This is an abridged version of an article by Nicholas D. Kristof that I read in The New York Times. My response follows the article.
At a time when we Americans may abandon health care reform because it supposedly is “too expensive,” how is it that we can afford to imprison people like Curtis Wilkerson?
Mr. Wilkerson is serving a life sentence in California — for stealing a $2.50 pair of socks. As The Economist noted recently, he already had two offenses on his record (both for abetting robbery at age 19), and so the “three strikes” law resulted in a life sentence.
This is unjust, of course. But considering that California spends almost $49,000 annually per prison inmate, it’s also an extraordinary waste of money.
Astonishingly, many politicians seem to think that we should lead the world in prisons, not in health care or education. The United States is anomalous among industrialized countries in the high proportion of people we incarcerate; likewise, we stand out in the high proportion of people who have no medical care — and partly as a result, our health care outcomes such as life expectancy and infant mortality are unusually poor.
It’s time for a fundamental re-evaluation of the criminal justice system, as legislation sponsored by Senator Jim Webb has called for, so that we’re no longer squandering money that would be far better spent on education or health. Consider a few facts:
• The United States incarcerates people at nearly five times the world average. Of those sentenced to state prisons, 82 percent were convicted of nonviolent crimes, according to one study.
• California spends $216,000 annually on each inmate in the juvenile justice system. In contrast, it spends only $8,000 on each child attending the troubled Oakland public school system, according to the Urban Strategies Council.
• For most of American history, we had incarceration rates similar to those in other countries. Then with the “war on drugs” and the focus on law and order in the 1970s, incarceration rates soared.
• One in 10 black men ages 25 to 29 were imprisoned last year, partly because possession of crack cocaine (disproportionately used in black communities) draws sentences equivalent to having 100 times as much powder cocaine. Black men in the United States have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives, according to the Sentencing Project.
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Dear Mr. Kristof,
Your recent column about prisons and costs hit a nerve. I am a criminal defense lawyer and have never understood why the federal government does not take advantage of its authority to implement early deportation procedures of nonviolent offenders in the federal system. Early deportation programs have been implemented in states that want to free their prison population of nonviolent deportees, who you note are being supported at the rate of $25,000-$50,000 a year. New York state employs it and it works very well. But the program is not offered in all states, and is not offered at all in the federal penal system.
Drug couriers are arrested everyday in major cities where international airports exist. And the Federal Sentencing Guidelines call for quantity-driven sentences (i.e. for 1 kilo of cocaine you are sentenced to X amount of time) when quantity has very little to do with the degree of culpability of drug couriers. The couriers and those like them, e.g. stash house guards, money couriers, truck drivers, peons in a chain driven by poverty (After all, who swallows a kilo’s worth of heroin-filled condoms except the desperate?) are receiving large amounts of time, occupying bed space and receiving free medical care, when after serving half of their quantity-driven sentences they could be deported to their country never to set foot on U.S. soil again.
Yes, some of them return, but federal law provides harsh penalties for those who illegally reenter, especially for those previously convicted of “aggravated felonies.” The monies saved would be in the millions and collectively, over a number of years, could be in the billions. True prison employment may fall, prison construction would take a hit, but that is no reason to keep deportable prisoners unnecessarily in our jails.
Keeping deportable nonviolent offenders hearkens to a time when we were “tough on crime,” but it is a luxury we can hardly afford now. Both federal and state governments need to take advantage of early deportation programs and use the money saved to invest in our communities.
David Zapp, Attorney at Law