Fewer Crimes Not More Prison

Nation needs fewer crimes, not more prisons

Earlier this week, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa laid out his case for more jail cells to ease overcrowding at the Criminal Justice Center. A look around the nation shows Maketa is not alone in his concerns for the safety of his deputies and inmates.

It hasn’t gotten this bad in Colorado yet, but last year, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looked at the 175,000 prisoners crammed into a prison system built for half that number and proclaimed a state of emergency. So far, this emergency has been addressed largely in terms of prison supply — more beds. A truly comprehensive solution for jails and prison systems nationwide must focus also on reducing prison demand: reducing the number of criminals by reforming sentences for those lawbreakers who don’t threaten public safety. A research institute that works closely with corrections departments around the country conducted an analysis of the nation as a whole, and found both the same problem and the same necessary solution.

According to Colorado Department of Corrections data, “As of Jan. 31, 2006, there were 28,243 people under the jurisdiction of the Colorado Department of Corrections.” In 2004, the incarceration rate was 438 per 100,000 adult residents.

The report issued last week by the JFA Institute shows this follows the pattern of the nation as a whole, which now warehouses 2.2 million prisoners at a cost of $100 billion a year: a 10-fold increase compared with three decades ago. JFA Institute, based in Washington, D.C., works with government and philanthropic agencies to evaluate criminal justice policies and design research-based policy solutions.

Who are these 2.2 million people? Hundreds of thousands of them are people imprisoned for non-violent drug charges.

The JFA report demonstrates the primary reason for overcrowded prisons is not an explosion of crime, but an explosion of prison sentences. These sentences are many times the length of those for equivalent crimes in other industrialized nations, and they are “significantly longer than they were in earlier periods in our penal history.” The result is greater expense for less effect.

The JFA Institute argues its recommendations would save $20 billion a year and, eventually, reduce prison rolls by half. Certainly, they represent the real reforms America needs: reducing sentences, eliminating the use of prison for parole violators, reducing parole and probation supervision periods and, most importantly, decriminalizing victimless crimes.