What would you do if a politician campaigned on the following proposition: They want to develop a government program that will require over 5,000 facilities to run; it will have an annual expenditure of $60 billion ($164 million per day); and within three years, over two-thirds of the program participants will fail to meet minimum program goals. On some level there might be benefits.
The building, staffing and supplying of 5,000 facilities would create a huge number of jobs. Tax-wise the burden would be approximately fifty-three cents per taxpayer, per day — far less than a cup of coffee. That’s all well and good, but the last part, the two-thirds failure rate, sounds an awful lot like dysfunctional “big government” programming at its worst. In short, most of us wouldn’t support a system if we knew on the front it would fail that miserably. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we are doing right now. There are over 2.2 million inmates in American jails and prisons. Within three years, 67 percent of them will be back. There is a growing trend in certain circles to embrace the perspective of “American exceptionalism.”
In other words, “that’s how we do it;” therefore, it must the “right” way. When we look at our neighbors in Europe who have far lower crime rates, lower inmate populations and fewer prisons, it’s hard to embrace the exceptionalist perspective on this particular issue.
Local Weed and Seed Program coordinator, Rev. Jesse Turner, has launched a program aimed at school children. The program has been dubbed “Pen or Pencil.” The wry turn of the title is simple: embrace the pencil (i.e. school work) or you’ll end up in the pen (penitentiary). Nationally, correctional reformers have begun to take up this clarion, but from a different angle. As reported in a recent issue of Law Enforcement Technology magazine, Jane Emory Prather, an adjunct professor at the Bedford Hill Correctional facility for Women in New York, says that the question is no longer one of “punishment versus rehabilitation.”
Instead Prather argues, that U.S. prisons need to focus on the more realistic goal of simply preventing inmates from returning to prison. She believes high recidivism can be effectively combatted through education. “At Bedford there has never been a released prisoner return if she attended the college program,” says Prather. “Never” is a word seldom uttered by prison officials. Yes, “tough on crime” types will criticize this approach as coddling, but who cares if the “coddling” effectively stops inmates from committing future crimes.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Beyond education, the design of prisons themselves needs to change. The state of Oregon has embraced a new paradigm of prison architecture. Instead of the monolithic compounds surrounding central yards, like Attica, or Pelican Bay, a new “podular” design is gaining acceptance. Oregon’s Two Rivers facility is comprised of 14 separated housing pods of 96 men each. Each pod has its own tennis court-sized recreation yard and with few exceptions, those 96 men stay completely separate from the others housed in the facility.
This approach has several benefits. First, it permits better inmate classification. For instance, the violent offenders are kept apart from the non-violent. Second, these new facilities require fewer guards, thus lowering operational costs. Staff often comprises 40 percent of operational costs. The work of the reduced guard staff is facilitated by technology: electronic monitoring, surveillance and other evolving techniques.
As we in Jefferson County are rich in correctional facilities, we owe it to ourselves to rethink this issue. If for no other reasons, we must address the waste and inefficiency of the current system.