A case against mass incarceration

Few states have jumped on the prison bandwagon more than California. The state prison population soared by more than 500% from 1980 to 2000. Taxpayers spend almost $7 billion per year to maintain the largest inmate population in America. Since 1980, the Golden State has built more than 20 new prisons, but hasn’t fully opened a new campus of the University of California.

During this period a powerful union of prison guards has emerged as one of the major players in statewide politics. The California Department of Corrections has been repeatedly and successfully sued based on civil rights and other constitutional violations. Failure to meet court orders has led a prominent federal judge to consider declaring the system in receivership and appointing an outsider to run the system. The vast majority of prisoners are rearrested within a short time after release. The prison system is a revolving door of failure, hardly making our communities any safer.

These and other facts are at the heart of Michael Jacobson’s book “Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration.” Jacobson traveled an unusual career path from left-liberal academic to New York City budget analyst to director of that city’s jails and probation system, a set of experiences that has helped him produce fresh analysis and offer many pragmatic recommendations for reform. Jacobson, now a college professor and president of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, uses plain talk to define how the United States got into the mess of mass incarceration and show the true costs of these failed social policies.

Over the last three decades, most states put into place a set of ill-advised penal policies. California, for example, enacted hundreds of laws that mandated imprisonment for many crimes, increased penalties for most offenses and reduced the opportunities for inmates to earn early release through good behavior. The most egregious policy, known as the three-strikes law, provides for 25-year-to-life sentences for felons with three convictions, even if the final strike is for a relatively minor crime.

All of these new laws led to an unprecedented swelling of the prison population. Further, the politicians played on citizen fears and frustrations to strip virtually all education, job training and counseling services from the prisons. Even athletic equipment and televisions in prisons became symbols of coddling criminals. More and more inmates were returned to prison for additional time not for new crimes but for violations of the technical rules of parole such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment with a counselor.

Jacobson argues that the political forces that make “get tough’ sentencing laws popular are still very powerful, but the severe budget crises afflicting most states in the last few years may provide an opportunity for more enlightened sentencing and penal practices.

Moreover, it appears from several opinion polls that the public’s fear of crime has been reduced, and that there is more acceptance of treatment and rehabilitation as valid goals of the criminal justice system.

He reports on dramatic rollbacks on tougher sentencing laws in red states such as Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky and even Texas.

These changes were generated by chronic and severe budget deficits that meant that elected officials would have to cut programs very popular with constituents. And crime simply became less of a powerful campaign issue for more conservative politicians when compared with combating terrorism, opposing same-sex marriages or keeping the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

One of the most significant contributions of this book is Jacobson’s clear and convincing demonstration that prison expansion is only marginally related to crime reduction. In particular, he demonstrates how New York City and San Diego achieved the largest declines in crime of any major cities in the 1990s even as the use of incarceration in those places was significantly reduced. Jacobson shows that there are cheaper and better ways to make our communities safer. Indeed, he argues eloquently how the bloated corrections system consumes scarce public funds that could be used to genuinely fight crime.

The time is at hand, according to Jacobson, to reverse the errors of the past. He offers a range of policy options to fix the failing parole system that hold great promise for reducing correctional expenditures and curtailing parolee failure rates. According to Jacobson, we can both save money and save lives.

Backing away from more than two decades of policies of mass incarceration will not be easy. Data and compelling research must be joined with political courage and new modes of communicating with citizens about crime and punishment. There is no magic remedy that can achieve the downsizing of prisons overnight. Jacobson urges us to stop the destructive social policies that produced the current nightmare of America’s bulging prisons. There is a better path, and this book shows us how to find that new direction.

Barry Krisberg is the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.