Prison reform

A recent, eye-opening New York Times Op-Ed considers the enormous costs of mass incarceration in America. The economists who co-author the opinion question the value of spending US$80 billion – a quarter of  the Department of Justice budget – on the 2.2 million inmates languishing in America’s jails and prisons. They suggest that the staggering annual costs – $30,000 per adult and $110,000 for juveniles – would be better spent elsewhere, especially since many studies have shown that longer sentences and draconian “three-strikes” measures have done nothing to reduce crime.

America’s prison-industrial complex costs a fortune but does little to make society safer in the short- or long-term. Also, especially given the strong correlation between poverty and incarceration, its impact on poor families is particularly worrying. Prison time entails a significant loss of income for poor families and often undermines relationships and contributes to behavioural problems in children. Yet, the US government has, for decades, stuck with policies that exacerbate the situation. As a result “[t]he probability that a family is in poverty increases by nearly 40 percent while a father is incarcerated.”

Another concern is that the threshold for incarceration has fallen as the prison population has soared. This has meant that an “additional prisoner is more likely to be a less risky, nonviolent offender, and the value of incarcerating him (or, less likely, her) is low.” America’s correctional system has accordingly expanded to levels that any outsider will struggle to comprehend. At the end of 2014, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, some 6,851,000 citizens were “under the supervision of U.S. adult correctional systems.” That number – which had fallen slightly from the previous – is roughly the population of Paraguay.

After making a strong case that the “putative benefits” of longer sentences and larger prison populations are really costs, the economists urge Congress to “rationalize” the system by supporting a bill that would reform some of the harsher criminal justice policies including “sentencing for individuals who pose the least risk.”

Nobody who has followed recent events at Camp Street needs to be reminded of the dangers of underfunded and overcrowded prisons. What is worth noting about the situation here (and other parts of the Caribbean) is how much of the blame for our overstretched criminal justice system is the result of US pressure to adopt harsh sentences during its misguided “war on drugs.” Almost everything that the US economists identify as dysfunctional within their criminal justice system is true of the Caribbean, except we possess a fraction of the institutional and financial resources that can be used for reforms. Furthermore, too many of us still believe that harsh sentencing is a sensible response to crime even though a large and growing body of evidence suggests that for almost every sphere of criminal activity, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Even, we can learn from America’s mistakes and enact our own criminal justice reforms sooner rather than later.