wPosted on: Sunday, August 29, 2004
Silenced voters point to need for prison reform
By Vincent Schiraldi and Eric Lotke
It is more than a little ironic that with a higher number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system than at any time in history, crime and punishment have virtually vanished as an issue in this year's presidential race.
The staggering size of America's prison population and its human and fiscal costs demand far more serious examination than they have received so far.
Unless something changes, one in 15 Americans born in 2001 is expected to spend at least a year of life in prison. Nearly 7 million Americans live under correctional supervision, more than live in our eight least-populous states. Organized differently, they would have 16 votes in the U.S. Senate.
A focused look at the 17 "swing states" in the upcoming election reveals just how profound an impact prison expansion has had. Between 1993 and 2002, the swing states experienced a collective growth in prisons and jails of 204,807 people, an increase of nearly 40 percent in 10 years.
This comes with significant costs to other government functions and in disenfranchising millions of potential voters. Between 1977 and 2001, combined state and local spending on corrections increased 1,101 percent, more than double the growth in healthcare (482 percent). Between 1985 and 2002, the swing states alone increased spending on corrections more than five times as fast as their spending on higher education (220 percent vs. 39 percent).
Politicians claim that prisons bring safety, but the data show otherwise. Crime declined nationally during the 1990s, largely because of a booming economy. Between 1993 and 2002, states leaning Republican grew their prison populations nearly twice as much as states leaning Democrat. Yet crime in the "D" states dropped at twice the rate of the "R" states.
Paired swing states show how tenuous the connection between prison and safety can be. For example, the prison population of Pennsylvania grew more than twice as much as Ohio's between 1993 and 2002, yet the states saw similar declines in crime.
The people punished most by America's penal system have the least to say where decisions are made. One in 10 black men in his 20s or 30s wakes up behind bars every morning, and nearly twice as many black men will have been to prison by their early 30s as will have obtained a bachelor's degree.
Yet, of the 4.7 million Americans barred from voting because of felon-disenfranchisement laws, 1.4 million are black men. The number of disenfranchised voters exceeded the margin of victory in nine swing states in the 2000 presidential election. In Florida, the 827,207 disenfranchised exceeded George W. Bush's 537-vote margin 1,500-fold.
Fortunately, some swing states are leading the way with promising, bipartisan approaches to curbing prison growth. Michigan revised its harsh mandatory sentencing laws, saving an estimated $41 million last year. And Washington officials shortened sentences for people convicted of drug and nonviolent offenses and used the savings to fund community-based treatment.
Such reforms lack the primitive appeal of a Willie Horton ad. But with nearly 5 million people unable to vote in the 2004 election because of their criminal justice status, and the United States holding the world's highest incarceration rate, voters need to hear more than silence on this important issue.
Vincent Schiraldi and Eric Lotke are executive director and research director, respectively, at the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute.
