Overcrowded Prisons: Swamped States Willing to Try Anything to Cope

The U.S. prison system is like a stopped-up pipe. Built to contain a stream of criminals, the plumbing is overflowing.

Spillover inmates end up in tents in Florida and on surplus troop barges in New York City. In Texas, POW-style camps may be built.

Some states have installed jury-rigged emergency valves to free prisoners ahead of their time. But last year, when courts freed a wave of Philadelphia inmates, they committed a wave of new crimes. And 10 days after one Florida prisoner got an early release he was charged with killing two police officers.

States Reacting

The states swamped the worst are trying to bail themselves out with new prison construction. California, 70% over the brim, is spending $3.2 billion on building. President Bush wants an extra $1 billion in 1990 for federal prisons, which are 55% over capacity.

Authorities say these vast amounts and desperate measures are not enough to ease the jam and the threat of riot that goes with it. They propose shorter sentences for nonviolent criminals, and more use of work release, probation, restitution, halfway houses and electronically monitored house arrest.

“The entire system is filled beyond capacity. It’s clogged,” said Anthony Travisono, executive director of the American Correctional Assn.

“It’s like trying to mop the bathroom floor without turning off the spigot on an overflowing bathtub,” said Gordon Bonnyman, a civil rights lawyer in Nashville, Tenn.

Recent mandatory sentencing rules and a jump in drug-related prosecutions have packed prisons, officials said, but the flood of inmates is not new. This year was the 14th straight that opened with the U.S. prison population at an all-time high. The number imprisoned has nearly tripled since 1975.

They’re Overflowing

The 627,402 people behind bars at the start of this year were 60,504 more than the system was designed to hold, according to the Justice Department.

Are the streets safer?

“There’s not a criminologist or a sociologist in the country that can say as a result of more incarcerations we have lowered the crime rate,” said Herb Hoelter, director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives. “We’ve been blackmailed by our fear of crime.”

If so, it’s expensive blackmail. The annual tab for locking people up is $16 billion a year. In some places the $20,000 cost to imprison an inmate each year could send a student to Stanford or Harvard, or pay a police officer’s salary.

An average new prison costs $40 million. Last year, the system grew by 42,967 inmates, which translates into the need for 86 new prisons.

States are building furiously. This year, $9 billion is being spent for construction. An additional $6 billion is on states’ wish lists.

Projections See Rise

But if the number stayed the same, and every projection says it will keep accelerating, it would take eight years just to build cells for all the inmates who need them, the correctional association said.

Even corrections officers say new prisons won’t solve overcrowding.

“Nobody has been able to build their way out of the overcrowding problem. Once built, a prison bed will soon find an inmate,” said Larry Meachum, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Corrections.

If all 24,000 beds that Bush wants to add to federal prisons were available immediately, they would eliminate only the overflow; the 48,039-inmate system is 55% over capacity.

New York City may put prisoners in shelters for the homeless. Recently, 75 inmates at Rikers Island slept in a single room with one toilet. The city is housing prisoners on two surplus ferryboats and two converted British troop barges. A five-story, 625-foot-long floating jail is being built.

California, with the largest inmate population in the country at 80,721, is spending $3.2 billion on more space. It has built 21,000 new beds since 1984.

Cost Often Overlooked

Americans “expect criminals to serve hard time, to suffer,” said Robert Johnson, professor of justice at American University in Washington. “They want these people off the streets, but they’re not inclined to think through what it will cost.”

The cost could be another Attica or Soledad, some officials warn. “The potential for explosion is always there in an overcrowded prison,” said Samuel Sublett, president of the American Correctional Assn.

Thirty-five states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are under court order to relieve overcrowding; all except Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wyoming.

Twenty-seven states have population caps set by federal courts.

Until 1988, Florida housed 1,046 inmates in 12-person tents. The state is building 9,376 new prison beds at a cost of $109 million. And to comply with a cap, the state has an early release program in which inmates serve only 35% of their sentence.

One convict, Charlie Street, was accused of killing two Miami police officers in November, 10 days after he was released from prison and had served eight years of a 15-year sentence for attempted murder.

“The system is broken,” said Florida Atty. Gen. Robert Butterworth in a speech to the American Jail Assn. “What we have now is a legal escape system. We just open the door for them.”

Philadelphia prisons twice released inmates last year to meet a court order. Of 256 inmates released in June, 106 were arrested within six months and accused of 156 new crimes.

“That’s 156 crimes that shouldn’t have happened,” said Dist. Atty. Ronald Castille. “We’re sending a message to criminals that they’re not going to jail here. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is.”

Because of a court-ordered cap, Texas closed its system to new inmates in April, the 31st time since 1987 the doors were shut. That just burdens county jails. One judge authorized Tarrant County to build POW-style camps that could be patrolled by the National Guard.

In Connecticut, parole was outlawed in 1981, and a 1984 state law mandates emergency release if the prison population is at 110% of capacity for 30 days.

To avoid opening prison doors, the number of people in a parole-like program called supervised home release has increased from 700 to 3,400 in the last 18 months.

Nine states have military-style boot camps where young felons trade their sentences for a few months of pre-dawn wake-ups, push-ups and hard labor under bombastic drill sergeants. Critics doubt the discipline will help and fear it might just make criminals meaner.

Fifty overflow inmates from the District of Columbia were blamed for death threats, fires, food fights and sabotaged toilets after they arrived at a prison in Spokane, Wash. Guards threatened to strike.

Last week, 10 Massachusetts prison guards charged in a lawsuit that overcrowding was so severe that their lives were in danger.

Arizona Gov. Rose Mofford also has reason to worry. Her state spent $100 million in five years for 4,500 new prison beds and still pays $28,000 a day to house an overflow of 700 inmates in county jails.

The cost, she said, has “begun to restrict the state’s ability to educate our children, provide health care for the elderly, disabled and low-income citizens and fulfill other state obligations.”