Why Are We Spending So Much To Lock Up Elderly Prisoners Who Pose Little Threat?

By Inimai M. Chettiar and Vanita Gupta, cross-posted from American Constitution Society

Elderly prisoners are the least dangerous group of people behind bars but the most expensive to incarcerate. Yet despite this truth, the number of elderly prisoners is skyrocketing. Harsher sentencesfor less serious crimes – one defining characteristic of our failed “tough on crime” and “war on drugs” policies – are responsible for this staggering increase in the number of older prisoners, and taxpayers are taking the hit.

You may be shocked to learn how much money states are dumping into housing aging prisoners who pose little safety risk. Today the American Civil Liberties Union released a report, “At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly,” which details the growth of our aging prisoner population, the low public safety threat elderly prisoners pose and the fiscal impact of incarcerating them. Strikingly, the report estimates that the average aging prisoner costs taxpayers about twice as much as the average prisoner.

The report is co-authored by the ACLU’s fiscal policy analyst and in-house economist, Will Bunting. He conducted a fiscal impact analysis, weighing the cost of incarcerating the average aging prisoner against the burden releasing that same prisoner would impose on public benefit programs. Even taking into consideration the cost of state payments for Medicaid, supplemental security food stamps, energy assistance, and other public assistance benefits, the report estimates that states could save $66,000 per year for each aging person released from prison. To put this number in context, the average American household makes $40,000. The money thus saved could be redistributed to more worthwhile and cost-effective state goals like education and infrastructure.

A look at the grander scheme of things is even more startling: in 1988, the United States spent about $11 billion on the entire corrections system. Today, we spend about $16 billion annually on the aging prisoner population alone.

As the number of prisoners in the United States climbs ever higher, the number of aging prisoners is climbing even faster. Between 1980 and 2010, the total number of people incarcerated in this country grew by 400 percent. In that same timespan, the population of prisoners age 55 and older grew by nearly 1,400 percent. At the current rate of growth, the number of prisoners age 55 and older will have increased 4,400 percent from 1981 to 2030 and will make up fully a third of the nation’s prison population.

The increase in the number of aging prisoners is not due to a spike in the number of crimes committed by older people. There is no “elderly crime wave.” And contrary to popular belief, older prisoners aren’t more likely to have committed a serious crime. Rather, many elderly prisoners are incarcerated for crimes committed in their youth for which they received disproportionately long sentences, and many elderly prisoners are in prison for nonviolent crimes. The current mentality of “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” has led lawmakers to impose exceedingly harsh penalties on individuals who commit low-level offenses, ensuring that they stay behind bars well into age and often until they die. The adage “let the punishment fit the crime” has given way to a reign of disproportionality in sentencing that is nothing if not cruel and unnecessary.

For instance, in California, Leandro Andrade, a father of three, received a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison for two counts of shoplifting children’s videotapes valued at $153. He had two prior offenses for misdemeanors. In Mississippi, Atiba Parker was sentenced as a habitual offender to a total of 42 years in prison for selling a total of .3 grams and possessing less than .1 grams of crack cocaine. And also in Mississippi, the now-famous Scott sisters, Jamie and Gladys, were sentenced to two consecutive life terms for a robbery in which they stole $11 when they were teenagers.

Like many aging prisoners, Andrade, Parker and the Scott sisters are caught in the net of our extreme sentencing laws enacted since the mid 70’s. Politicians over the last quarter-century have held strong to the conventional wisdom that being "tough on crime" will win elections and appease the public's appetite for safety. To alleviate the public's overblown fear, or even to slake a thirst for retribution, our lawmakers have increasingly deemed more private acts criminal and doled out harsher punishments for a generation. Law enforcement has selectively enforced these laws against the "feared" Black and brown communities. In the end, we’re left with a massive, unsustainable prison population – and equally unsustainable aging prison population – unlike anything the world has ever seen.

If aging prisoners posed a serious threat to public safety, the costs of incarcerating them might be justified. But aging prisoners are in fact highly unlikely to commit new crimes upon release. Research has conclusively shown that by age 50 most people have significantly outlived the years in which they are most likely to commit crimes. For example, arrest rates drop to just over 2 percent at age 50 and are almost nil at age 65. In other words, there is no value to the continued incarceration of a large majority of our aging prisoners.

Today’s report provides a number of recommendations to legislators and correctional leaders interested in meaningful reform. Given the fact that public opinion is shifting toward a desire for fewer people in prison, the time to implement these reforms is now. The longer term solution requires political will to redesign our extreme sentencing regime to reintroduce proportionality, and repeal or reform habitual offender, mandatory minimum and truth-in-sentencing laws. A more immediate recommendation is for states to empower parole boards to determine which aging prisoners are worth the cost of continued incarceration because they pose grave public safety threats and which are not and can be safely released. In 2011, a bipartisan coalition in Louisiana passed just such a reform measure; if Louisiana – which leads the nation in incarceration – can take these steps, other states can surely follow suit.

In today’s hobbled economy, legislators cannot continue wasting taxpayer dollars by turning our prison system into a vast complex of nursing homes. It is a moral and fiscal imperative to stem the explosion in the aging prisoner population. Aging prisoners pose little threat to the public’s safety and incarcerating them is breaking our collective bank. Furthermore, it is inhumane to keep people locked up when there is no compelling societal justification to do so. The tools for grappling with this crisis are well within reach of legislators around the nation and the time for reform has arrived.

Inimai M. Chettiar, Policy Counsel, and Vanita Gupta, Deputy Legal Director, at the American Civil Liberties Union. Ms. Gupta directs the ACLU’s Center for Justice and its Safe and Fair Initiative to End Overincarceration. Ms. Chettiar serves as national legislative counsel coordinating the Initiative, and is incoming Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

"Tough On Crime" No Longer The American Mantra?

By Inimai Chettiar and Alex Stamm, cross-posted from Huffington Post
  

Politicians over the last quarter-century have held strong to the conventional wisdom that being "tough on crime" will win elections and appease the public's appetite for safety. And for the most part, it seems Americans did feel this way (if you don't think so, just ask Michael Dukakis). To alleviate the public's overblown fear, or even to slake a thirst for retribution, our lawmakers have repeatedly deemed more private acts criminal and doled out harsher punishments for a generation. They selectively enforced these laws against the "feared" Black and brown communities, and in the end gave us a massive, unsustainable prison population unlike anything the world has ever seen.

But the pendulum of public opinion is starting to swing in the other direction. A Pew survey in March found that not only do 73 percent of Americans who have not experienced violent crime think that too many people are behind bars, but they're joined in that opinion by 70 percent of violent crime victims. Further, 88 percent of respondents agree that we have too many low-risk, nonviolent offenders behind bars, and 87 percent support increased access to reentry programs, such as job training.

The vast majority of Americans are ready to end our addiction to incarceration. What Americans want now is common sense and proportionality. Two factors have contributed significantly to the shift in opinion. First, Americans are increasingly aware of our appalling incarceration rate and its racial injustices. We have the largest prison population on the planet; we have 5 percent of the world's people but 25 percent of its prisoners. Our criminal justice system locks up Black and brown people for drug crimes at a far higher rate than their white counterparts -- even though white Americans use drugs at a higher rate. Our prison system is one of the largest human rights atrocities in the world.

Second, more Americans know that our incarceration rate is not only egregious but also unnecessary. Social scientists and policymakers have a generation of solid data proving that we can have fewer prisoners and less crime, and showing that unnecessary incarceration can actually increase recidivism. States have proven this over and over. New York did it; between 1999 and 2009, it reduced its prison population by 20 percent and its crime rate fell by 29 percent during that time. Texas did it too; thanks to smart reforms beginning in 2003, prison population growth stalled while its crime rate fell by 13 percent to its lowest level since 1973. These examples are a sample of a larger and growing trend—states and large cities are locking fewer people up, and their communities are getting safer.

Americans are tired of being tough on crime and are ready to be smart about crime. That's good news for lawmakers. It means that they can pass the necessary pretrial, sentencing, drug and parole reforms that this country so desperately needs without the fear of losing their next election. In fact, championing these types of reforms may actually start to win them votes. With the public behind them, we hope lawmakers will take action to finally end our incarceration binge.

Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

Locking Down An American Workforce

Prison Labor as the Past -- and Future -- of American “Free-Market” Capitalism

by Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world.  Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work.  The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.  The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside.  All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance -- unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide.  Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system.  More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy -- at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.

Hate Crime And Punishment

"Locking up Ravi ultimately won't do much to stop bullying or fight homophobia.  His  prosecution speaks volumes, however, about America's rush to use criminal justice to address problems that are better resolved by other means. Every bad act is not a crime. Every kid who does a stupid thing is not a criminal."
Professor Paul Butler

Dharun Ravi

Dharun Ravi was an immature college kid who secretly videotaped his roommate, Tyler Clementi, having sex with another man.  Clementi tragically killed himself shortly thereafter.  Ravi was convicted of hate crimes, invasion of privacy and other charges, after rejecting a plea bargain that would have resulted in no jail time.  He now faces up to ten years in prison and deportation to India where he hasn't lived since he was 2 years old.  As George Washington University law professor Paul Butler writes, "Ravi should be shamed by his fellow students and kicked out of his dorm, but he should not be sent to prison for years and then banished from the United States."

Ravi is being scapegoated, Professor Butler points out, for what is sadly embedded in our culture:  "Until last year people were being kicked out of the military because they were homosexuals. None of the four leading presidential candidates -- President Obama, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich -- thinks that gay people should be allowed to get married."

Butler argues that "a better way to honor the life of Clementi would be for everyone to get off their high horse about a 20-year-old kid and instead think about how we can promote civil rights in our own lives."

Though a national conversation about civility and respect would have been better, as usual for social problems, we looked to the criminal justice system. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the world. We are an extraordinarily punitive people.

The Road Forward

My friend and former colleague, Arcelia Hurtado, who is Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates, conducted the following interview with San Francisco Deputy Public Defender Jennifer Johnson, one of the organizers of The Road Forward, a fundraiser on October 26, benefiting the SF Sheriff’s Department Women’s Resource Center and the SF Behavioral Health Court.  This piece was originally published at Huffington Post.  Please read the interview below and support this very worthy cause. -- Lovechilde

The Road Forward:  An Interview With Jennifer Johnson

Jennifer Johnson has been working with San Francisco's mental health court to provide gender specific services for women since 2005. She is a founding member of San Francisco's Behavioral Health Court and one of the organizers of The Road Forward, a fundraiser to benefit women as they transition out of custody and into the community.

Arcelia Hurtado (AH): Tell us what is going on in California with incarcerated women.

Jennifer Johnson (JJ): In times of economic prosperity, women in jails and prisons are an underserved population. In times of economic despair, they are forgotten. California is currently embarking on the biggest shift in criminal justice policy in decades as it enacts AB109, known as "realignment." The stakes are high and the opportunity is unprecedented as communities craft new approaches to incarceration and rehabilitation.

AH: What is The Road Forward?

JJ: The Road Forward is raising money to renovate the San Francisco Sheriff's Department's Women's Resource Center to create an optimal environment for helping women reclaim their lives.

Two community programs, Behavioral Health Court and the Women's Resource Center, are working together to ensure that women are not lost as the realignment process unfolds. Both programs have independently provided quality gender-specific treatment for years and they are joining forces streamline and enhance those services.

The October 26th event marks the beginning of a capital fundraising campaign and we have great allies in this effort: Equal Rights Advocates, California Pacific Medical Center, and Women Defenders of California.

AH: What do you mean when you say "helping women reclaim their lives?"

JJ: The Women's Resource Center serves women who are leaving jail and prison. The Center provides access to an array of coordinated services to help women find employment, sustain recovery, improve mental health, link to quality health care, and reconnect with their families and the community.

These services are going to become increasingly important as we see dramatic changes in criminal justice policy take effect across California.

Prisoner Realignment Plan: Counties Must Find Alternatives To Lockups

By Allen Hopper.  Originally published in the Sacramento Bee.

California's realignment process – which will shift responsibility for some low-level, nonviolent, nonserious offenders from state prisons to counties – has begun. But far more is at stake than the transfer of inmates. If properly implemented, realignment will reverse decades of over-reliance upon incarceration, improve public safety and save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

At the core of the realignment legislation is an acknowledgment of the indisputable failure of California's criminal justice policy on a massive scale. As the legislative findings that accompany the law explain, "despite the dramatic increase in corrections spending over the past two decades, reincarceration rates … remain unchanged or have worsened … Criminal justice policies that rely on building and operating more prisons to address community safety concerns are not sustainable, and will not result in improved public safety."

Our state's overall recidivism rate has risen to an appalling 67.5 percent, among the highest in the nation. To stem over-incarceration, counties must confront the recidivism problem. We must hold individuals accountable for their behavior while addressing the underlying reasons for criminal behavior – whether drug addiction, mental health problems, lack of stable housing, education or job prospects and others.

Each county must provide the state with an Assembly Bill 109 implementation plan divvying up their share of the nearly $400 million in state realignment funding. Since the new realignment law goes into effect Oct. 1, counties across the state are scrambling to get these plans drafted and approved by boards of supervisors in the next few weeks.