November 28, 2018 at 5:30 p.m.
The incarceration nation
The incarceration nation
The bill would fund programs to help federal inmates reintegrate into society after release, and it would also lower incarceration rates by reducing mandatory minimums, curbing enhanced penalties for certain non-violent repeat drug offenders, and eliminating the three-strike mandatory life provision.
The shackling of pregnant women would be banned - a barbaric practice that quintessentially symbolizes the oppression and marginalization of women in correctional institutions, a practice that not only is not necessary for security reasons but that is medically dangerous and emotionally scarring.
It would also end a racist and unjust sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Specifically, federal law used to punish crack offenses much more harshly than powder cocaine offenses - by about 100 to one - though there's not much difference between the two, either in chemical constituency or in stimulative result.
The difference is in the price - crack is much cheaper, and so it is the drug used in poorer and more minority neighborhoods, while more affluent white Americans use powder. A 2010 law reduced the sentencing disparity; this legislation would apply it retroactively to those convicted before 2010.
The bottom line? African Americans and other minority groups paid a heftier price - a much heftier price - than white Americans. The price of the drug might have been lower, but the prison sentence was much longer.
Ending racial and class and gender disparities is cause enough to support this legislation from a social justice perspective, but there is more. The more is, the bill would reform sentencing guidelines and minimums to begin to rein in the over-incarceration binge we've been on in American society since President Bill Clinton initiated it with his 1994 crime bill.
Over-incarceration - putting people in the prison system who do not belong there - is not only unconscionable, it is expensive to society and taxpayers. It costs us and the economy the human capital and productivity of those inmates, it costs us the cold hard cash it takes to run all those prisons, and it costs us in increased welfare for former inmates once they re-enter society, at least for the minority of them who don't wind back up in prison.
The statistics of what we've done since the Clinton presidency are sobering, and that's an understatement.
Right now, there are nearly 2.3 million Americans behind bars, at an annual cost of about $80 billion a year (2014 numbers from The Hamilton Project). The state controls another 4.5 million people through probation and parole.
In 1980, before the binge, the cost was about $17 billion a year. In 1975, the prison and jail population was about 400,000 people, or just 17 percent of what it is today.
Compared to other nations, as well as to our own 50 years before 1980, current incarceration rates are off the charts, out of the galaxy even, and they have made the U.S. a world leader in locking people up and throwing away the key.
Seriously now, have we become a nation of criminal marauders in the short space of less than 40 years? Today, the United States has slightly less than 5 percent of the world's population, but we can proudly proclaim we have almost 25 percent of the planet's prisoners.
As The Washington Post noted, that figure sounds so outrageous that fact checkers everywhere have tried to debunk it, only to find out it is true. Little wonder that many label the U.S. the incarceration nation - our criminal "justice" system is less a mechanism for justice than it is a social gulag for minorities and the poor.
Of course, the price tag is really more than $80 billion to imprison those inmates. Other estimates put the true cost of incarceration much higher when the costs to families and such things as interest payments on corrections debt and prisoner health care are factored in - as much as $200 billion a year.
And that doesn't include the cost to the American economy. A 2010 study estimated incarceration produced a net loss of between 1.5 million and 1.7 million workers to the U.S. economy, at an estimated cost of $57 billion to $65 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) per year.
Some will retort that many of those people would not have been working had they not been in jail, but would have simply been on the dole. Even if that were true, the average cost to incarcerate exceeds the average welfare benefits collected by individuals in the vast majority of states.
According to a 2013 Cato Institute study - and Cato is hardly liberal - in Wisconsin the average welfare benefits package totaled $21,483. The cost of incarcerating an inmate in a Wisconsin medium security prison for one year: $29,900 (based on 2014 information from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections).
In other words, taxpayers would pay less if, in the worst case scenario, those prisoners were on the streets and on the dole.
What's more, none of this takes into consideration the welfare costs when inmates re-enter society. People with felony records and jail time on their resumes have a hard time finding work and successfully transitioning.
Recidivism rates are anywhere from 50 percent to 68 percent, and for the rest even more welfare is the most likely outcome.
The bottom line is, prison begets more prison in most cases, and ever higher costs for taxpayers. And for former inmates who manage to stay out of the gulag, the lack of support diminishes their chances of escaping welfare compared to if they had never been incarcerated.
The First Step Act is thus a needed first step indeed, to help transition inmates to a successful life out of jail, and, most important, to keep people who do not belong in jail out of jail in the first place.
A couple of final observations are important. Notably, some states are far ahead of the federal government in criminal justice reform, and they include red states such as Texas.
Sadly, Wisconsin is not. According to the Wisconsin Budget Project, state and local governments in Wisconsin spent $1.5 billion on corrections in 2015, or 12 percent more on corrections per state resident than the national average.
That's because our incarceration rates are so much higher than the average. For instance, Bureau of Justice statistics (cited by the WBP) at the end of 2015 showed an incarceration rate of 780 per 100,000 in Wisconsin, compared to only 390 in Minnesota and 540 in Iowa.
Even Illinois at 640 was lower, and that of course includes Chicago, which speaks for itself.
But that leads to an important caveat. None of this means we should be just opening up the prison doors and letting inmates go free willy-nilly. There are people in jail who have done bad things and who need to stay there.
Rather, as Michael Mitchell of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities asserts, we need to focus on nonviolent offenders, especially first-time nonviolent offenders, as well as on keeping those with substance abuse or mental health issues out of the system as much as possible. Certain offenses can no doubt be reclassified as misdemeanors or decriminalized altogether, and the state can work to reduce the return to jail for those who only technically violate the conditions of their parole or probation.
There are other reasonable ways to reduce incarceration, but the one thing we should not do is simply say - as incoming governor Tony Evers and his Democratic allies seem to be saying - that we should swing open the doors and let 50 percent of the prisoners go.
In typical fashion, the Democratic response lacks any intellectual rigor and is both inane and insane. The Democrats' obvious and shallow pandering on the issue could foreclose the very reasonable analyses and discussions about real reform that are taking place on both the Left and the Right and that could lead to very productive results.
First things first, though, we should all urge our U.S. senators to press that body to pass the federal act before the end of the year and then try to take our own first steps.
The unjustly jailed will thank us, as will future taxpayers.
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