Debt To Society: The Real Price of Prisons, Part 4 of 8

BREEDING VIOLENCE

Locking People Up Is Supposed To Make Our Streets Safer, But It May Be
Doing The Opposite

Jason, 19, has just been released after a year-long stint on Rikers
Island, New York City's sprawling jail complex, where he was sent for
dealing drugs. But he still doesn't get out much. Jason's mother keeps
him at home in their Harlem apartment, fearing that the instinct for
violence he had to hone in jail will land him back behind bars.

"Jail is whacked, man. Whacked," says Jason, who asked that his last
name be withheld. "I picked up some violent shit in there.

You're with people locked up for murder, gun charges.

Eventually that shit's going to wear on you." While he was locked up,
Jason says he saw a group of kids sodomize another inmate with a stick.

He himself got slashed twice and stabbed in the back with a sharpened
paper clip. Although Jason had never been convicted of a violent crime
before, he retaliated by stabbing a rival gang member. As a result, he
was sent to solitary confinement in Rikers' Central Punishment
Segregation Unit, an area inmates call "the Bing." He spent three months
alone in a space the size of a small bathroom. "You be in the Bing,
you're in there by yourself," he says. "End up playing with roaches and
shit. You end up going crazy." Then one day, you're sent right back to
your old neighborhood.

Since America embarked on its generation-long prison expansion, the
number of people behind bars on any given day has risen from 500,000 to
nearly 2 million. The looming question is: What happens when they are
released?

Over 90 percent of them will eventually return to society.

Over half a million inmates are currently released each year -- numbers
approaching those of demobilized soldiers at the end of a long and
bloody war. Some are rehabilitated by their time in the lockup; but
others emerge from prison more violent and more prone to crime than when
they were taken away. Like the Vietnam vets who found it so hard to
readjust to civilian life 30 years ago, many ex-cons like Jason bring
the habits and attitudes they've developed behind bars back with them to
the streets.

By subjecting petty criminals to a world of hardened violence, America's
experiment with mass-scale incarceration may ultimately make its streets
not safer, but more dangerous.

"What I'm seeing is people coming out of prison with anywhere from
moderate to severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder," says
Bonnie Kerness, associate director of the American Friends Service
Committee's Criminal Justice Program in Newark, New Jersey. "People are
coming out with hair-trigger tempers."

There's no question that prisoners are subjected to harsh and often
violent conditions. Race-based gangs dominate inmate life and often
collide brutally with one another.

Staff assaults on inmates are not uncommon -- and the average number of
inmate-on-staff assaults has risen 50 percent since 1991, according to
data collected by the New Jersey-based Criminal Justice Institute. And a
recent Human Rights Watch report affirms the widely held belief that
violent male-on-male rape is commonplace behind bars.

Small wonder, then, that so many ex-convicts seem to be made worse, not
better, by their time in the lockup.

The most recent major study of recidivism by the federal Bureau of
Justice Statistics tracked 16,000 released prisoners -- and found that
two-thirds were rearrested on felony or serious misdemeanor charges
within a few years.

Even more striking, nearly one-fifth of those who had been locked up for
nonviolent offenses were rearrested for violent ones. Sometimes, the
violence flows directly from prisons to cities: Boston's superintendent
of police recently told the New York Times that a major reason his city
saw a surge in gun crimes last year was because of newly released
inmates continuing prison feuds on the streets.

Studies over the last three decades have repeatedly found that being
sent to prison actually seems to make inmates more likely to commit
crimes.

A study by researchers at the University of North Carolina, for
instance, concluded that "increasing imprisonment generally did not have
a deterrent effect on imprisoned offenders, and in fact may have
increased their chances of rearrest." Another study carried out at
Carnegie-Mellon University found that prisoners in 10 states continued
their criminal behavior later in life than did offenders who managed to
evade prison time. As prominent criminologist Alfred Blumstein writes,
"Incarceration can move the prisoner to a more serious level of criminal
activity ... as a result of association with other more serious
offenders." In effect, prison serves as what many experts describe as a
"graduate school for crime."

Consider John King, a small-time burglar when he was sent to a state
prison in Texas. There, forced to survive in a world divided into
race-based prison gangs, he joined a white supremacist group that
schooled him in racial hatred and violence.

When he was released in 1998, he and two other men killed James Byrd
Jr., an African American man in Jasper, Texas, by dragging him behind a
pickup truck.

While King's case may be extreme in its violence, many prisoners locked
up for nonviolent offenses wind up resorting to violence simply to
survive. Hyyawatha Branch, a former inmate in Pennsylvania, started out
as a juvenile delinquent. "In juvenile, you fight every day," he
recalls. "I learned how to be in control of things, giving orders, being
aggressive enough to fight my way to the top." When he was released,
Branch climbed rapidly up the rungs of the criminal justice system. "I
started robbery and stealing," he says. "I got shot. I started shooting
people." He wound up doing 18 years for homicide.

Now 13 years out of prison and well into middle age, Branch teaches a
job-application class to recently released ex-cons in Philadelphia for
the Pennsylvania Prison Society. After decades of living behind bars and
then working with hundreds of former inmates convicted of small-time
offenses, he knows firsthand how the current prison boom is harming
society. "I don't know where they get this word 'rehabilitation,'" he
says. "If you took a person through hell, how are you going to get them
back to where they originally came from?"

At their most extreme, correctional facilities may literally drive
inmates crazy. Faced with the need to discipline and control soaring
numbers of convicts, correctional officials increasingly rely on
segregation facilities -- prisons-within-prisons where inmates are often
kept in solitary confinement, let out of their cells for an hour a day
or less. The federal prison system, as well as 40 states and the
District of Columbia, have segregation units.

On any given day, some 36,000 people are held in them.

In several states, including California and Texas, inmates are sometimes
taken directly from isolated cells where they have festered for years
and released straight back to the streets.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have filed a
half-dozen lawsuits against segregation units, arguing that subjecting
inmates to such harsh conditions will ultimately boomerang on the public
by worsening their tendencies to violence and mental illness.

"Paula," another ex-inmate placed in solitary confinement at Rikers
Island while serving time for selling drugs, says she came out of a
stint in the Bing a ball of fury. "I was only allowed out two times a
week, and every time I went out I was shackled," she says. "It kicked up
a lot of animosity and anger in me. When I got out, people were afraid
to talk to me. I literally lived like an animal.

Straight-up animal.

I'd flip on a dime on you."

Inmates like Paula are often set free with little more than a one-way
bus ticket back to their old haunts, a couple of hundred dollars in
"gate money," and virtually no preparation for re-entering society.

In California, a recent state report found that 85 percent of released
prisoners are drug or alcohol abusers, 50 percent are illiterate, and 10
percent are homeless.

Nonetheless, many states have cut job-training and educational programs
in prison over the past decade, and Congress has barred inmates from
receiving grants for college correspondence courses. Between 1991 and
1997, the number of prisoners in drug-treatment programs dropped by more
than half. There are some re-entry programs for recently released
convicts, but they serve relatively few people.

The Fortune Society, for instance, is one of the largest re-entry
programs in New York but serves only about 1,000 ex-cons annually, out
of the nearly 30,000 who are released in the state every year.

In effect, ex-cons have become a huge and growing caste of untouchables.
A criminal record makes getting a job considerably tougher.

California has even banned parolees from certain occupations, including
nursing, physical therapy, and education.

Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton University, found that paroled
inmates who do manage to land jobs are paid only half as much as people
with similar backgrounds who have not been imprisoned. In many states,
felony convictions and drug-related offenses render former prisoners
ineligible for public assistance or public housing, and Congress
recently cut off higher education grants to those with drug records.

"They're released back into society, to the same devastated community,
with an enormous buildup of anger and frustration," says Eddie Ellis, a
former inmate who now works as an organizer for the Harlem-based
Community Justice Center, which helps ex-convicts re-enter society.
"You've got to be an absolute idiot not to know if you take someone,
lock them up for 10 years, and don't give them any rehabilitative
activities, when you let them out you're going to have a failure."

Those failures will be felt by everyone -- and are likely to grow only
more acute. Not only are more people in prison than ever before, but
they are being subjected to the violence of incarceration for longer
than ever. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, inmates
released in 1985 served an average of 20 months.

For those entering prison today, the average time served is projected to
be more than 42 months.

Exposed to more violence on the inside, the hundreds of thousands of
inmates who will be released each year are likely to commit more
muggings, car thefts, and killings on the outside.

Communities that are home to the most ex-convicts will be the hardest
hit. In some urban neighborhoods, as many as one in four men are under
the criminal justice system's control on any given day. Todd Clear, a
criminology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New
York City, says many inner-city neighborhoods may be reaching what he
calls a "tipping point." In some areas, he notes, so many residents have
been through prison that entire communities are unraveling, afflicted
with rising unemployment, domestic violence, and crime.

When Clear and his wife, Dina Rose, studied a 1996 drop in crime rates
in Tallahassee, Florida, they discovered that crime fell the least in
neighborhoods with the most residents who had spent time in state
prisons. "The only difference was incarceration," Clear says.

The study underscores a trend that may soon affect the nation as a whole
- one that Clear boils down to a simple formula. "The higher the
numbers returning from prison," he says, "the higher the crime rate."

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