How does the US prison system fail? It is all a matter of perspective. Whether you regard prisons as a place of punishment or rehabilitation.
The sheer size of the US prison population is staggering. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies 2007 World Prison Brief, there were 7.2 million people behind bars, on probation or on parole. 2.3 million of these were incarcerated in the prison system. This is a mind-boggling number – representing 3.2 percent of the US adult population or 1 in every 31 adults. To put this into context, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world by a considerable margin. The country ranked second on the list, China, has a prison population of only 1.5 million, despite having a general population four times larger. Directly comparing the two, the second ranked country on the list has an incarceration rate of only 18 percent of the United States.
One view of these numbers is that the United States is very successful at identifying and punishing criminals and on this basis the US prison system could be considered a phenomenal success. But it is not about numbers and this doesn’t take into account either apprehension rates or conviction rates. It merely reflects the high rate of crime in the US (ranks 1st in terms of the number of reported crimes and 8th per capita). It also indicates that the preferred method of dealing with criminals and criminal behaviour in the US is incarceration. This is effective in taking criminals off the streets and probably has something to do with the crime rate falling by around 25 percent in the period 1988-2008. Whether or not this is the best way of tackling crime though is questionable and the cost of maintaining this policy is in the region of $60 billion each year. This is a lot of money by any stretch of the imagination.
When you start to drill into the numbers, the states with the highest levels of incarceration are: Louisiana (816 per 100,000), Texas (694) and Mississippi (669). Two of these are states among the lowest average level of income and the highest unemployment rates in the country. More than 93 percent of prisoners are male and 70 percent of prisoners are non-white. In Federal prisons, 27 percent of prisoners are non-citizens, basically illegal immigrants convicted of crimes while in the country. Nearly half of all prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent crimes. What these numbers strongly suggest is (1) little tolerance for minor crimes, and (2) there is a strong correlation between crime and socio-economic status. One of the problems with this policy is that it often takes away the main bread-winner from low income families and makes effectively adds fuel to the fire, making it more difficult for low income families to make ends meet and desperate times lead to desperate acts which may often involve crime.
It is easy to make glib statements like “do the crime and you do the time”, but in any society it should be preferable to deter and prevent crime in the first place. Less crime means less cost, and that isn’t just the cost of operating the prison system. It also means reduced health costs, both in the prisoners themselves and in dealing with assaults and personal injuries, reduced enforcement and associated legal costs, and reduced insurance and property costs. Given the high crime rate and incarceration rate in the United States, it is clear that the threat of jail does not act as a sufficient deterrent. The question is why? Jail is not a pleasant place and most rational people would prefer not to spend any time there, yet the introduction of mandatory sentencing, set minimum terms and the three strikes rule has done little to reduce the United States’ comparative position in terms of both crime and incarceration rates. There must be other forces at play here.
With the statistics pointing to low income areas having the highest crime rates, the question needs to be asked why is this so? Is it drug related, a reaction to social inequities, poor upbringing or something else altogether?
The answer is that it is probably a combination of all these factors. To start with the low income aspect of the equation, the significant productivity gains over the last 30-40 years have not been matched by an increase in real wages . In 2003, salaries and wages were at their lowest proportion of GDP since the 1940s and at the same time corporate profits were at their highest level since the 1960s. The minimum wage in real terms has been falling steadily since the late 1960s and this, combined with a social security system that compares poorly with the rest of the developed world, makes it difficult for those at the lower end of the spectrum to make ends meet. The point has already been made that desperate times push people toward committing crimes as a means of redress. It also serves to entrench a sub-class of poor and undermine their hopes for the future or to aspire to anything better. Working multiple minimum wage jobs to pay the bills and put food on the table also creates a generation of latch-key children who are forced to spend a considerable amount of time without the care and attention of at least one parent. This is not the sole prevail of the lower income group as the rise in the divorce rate and single parent families cuts across all income levels. Bored children may turn to criminal activity and/or drugs to gain attention, as a means to obtain some of the gadgets they see advertised everywhere which their parents cannot afford, or simply for something to do. Social inequity can also lead to resentment and anger, and when there is the absence of hope, this can push people to redress the situation through crime.
The issue of drugs is an important one. Over the last 30 years, the percentage of people who have used illicit drugs has increased from around 32 percent to 42 percent. This is a major concern as there is a strong correlation between drug use and crime as it often becomes a vicious circle where crime helps pay for the addiction. Another concern is the type of drug use, which has moved from mostly marijuana, regarded as the lower end of the illicit drug scale, to cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. These harder drugs are more expensive and more addictive, with consequent mental health issues and they are often associated with violent and extreme behaviour. On the subject of mental illness, it is estimated that it affects some 20 percent of the population, yet investment in mental health programs has been declining in real terms for the last 30 years. Treatment is often left to the individual and this means that mental health problems are often left untreated. It should therefore come as no surprise that the number of mentally ill prisoners is significantly higher than that of the general population (more than three times higher).
The issue of bored children has already been discussed, however it goes deeper than that. Our society has moved to the point where double incomes are the norm. With both parents out in the workplace, children are often left to either their own devices or to the care of others. Children learn through imitation and they therefore often lack a suitable role model. Their behaviour then begins to mimic other children, care workers or what they see on television or in the movies. The traditional values of courtesy, respect for people and property, and morality have deterioriated markedly over the last 50 years and the boundaries regarding what is acceptable behaviour have blurred. Combined with an increasingly stressful and rapidly changing world, it is perhaps no surprise that the growth in the juvenile incarceration rate is much higher than the average. When so many of our young people end up in prison, it is not just a failure of the prison system, but a failure of our society as a whole.
Another area of concern is privatisation. In the United States, this is a means of reducing the cost of maintaining a prisoner (estimated at around $88 per day) to the state. This is good in theory but not so in practice. A big problem is that privatisation means the prison becomes a business and businesses are there to make a profit. If they don’t, they soon cease to be a business. The profit motive means that prisoner wellbeing suffers is a secondary consideration and it becomes a simple equation of trying to maintain the greatest number of prisoners for the least cost. This usually leads to overcrowding (the 33 prisons in California were designed to hold 100,000 inmates, yet they hold some 70 percent more than this capacity), reducing the quality and number of prison and ancillary staff, reducing the standard of accommodation and facilities, and a smaller range of lower cost food.
Rehabilitation and quality of care is not as important a consideration as generating a profit and prisoners are in a poor position to argue against any shortfall or injustice. And prisoner complaints generally don’t receive a great deal of public support. Privatisation is more conducive to a prison system based on the core principle of punishment and this means that prisoners finish their terms with a fair degree of anger at a system that put them away in the first place and with little attempt to address the underlying factors that caused them to commit their crimes in the first place.
An important measure of success for a prison should be recidivism rates. In the United States, just over two thirds of released prisoners were charged with a felony or serious misdemeanour within three years of their release date. This is almost double the recidivism rate in the rest of the developed world and highlights a real failing of the prison system.
