various states over the past
three to four decades, state prison systems developed these
‘tough-on-crime’ policies that resulted in over
incarceration. You see the percentage of the state budget
devoted to prisons go up and the percentage devoted to paying
for public higher education go down.
“In
California, where I grew up in the 1970s, the state spent
3 percent of its budget on incarceration and 11 percent on
education. Last year, the state spent 11 percent on incarceration
and only 7.5 percent on public higher education. That trend
is repeated across the country. When Pennsylvania was faced
with a budget crisis, the state took $300 million out of its
public education budget and added $300 million to its budget
for jails and prisons in a single budget year,” said
Jealous.
“Georgia
has the fifth largest penal system in the country, three-quarters
of whom are low-level, nonviolent drug offenders—the
No. 1 source of the prison population, both in growth rate
and size over the last three decades. This is why states like
New York and others are shifting the priority from incarceration
to treatment. South Carolina took that step last year. For
example, people convicted for possessing crack are treated
the same as those convicted of possessing powdered cocaine,
something that the U.S. Congress hasn’t even been able
to do,” he continued.
“This
moment is exciting for a few reasons. There’s a lot of
financial pressure on states. Every decision is a tough one
and every decision related to the criminal justice system
is now getting full attention in a way that they often don’t.
This comes from people on both sides of the aisle as officials
look for ways to creatively cut budgets and are willing to
do tough things to accomplish that,” said Jealous.
“It’s
also exciting because we’ve reached a point where we’ve
tried so many ways to deal with the increase of drug abuse
in the country and the perceived increase in crime although,
in actual terms, crime has fallen in many places. It’s
the consensus that these things have failed. People on both
sides of the aisle are now willing to look at the evidence
and really embrace what works. It worked in New York. It worked
in South Carolina. It worked in Virginia, where the governor
actually shrank down the number of prisons and increased a
portion of his budget devoted to historically Black colleges.
In these times when there is so much partisanship, this is
a place where bipartisanship is really possible,” Jealous
said.
On
the implementation of this plan, Jealous said: “If you
have a state that is taking this on for the first time, like
Georgia is right now, the first thing to do is to impanel
a commission to look at the state’s criminal justice
system from top to bottom—law enforcement strategies,
sentencing strategies and re-entry strategies—and to
prioritize writing legislation to replace failed policies
with ones that are proven to make us safer. That tends to
result in policies that cost less in the way that rehab costs
less than incarceration, or in the way that a halfway house,
as a first step to re-entry, costs less than incarceration.”
“For
decades, law enforcement has been operating on a broken window
theory: The best way to stop a more serious crime from occurring
is to focus on the smallest infractions in a community. It
ultimately is inefficient and ineffective,” he explained.
“The
city of Los Angeles is notorious for its aggressive police
practices—anything from jaywalking on up. Last year,
it was revealed that they had 12,000 unopened rape kits that
hadn’t even been processed. There is a need for the public
to take an interest in this. Catching violent criminals should
be job one, and in many instances that’s just not the
case in most departments. The ideal is to focus on what works
and what makes us safe. We are calling on states to put together
commissions to focus on what works and propose a series of
reforms,” Jealous concluded.
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