The Problem with Our Prisons

Prisoners are often viewed as intolerable human beings who committed a crime and therefore deserve their punishment.  This vision of the criminal has led to a tough-on-crime rhetoric and growth of the prison system since the mid 1980s.  Prisons are becoming increasingly overcrowded, with the growth in the number of prisoners due to mandatory minimums and parole violations.  In fact, the prison population in the country has more than tripled in the past few decades.  In 1970, only 200,000 people were behind bars; today, about 2.2 million prisoners are held in federal or state prisons or local jails.1  The U.S. has the largest population of prisoners in the world, housing 25% of the world’s incarcerated population while accounting for only 5% of the world’s population.  The U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate in the world, according to The Justice Policy Institute.  As of 2005, there were 726 inmates for every 100,000 United States residents; in other words, one in every 138 residents was in prison or jail.2  Belarus has the next highest incarceration rate, with 532 per 100,000 citizens imprisoned.  The Western European countries with which the U.S. likes to be associated have much smaller prison populations and much lower incarceration rates, like France with a prison population of 55,028 and an incarceration rate of 91 per 100,000.3  U.S. officials presume that increased incarceration, a virtual warehousing of prisoners, is a viable solution to crime.  However, over the past decade, the crime rate has decreased while the incarceration rate has continued to climb.  The recent trend in corrections has been to lock people up and throw away the key, a warehousing of a generation.

As the prison-industrial complex has grown, it has almost become more lucrative for states and private corporations to keep individuals incarcerated for many years, and hope that they recidivate, than to invest a relatively small amount of funds to provide for arts and education programs while people are incarcerated.4  Most federal and state funds for corrections have been allocated to build prisons and to pay for the guards, rather than to provide arts programs and education.  However, as recent studies have shown, it costs more money per year to incarcerate someone than it does to educate them.  In New York, for instance, it costs $36,835 to imprison one person for a year, compared to $10,254 for one year at a public four-year college and $25,171 for one year at a private four-year college.5  In spite of these findings, the investment in educational and other programming for incarcerated populations remains quite low.  Currently, only 9% of prisoners are in full-time job training or education programs, while 24% are completely unoccupied, according to James Austin, the co-director of the Institute on Crime, Justice and Corrections at George Washington University.6

Since more than 95% of those imprisoned will eventually return to society, this population cannot simply be forgotten.  Due to the limited number of educational and work opportunities within correctional facilities, most prisoners are unprepared to reenter society after serving their sentences with no skills or education.  The criminal justice system has transformed into a revolving door for many youth and adults in our country. With many individuals not receiving the necessary education while incarcerated or the needed support upon their release, the chances of violating parole or committing another crime increase.  According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67.5% of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994 were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% re-sentenced to prison for a new crime.  Within 3 years of their 1994 release, 51.8% of the prisoners were back in prison either because of a new crime, or because of a technical violation of their parole.7  As the New York Times recently noted on their editorial page, “Worse still, the country has created a growing felon caste, now more than 16 million strong, of felons and ex-felons, who are often driven back to prison by policies that make it impossible for them to find jobs, housing or education.”8  The country needs to re-evaluate the state of its criminal justice system and its funding priorities.  If a greater value is not placed on improving the educational and skill levels, as well as emotional and mental health, of the incarcerated, the current corrections price tag of $60 billion annually will continue to rise.9