AMERICA BEHIND BARS: WHY ATTEMPTS AT PRISON REFORM KEEP FAILING

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared plans in January 2005 to
reform California's prisons, starting with a rebranding campaign
(it's the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
now), his announcement signaled much-needed relief for California
taxpayers, whose overstretched, scandal-prone prison system was
screaming for an overhaul.

But three years later, California maintains the second-highest prison
population in the country (171,444 in January 2008) and the highest
recidivism rate (a staggering 70 percent).

From the start, people familiar with the embattled prison system
were skeptical. "Everybody's going to get new business cards and
letterheads," said Lance Corcoran, vice president of the powerful
California Correctional Peace Officers Association, "but we haven't
changed with respect to providing inmates anything different."

Gov. Schwarzenegger's largely failed attempts at prison reform --
e.g. reducing the overall prison population and releasing low-risk,
nonviolent offenders early -- is a reflection of a larger economic
and political dynamic playing out across the country.

On one hand, people are starting to realize that bloated prison
systems are a resource suck on an already troubled economy.

On the other hand, many people -- even in that liberal bastion,
California -- cling to the misguided idea that locking up large
numbers of lawbreakers will keep the public safer.

That leaves politicians like Schwarzenegger trying to straddle a line
between appearing "tough on crime" and pushing for meaningful reform.

So far, the former has won out. In many ways, California is a
microcosm of the American prison crisis -- one that has reached
alarming proportions.

The most recent proof is summarized in the title of a report released
last week by the Pew Center on the States: "One in 100: Americans
Behind Bars 2008." The study examines the state of adult America (no
juveniles were included) to deliver a sobering new measure of our
incarceration nation. The title statistic alone is jaw-dropping,
representing a historic high (or new low, depending on how you look
at it) when it comes to American justice.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States
leads the world in its prison population, well ahead of China (1.5
million) and leaving Russia in the dust (890,000). "Beyond the sheer
number of inmates, America is also the global leader in the rate at
which it incarcerates its citizenry," the study reports, "outpacing
nations like South Africa and Iran."

As always, it turns out the "citizenry" disproportionately consists
of black men over 18 (one in 15 are imprisoned) -- and particularly
those between the age of 20 and 34 (1 in 9). Recidivism rates are
also sky-high. According to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics,
more than a third of the people admitted to prison in 2005 were
arrested on parole violations. "Nationally, more than half of
released offenders are back in prison within three years," the Pew
study reports, "either for a new crime or for violating the terms of
their release." In 1998, thanks in large part to the War on Drugs,
the number of nonviolent prisoners hit 1 million -- and has risen
since then. The number of women prisoners is also rising, and black
women are a microcosm of the national prison epidemic: One in 100
black women in their mid-to late 30s is behind bars.

It's a clarion call for reform, no doubt, but beyond its
record-breaking numbers, the Pew study breaks no news -- at least not
in the larger scheme of the American criminal justice system.

It's a crisis decades in the making, and a 50-state Pew analysis
released at the same time last year provided similarly startling
projections of where our prisons and jails are headed, to far less fanfare.

But one in 100 is a stark figure (and, in fact, the exact number is
worse: 1 in 99.1). Thus, both the New York Times and the Washington
Post ran stories -- with the Post holding an online Q&A with one of
the study's authors the day after it was released. The report even
nudged its way into the presidential race: Hillary Clinton issued a
press release on her campaign website that day bemoaning the
"heartbreaking statistic" and invoking the need for "a president who
will be tough on crime, but smart about it too." (As a senator
representing a state whose rural regions are littered with the
architecture of a prison explosion fanned during her husband's
administration, it's an important statement -- if only a statement).

While public shock and dismay over the criminal justice system is a
good thing, policy reform usually only comes once those in power
recognize public support for measures otherwise considered too
politically risky. (Iraq war notwithstanding.) Indeed, a significant
part of the Pew study (which was written mainly with politicians in
mind) is devoted to showing that policy makers are starting to come
around on the prison issue, increasingly talking about being "smart"
rather than "tough" on crime. The hope is that others will take their
lead. "There's a shift away from the mindset of lock them up and
throw away the key," one Ohio Republican legislator is quoted as saying.

Alternatives include investing in drug treatment for prisoners -- as
well as "drug courts" -- relaxing stringent parole rules and curbing
mandatory minimums.

Ironically (if necessarily) the states that appear to be paving the
way on prison reform are the ones who lock up the most people.

Take Texas: Between 1985 and 2005, its prison population rose by 300
percent, a growth rate even the state's death row machinery couldn't offset.

Now, with an estimated prison population of 171,790, according to the
Pew study, the Lone Star State is forging "a new path," with a
bipartisan decision last year to authorize a "virtual makeover" of
the prison system. The overhaul will include more drug treatment for
prisoners and "broad changes in parole practices" aimed to curb
recidivism rates.

If all goes according to plan, the state may be able to shelve
emergency blueprints for three new prisons. "It's always been safer
politically to build the next prison, rather than stop and see
whether that's really the smartest thing to do," the Houston-based
chair of the Texas senate's criminal justice committee said. "But
we're at the point where I don't think we can afford to do that anymore."

Financially, this is certainly true. Politically, Texas lawmakers
will likely face serious challenges when it comes to implementing
these reforms. In California, months after tacking the word
"rehabilitation" to its Department of Corrections, an organization
called Crime Victims United of California created TV ads accusing the
governor of abandoning crime victims and endangering Californians by
easing up the punishments for people on parole.

In concert with the CCPOA, the effort successfully derailed one of
the central components of Schwarzenegger's plan. Rather than receive
drug counseling or anything comparable, parole violators would be
shuttled back to prison.

The move was a big step backward. "Eliminating alternative sanctions
as an option for parole violators will undoubtedly drive up the
inmate population and exacerbate overcrowding in the California
prison system, already jam-packed to nearly twice its design
capacity," reported the Los Angeles Times in April 2005. "Experts say
such conditions -- with inmates stacked in triple-decker bunks and
wedged into gyms, hallways and other spaces not intended as housing
- -- are a recipe for riots."

In fairness, regardless of what happens in Texas, it's hard to
begrudge honest-sounding and measured rhetoric about an issue that
historically has attracted so much belligerent posturing.

But at the same time, for those who have watched the American
criminal justice system consume not just state budgets but whole city
blocks, it's also somewhat infuriating. Warehousing massive
populations of men and women is, on its face, bad public policy.

For politicians to be just waking up to this maddening reality seems dubious.

What's more, the dollars and sense tone so many strike when espousing
the benefits of prison reform leaves out a major factor -- a
veritable elephant in the room when it comes to the prison boom: the
powerful incentives that continue to keep the prison population high.
From construction to prison security to healthcare, prisons are an
industry -- and a highly lucrative one at that. "Profits oil the
machinery, keep it humming and speed its growth," wrote criminal
justice expert Judith Greene in an essay recently published in Prison
Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration (New Press). With
states spending $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, prisons
are an enormous cash cow for private companies.

In its 2005 annual report, the Corrections Corporation of America
laid out what's at stake for a prison industry facing reform:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new
contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention
facilities ... The demand for our facilities and services could be
adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency
in conviction and sentencing practices or through the
decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed
by our criminal laws.

. Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could
lower minimum sentences for some nonviolent crimes and make more
inmates eligible for early release ... Also, sentencing alternatives
under consideration could put some offenders on probation with
electronic monitors who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly,
reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests,
convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.

The reforms described by the rather alarmed-sounding CCA mirror those
that Pew and other advocates herald as a way to curb the growing
prison crisis -- and it appears that lawmakers are finally willing to
hear them. "What we're seeing is state leaders around the country
starting to call time out," said Pew researcher Susan K. Urahn during
the Post's online chat. "We are seeing activity in several states
where legislators from both parties are saying, 'We aren't getting
our money's worth out of prisons.'" So, for example, "for the same
amount of money, you could keep one inmate behind bars for an
additional year, or you could provide treatment and intensive
supervision for several others -- and cut the recidivism rate
considerably." But who will provide treatment -- and how about those
electric monitors?

Like prison construction itself, prison "reform" will largely amount
to trading in one set of services for another.

Reform as it stands mostly means managing a massive pre-existing
population that is already mired in the prison-to-parole-to-prison
pipeline. With the numbers so high, any small adjustments in the
system will yield results.

In Texas' case, "even a small tweak -- such as the 5 percent increase
in grants by the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole between 2006 and
2007 -- can have an appreciable thinning affect on the prison
population." It is too soon to tell how effective such reforms will
be in the long term.

Going beyond managing the prison population from state to state to
effectively reduce it nationwide will take much more than
implementing piecemeal alternatives. The fact that we're no longer
seeing an all-out race to the bottom in prison expansion is a good
thing, but deeper change will require dismantling the pervasive
attachment to conventional wisdom that, despite being erroneous and
counterproductive, is still used to justify the record-breaking rise
in the American prison population. "One out of every 100 adults is
behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a
serious criminal offense," a Utah-based law professor and former
federal judge told the New York Times last week, directly
contradicting the conclusions of the Pew study, which focused much
attention on the pitfalls of locking up nonviolent and drug offenders.

Others continue to defend the sweeping policies that got us here in
the first place. "The fact that we have a large prison population by
itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the
extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country,"
conservative sociologist James Q. Wilson told the Washington Post.
Hardly unbiased criticism, given that Wilson was one of the
intellectual engines behind the "broken windows" theory that helped
get us into this mess. (And tell that to black or Latino families who
experience the criminal justice system's harshest excesses -- from
children growing up without their parents to parents paying crippling
phone fees to reach their children. Or tell that to now-elderly
prisoners living out their final days behind bars, whose threat to
society is negligible and whose failing health makes them highly
vulnerable -- and hugely expensive to care for.)

Besides, connecting the prison boom to an increase in public safety
is a classic canard.

Studies by organizations such as the Vera Institute of Justice have
found only a small correlation between prisons and reduced crime. As
Urahn puts it, "incarceration is not the dominant force in crime
control that many people assume ... despite having quadrupled the
prison population over the past 25 years, we have not quadrupled
public safety."

What has soared is the cost for taxpayers -- $50 billion per year at
the state level and an additional $5 billion at the federal level,
according to the Pew study.

Perhaps more than even the stunning one in 100 figure, these are the
numbers that should shake people awake.

But regardless of all proof to the contrary, many Americans remain
attached to the idea that prisons keep them safe. "We are jammed up
in this situation right now because we have fallen in love with one
of the most undocumented beliefs," California Sen. Don Perata said in
2007. "That somehow you get safer if you put more people in jail."

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared plans in January 2005 to
reform California's prisons, starting with a rebranding campaign
(it's the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
now), his announcement signaled much-needed relief for California
taxpayers, whose overstretched, scandal-prone prison system was
screaming for an overhaul.

But three years later, California maintains the second-highest prison
population in the country (171,444 in January 2008) and the highest
recidivism rate (a staggering 70 percent).

From the start, people familiar with the embattled prison system
were skeptical. "Everybody's going to get new business cards and
letterheads," said Lance Corcoran, vice president of the powerful
California Correctional Peace Officers Association, "but we haven't
changed with respect to providing inmates anything different."

Gov. Schwarzenegger's largely failed attempts at prison reform --
e.g. reducing the overall prison population and releasing low-risk,
nonviolent offenders early -- is a reflection of a larger economic
and political dynamic playing out across the country.

On one hand, people are starting to realize that bloated prison
systems are a resource suck on an already troubled economy.

On the other hand, many people -- even in that liberal bastion,
California -- cling to the misguided idea that locking up large
numbers of lawbreakers will keep the public safer.

That leaves politicians like Schwarzenegger trying to straddle a line
between appearing "tough on crime" and pushing for meaningful reform.

So far, the former has won out. In many ways, California is a
microcosm of the American prison crisis -- one that has reached
alarming proportions.

The most recent proof is summarized in the title of a report released
last week by the Pew Center on the States: "One in 100: Americans
Behind Bars 2008." The study examines the state of adult America (no
juveniles were included) to deliver a sobering new measure of our
incarceration nation. The title statistic alone is jaw-dropping,
representing a historic high (or new low, depending on how you look
at it) when it comes to American justice.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States
leads the world in its prison population, well ahead of China (1.5
million) and leaving Russia in the dust (890,000). "Beyond the sheer
number of inmates, America is also the global leader in the rate at
which it incarcerates its citizenry," the study reports, "outpacing
nations like South Africa and Iran."

As always, it turns out the "citizenry" disproportionately consists
of black men over 18 (one in 15 are imprisoned) -- and particularly
those between the age of 20 and 34 (1 in 9). Recidivism rates are
also sky-high. According to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics,
more than a third of the people admitted to prison in 2005 were
arrested on parole violations. "Nationally, more than half of
released offenders are back in prison within three years," the Pew
study reports, "either for a new crime or for violating the terms of
their release." In 1998, thanks in large part to the War on Drugs,
the number of nonviolent prisoners hit 1 million -- and has risen
since then. The number of women prisoners is also rising, and black
women are a microcosm of the national prison epidemic: One in 100
black women in their mid-to late 30s is behind bars.

It's a clarion call for reform, no doubt, but beyond its
record-breaking numbers, the Pew study breaks no news -- at least not
in the larger scheme of the American criminal justice system.

It's a crisis decades in the making, and a 50-state Pew analysis
released at the same time last year provided similarly startling
projections of where our prisons and jails are headed, to far less fanfare.

But one in 100 is a stark figure (and, in fact, the exact number is
worse: 1 in 99.1). Thus, both the New York Times and the Washington
Post ran stories -- with the Post holding an online Q&A with one of
the study's authors the day after it was released. The report even
nudged its way into the presidential race: Hillary Clinton issued a
press release on her campaign website that day bemoaning the
"heartbreaking statistic" and invoking the need for "a president who
will be tough on crime, but smart about it too." (As a senator
representing a state whose rural regions are littered with the
architecture of a prison explosion fanned during her husband's
administration, it's an important statement -- if only a statement).

While public shock and dismay over the criminal justice system is a
good thing, policy reform usually only comes once those in power
recognize public support for measures otherwise considered too
politically risky. (Iraq war notwithstanding.) Indeed, a significant
part of the Pew study (which was written mainly with politicians in
mind) is devoted to showing that policy makers are starting to come
around on the prison issue, increasingly talking about being "smart"
rather than "tough" on crime. The hope is that others will take their
lead. "There's a shift away from the mindset of lock them up and
throw away the key," one Ohio Republican legislator is quoted as saying.

Alternatives include investing in drug treatment for prisoners -- as
well as "drug courts" -- relaxing stringent parole rules and curbing
mandatory minimums.

Ironically (if necessarily) the states that appear to be paving the
way on prison reform are the ones who lock up the most people.

Take Texas: Between 1985 and 2005, its prison population rose by 300
percent, a growth rate even the state's death row machinery couldn't offset.

Now, with an estimated prison population of 171,790, according to the
Pew study, the Lone Star State is forging "a new path," with a
bipartisan decision last year to authorize a "virtual makeover" of
the prison system. The overhaul will include more drug treatment for
prisoners and "broad changes in parole practices" aimed to curb
recidivism rates.

If all goes according to plan, the state may be able to shelve
emergency blueprints for three new prisons. "It's always been safer
politically to build the next prison, rather than stop and see
whether that's really the smartest thing to do," the Houston-based
chair of the Texas senate's criminal justice committee said. "But
we're at the point where I don't think we can afford to do that anymore."

Financially, this is certainly true. Politically, Texas lawmakers
will likely face serious challenges when it comes to implementing
these reforms. In California, months after tacking the word
"rehabilitation" to its Department of Corrections, an organization
called Crime Victims United of California created TV ads accusing the
governor of abandoning crime victims and endangering Californians by
easing up the punishments for people on parole.

In concert with the CCPOA, the effort successfully derailed one of
the central components of Schwarzenegger's plan. Rather than receive
drug counseling or anything comparable, parole violators would be
shuttled back to prison.

The move was a big step backward. "Eliminating alternative sanctions
as an option for parole violators will undoubtedly drive up the
inmate population and exacerbate overcrowding in the California
prison system, already jam-packed to nearly twice its design
capacity," reported the Los Angeles Times in April 2005. "Experts say
such conditions -- with inmates stacked in triple-decker bunks and
wedged into gyms, hallways and other spaces not intended as housing
- -- are a recipe for riots."

In fairness, regardless of what happens in Texas, it's hard to
begrudge honest-sounding and measured rhetoric about an issue that
historically has attracted so much belligerent posturing.

But at the same time, for those who have watched the American
criminal justice system consume not just state budgets but whole city
blocks, it's also somewhat infuriating. Warehousing massive
populations of men and women is, on its face, bad public policy.

For politicians to be just waking up to this maddening reality seems dubious.

What's more, the dollars and sense tone so many strike when espousing
the benefits of prison reform leaves out a major factor -- a
veritable elephant in the room when it comes to the prison boom: the
powerful incentives that continue to keep the prison population high.
From construction to prison security to healthcare, prisons are an
industry -- and a highly lucrative one at that. "Profits oil the
machinery, keep it humming and speed its growth," wrote criminal
justice expert Judith Greene in an essay recently published in Prison
Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration (New Press). With
states spending $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, prisons
are an enormous cash cow for private companies.

In its 2005 annual report, the Corrections Corporation of America
laid out what's at stake for a prison industry facing reform:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new
contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention
facilities ... The demand for our facilities and services could be
adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency
in conviction and sentencing practices or through the
decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed
by our criminal laws.

. Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could
lower minimum sentences for some nonviolent crimes and make more
inmates eligible for early release ... Also, sentencing alternatives
under consideration could put some offenders on probation with
electronic monitors who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly,
reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests,
convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.

The reforms described by the rather alarmed-sounding CCA mirror those
that Pew and other advocates herald as a way to curb the growing
prison crisis -- and it appears that lawmakers are finally willing to
hear them. "What we're seeing is state leaders around the country
starting to call time out," said Pew researcher Susan K. Urahn during
the Post's online chat. "We are seeing activity in several states
where legislators from both parties are saying, 'We aren't getting
our money's worth out of prisons.'" So, for example, "for the same
amount of money, you could keep one inmate behind bars for an
additional year, or you could provide treatment and intensive
supervision for several others -- and cut the recidivism rate
considerably." But who will provide treatment -- and how about those
electric monitors?

Like prison construction itself, prison "reform" will largely amount
to trading in one set of services for another.

Reform as it stands mostly means managing a massive pre-existing
population that is already mired in the prison-to-parole-to-prison
pipeline. With the numbers so high, any small adjustments in the
system will yield results.

In Texas' case, "even a small tweak -- such as the 5 percent increase
in grants by the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole between 2006 and
2007 -- can have an appreciable thinning affect on the prison
population." It is too soon to tell how effective such reforms will
be in the long term.

Going beyond managing the prison population from state to state to
effectively reduce it nationwide will take much more than
implementing piecemeal alternatives. The fact that we're no longer
seeing an all-out race to the bottom in prison expansion is a good
thing, but deeper change will require dismantling the pervasive
attachment to conventional wisdom that, despite being erroneous and
counterproductive, is still used to justify the record-breaking rise
in the American prison population. "One out of every 100 adults is
behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a
serious criminal offense," a Utah-based law professor and former
federal judge told the New York Times last week, directly
contradicting the conclusions of the Pew study, which focused much
attention on the pitfalls of locking up nonviolent and drug offenders.

Others continue to defend the sweeping policies that got us here in
the first place. "The fact that we have a large prison population by
itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the
extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country,"
conservative sociologist James Q. Wilson told the Washington Post.
Hardly unbiased criticism, given that Wilson was one of the
intellectual engines behind the "broken windows" theory that helped
get us into this mess. (And tell that to black or Latino families who
experience the criminal justice system's harshest excesses -- from
children growing up without their parents to parents paying crippling
phone fees to reach their children. Or tell that to now-elderly
prisoners living out their final days behind bars, whose threat to
society is negligible and whose failing health makes them highly
vulnerable -- and hugely expensive to care for.)

Besides, connecting the prison boom to an increase in public safety
is a classic canard.

Studies by organizations such as the Vera Institute of Justice have
found only a small correlation between prisons and reduced crime. As
Urahn puts it, "incarceration is not the dominant force in crime
control that many people assume ... despite having quadrupled the
prison population over the past 25 years, we have not quadrupled
public safety."

What has soared is the cost for taxpayers -- $50 billion per year at
the state level and an additional $5 billion at the federal level,
according to the Pew study.

Perhaps more than even the stunning one in 100 figure, these are the
numbers that should shake people awake.

But regardless of all proof to the contrary, many Americans remain
attached to the idea that prisons keep them safe. "We are jammed up
in this situation right now because we have fallen in love with one
of the most undocumented beliefs," California Sen. Don Perata said in
2007. "That somehow you get safer if you put more people in jail."