Huh?

Arnold looks at his state prison system, and doesn't like what he sees. 170,000 (!) prisoners, with a $10.6 billion budget. ($10.6 billion is more than the combined economies of Mongolia and Laos- two countries with a total population of around 9.2 million people.)

SACRAMENTO — With his state strapped and his legacy looming, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed on Wednesday to greatly reduce the amount of money California spends on its prisons and to funnel that sum to the state’s higher education system instead.

It's sad that he had to wait until his state was bankrupt to do something about it, but at least he's doing it now, right? This should be a pretty easy call; there is absolutely no reason on earth for California to imprison 170,000 people. Most of them are non-violent offenders, including non-violent drug offenders who pose zero danger to society. Let's shift some of this money to education; nothing is more likely to keep people out of prison than education!

“The priorities have become out of whack over the years,” the governor told lawmakers. “I mean, think about it, 30 years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education, and 3 percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons, and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education.”

Good stuff! What's the plan?

While the governor provided few details of his new plan, much of the prison cost savings he envisions would come though privatizing services or prisons themselves...

(Pounding my head against the wall.)

...The governor said no prisoners would be released early for his plan, shutting the door on changes to sentencing laws and the release of low-level offenders as other states have done.

So...California imprisons too many people, and spends too much money doing it, and the solution is to...wait for it...hire unaccountable, private, profit-making prison companies and their lobbyists to take over?

Don't laugh. As goes California, so goes the nation.

More Customers for the Prison Business

I've written in the past about the absolute disaster that our criminal justice is. I'd like to write about the role that private prisons have in this mess.

The United States is far and away the world leader in imprisoning it's citizens. According to Human Rights Watch,

The latest statistics, released last week, show that as of June 30, 2008, more than 2.3 million people were behind bars in this country -- an increase of almost 20 percent just since 2000. This gives the United States an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents -- the highest rate in the world, dwarfing those of other democracies like Great Britain (152 per 100,000), Canada (116), and Japan (63).

Of course incarceration doesn't affect everyone equally. Black men in the United States are 6.6 times more likely than white men to be incarcerated. More than 10 percent of all black males ages 25 to 39 were in prison or jail as of June 30, 2008. And a 2006 BJS study showed that prisons and jails have become the new asylums, with more than half of all prisoners suffering from mental health problems like major depression and psychotic disorders.

It wasn't always like this. For much of the 20th century, the US incarceration rate remained fairly stable. It began to climb sharply in the late 1970s, as a result of policy changes like mandatory minimum sentencing and the widespread abolition of parole. In the 1980s and 1990s, the "war on drugs" and "three strikes" laws fueled further growth. More people were going to prison, and staying there for longer periods of time. By 2004, the incarcerated population was six times what it had been in 1972.

Here's a visual of that, courtesy of Sen. Jim Webb:




Now, as Human Rights Watch points out, there are a lot of reasons for this increase in prison population. I would submit that at its heart, it's a belief by those in power (read: read rich white people) that most crimes are committed by people who don't look like them, and that the easiest way to deal with this is to just put them in cages.

If you think that our prison population says something good about America, here is Sen. Jim Webb, quoted from a speech on the Senate floor:

There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States;
or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of
criminal justice.

I highly recommend reading this entire speech. It's only a few pages, and I can promise you that it will be more informative than that link to Jon & Kate Plus 8 that you were thinking of hitting up.

What do private prisons have to do with all of this? Private prisons are supposed to be more cost effective, because they are run as for-profit businesses. Leaving aside the fact that they aren't really any cheaper for the taxpayer, let's consider the bigger picture.

How do private companies grow and increase profits? What has every business since the dawn of time tried to do to make more money?

They look for more customers.

When they're convincing people to buy cell phones, or trying to put people on cruise ships, this has a relatively benign effect. But when their growth is predicated on putting more people in jail, their business model becomes far more malignant.

Private prison companies, along with prison guard unions, have a vested financial interest in locking people up. This interest is completely at odds with society's interests. We have reasons to help people with drug problems, for example, so that they can be better, more productive members of society. But private prisons have an interest in just locking people in cages, because they get paid for that. And when, as a result, they become more likely to commit more crimes, they can profit again from imprisoning them a second or third time. Heck, prison growth counts toward GDP!

We should consider high incarceration rates a problem. Prison should be a last resort; it breeds criminals and is, in many cases, simply inhuman. Nothing can make a man more angry and dangerous than society's inhuman indifference to his rights as human being, and if you can't oppose mass imprisonment on moral grounds, than at least on practical terms you must realize what a disaster this has been.

The prison-industrial complex in the United States is appalling and abhorrent. If you claim to celebrate America's supposed dedication to liberty, you should try to reconcile that with our horrendous record on civil rights. A society with over 2 million of its members behind bars can hardly be considered a free country.