A recent report by the US-based Pew Center on the States estimates that more than one percent of America’s adult population is currently in prison. This astonishing figure is mainly the outcome of the state legislatures’ hardening attitudes towards drug offences, increasing public support for zero-tolerance policing and harsher sentencing, such as life imprisonment for three-time felons. But while tough law and order policies have certainly had important successes in reducing crime – most famously in New York when Rudolf Giuliani was mayor – the Pew study raises serious doubts that the long term consequences of an inflated prison population may outweigh short term gains in public safety.
First of all there is the extraordinary expense of maintaining the system. In 2007, according to the Pew report, the collective budgets for the states’ correctional facilities was close to $50 billion. California annually spends more than $40,000 per adult inmate – a sum that would comfortably cover living expenses in a good motel on the outside. Many of the extra costs are produced by the inescapable pressures of overcrowding, but they are also partly due to the success of labour unions in setting the average salary of a prison guard at $70,000 dollars, with provisions for overtime that often push the final figure above $100,000. And yet, even with this vast expenditure, the state cannot match the traffic from the courts. Last year twenty counties had to place “court-ordered population caps on their jails [and] an additional 12 counties have imposed population caps on themselves to avoid costly litigation”, according to the editor David DeVoss. In practical terms this has meant “233,388 individuals avoided incarceration in 2005, or were released early because of a lack of space.”
Overcrowding has other consequences too. It allows seasoned criminals to mix with much younger inmates and facilitates the organization of the prison gangs that have made America’s jails so dangerous and unmanageable. It also helps to spread disease. Each year America’s prisons release 1.5 million people with infectious diseases such as hepatitis, HIV or tuberculosis, often into neighbourhoods with insufficient healthcare services. (There are also estimated to be 350,000 mentally ill inmates within the system at any given time.) With prison populations across the country trending upwards and with medical costs always rising, the problem will only get worse if the current system is not reformed soon.
America’s prisons also reflect the wider shortcomings of its criminal justice system. According to the poverty expert Jason DeParle: “Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in the same age group. Whites with only a high school education get locked up twenty times as often as those with college degrees.” Also, “[b]y the time they reach their mid-thirties, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts are now prisoners or ex-cons.” Clearly a system that is weighted so heavily against minorities, the poor and uneducated is in dire need of an overhaul.
If this is what happens in America-where the prisons collectively receive sums of money that are larger than the gross domestic product of many small countries; where the system is accountable to exacting congressional oversight-then it hardly needs to be said that prisons in the Caribbean, or in any developing country, are very unlikely to do any better. Although we suffer from many of the same problems, it is fanciful to suppose that our correctional budgets will ever approach the amounts needed to finance serious reforms. What we might be able to do, however, is to learn from America’s mistakes, to revisit the policies that incarcerate so many nonviolent offenders, to reconsider rehabilitation and community service as alternatives to custodial sentences, and to think more carefully about how to prevent our prisons from incubating the sort of nihilists that recently descended on Lusignan and Bartica. Harsh policies are fine, if they work, but the evidence from America’s prisons suggests that real solutions require complex strategies and almost never arise out of quick fixes.