Mass Incarceration The Whole Pie Summary

Land of the Unfree: Mass Incarceration and Its Unjust Effects on Those Subjected To It and American Taxpayers

As a child, I learned from my parents and teachers that if I did something wrong I would have to be punished. Back then, punishment to me was sitting in a corner until I “learned my lesson.” When I asked what would happen if adults were naughty, my teachers told me there was a place for them to go where they could kept so they couldn’t hurt anyone. Prison.

I believed this was the best solution, until high school that is. In the article “New Report Details Devastating Effects Of Mass Incarceration On The U.S.” Matt Ferner, national reporter for the Huffington Post, states that the United States is home to “5 percent of the world’s population, but it houses

about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.” I could not believe this, but it was true everywhere I looked.

In the report “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie” attorney Peter Wagner and policy analyst Bernadette Rabuy confirm “[t]he American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people,” a fifth of which for a drug offense, most nonviolent. Why is it that the so called “Land of the Free” has so many of its citizens behind bars?

I clung to the notion that it wasn’t the government’s or society’s fault these people were in jail. It was the prisoners to blame. They did the crime, so they had to do the time. In the article “Prison: To Punish or Reform” Dianne Clemens, president of Justice for All- Citizens United Against Crime, argues “[w]e encouraged criminals to place the blame for their activities and addictions upon others and we, as

a society, did likewise. In our quest to absolve the individual from any accountability we blamed history, poverty, parochial schools, parenting, right on down to the victim of the crime.” I agreed with Clemens, like many Americans would. This leniency in our society has let criminals absolve themselves from any responsibility and that cannot happen any longer. But this attitude can have dangerous consequences when it comes to sentences. In trying to force criminals to take responsibility for their actions, courts often give far more severe sentences than is necessary. In the past prisoners received lifelong sentences for crimes such as murder, treason, and human trafficking. Now, they are for even those who commit a non violent first offense, like Sharanda Jones. She received a life sentence— not for producing drugs or even selling them— but for being a mere middleman. She had never committed an offense of any kind prior and yet she received one of the harshest sentencings. I wondered why the judge would give such a long sentence for a crime that did not warrant it. I could not make sense of it no matter how hard I tried, and I had to come to terms with the fact that our justice system needs to be fixed.

This trend of sentencings is causing a rapid growth in prison populations in the United States, leading to severe overcrowding issues. The capacity of the Tecumseh State Penitentiary in our own state of Nebraska is 960 inmates. In 2013 it was over that capacity by fifty and as a result rioting occurred then and again in 2015. In the article “Prisons in these 17 states are over capacity” Reid Wilson, reporter of national politics and Congress for the Washington Post, states “Nebraska, Ohio, Delaware, Colorado, Iowa and Hawaii are all holding a prison population equal to more than 110 percent of capacity.” As one can assume by the rioting, overcrowding effects on inmates are severe. In the essay “Institual Conditions and Prison Suicide: Conditional Effects of Deprivation and Overcrowding” Meredith P. Huey and Thomas L. McNulty of the University of Georgia found “that increases in inmate populations are significantly associated with increases in the number of suicides.” Yet instead of fixing problems in terms of correction procedures― such as reviewing cases for early release on basis of good behavior, releasing elderly prisoners, or giving small time drug offenders lesser sentences— states such as California would rather spend billions of dollars housing inmates in county and private jails. By keeping inmates in privately owned jails, the public justice system monetizes on the imprisonment of fellow citizens. In the article “How Much Money Do Private Prisons Make?” Jenn Rose claims “Corrections Corporation of America, the second-largest for-profit prison system in the country, netted $3,300 per prisoner in 2015.” To keep the cash flowing into their pockets, private prisons often have occupancy clauses that require states to keep prisons populated at a certain capacity or face penalization. In fact, in 2015 a private prison in Arizona sued the state for not filling the prison to its 97% capacity quota, forcing the state to pay them $3 million in taxpayer money. This leads to states giving much longer sentences than they would otherwise. These prisons are making millions of dollars by imprisoning citizens who do not always deserve such treatment.

For many law-abiding citizens this is not a problem. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” is a popular validation people have for these unjust standards of sentencings. This saying represents the traditional American stance on punishment to a T. Many political leaders have shown support for harsher sentencings in an effort to reduce crime rates in the country. In the article “Presidential Prison Politics” Katie Rose Quandt, journalist for the Solitary Watch project, reveals that in 1994, 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called for “more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders” and argued “we need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes.” And Clinton is right. There are violent criminals who deserve to be in jail for the heinous crimes they have committed. Releasing a serial killer or a rapist would not do society any good. But these criminals do not make up most of the US prison population, or even a majority for that matter. In fact, the Bureau of Prisons has found that only 33 percent of all inmates in the United States committed a violent offence. That’s 767,000 of 2,500,000. Politicians soon came to this realization that a majority of inmates are not the violent, malicious criminals that politicians, and majority of citizens, think they are, and the current system of keeping criminals in a concrete, barbedwire safeseat was not an effective enough solution. Too many former inmates are being released only to end up in prison again after a short time. Wagner and Rabuy present the fact that “there are almost 7,000 youth[s] behind bars for ‘technical violations’ of the requirements of their probation, rather than for a new offense.” This cycle of imprisonment will carry on into their adulthood if there are not effective rehabilitation and deterrent programs to give them the opportunities and skills to get out— programs that the government has not yet produced. Thus many politicians have shifted their policies from punishment to reform, including Secretary Clinton. She has even acknowledged that her husband’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act contributed to the mass incarceration epidemic by going “further than it needed to go.”

Prisoners are not the only ones affected by unjustified mass incarceration, their families suffer as well. In the book “But They All Come Back” Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Chair of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Research Council, argues “the arrest of mother or father may signify the removal of a breadwinner and force the family into poverty,” which can increase the chances of one going to jail. Aside from the financial strain of having family incarcerated, there are harsh emotional effects as well. Shandra Jones’ prison sentence forced her young daughter, Clenesha, to grow up without a mother.
Mass incarceration is not just one problem. It is the problems caused by the unjust and outdated sentencing standards. It is the overcrowding of prisons so far above capacity that some inmates resort to taking their own life to escape their horrid living conditions. It is the private prisons forcing governments to issue unjustified sentences to satisfy their greed. The decision to make a change is ours. We need to create effective rehabilitation programs, have more defined limitations on non violent sentences, and regularly evaluate our justice system to prevent later incarceration epidemics. With a growth in awareness in the flaws of the correctional system, our country has made many strides in correcting these problems. But the number of problems still outnumbers the solutions. According to a study conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice, American taxpayers are paying $39 billion annually to fund this correctional system that prioritizes profit over justice. Not only is this system costing us billions, but also our empathy. We have created a society where if individuals commit a crime by any standards they will be punished for the rest of their life. Not only will prisoners spend a part of their life behind bars but even when they are released the limitations forced upon them are just as suffocating. Once someone has committed a crime we treat them as a social pariah. We throw them in prisons and other facilities so we don’t have to look at them and recognize our failure as a society. By putting them in “time out,” the responsibility to change has shifted to them, and the rest of the population can wash their hands of responsibility to them. By saying the reason these people are there is because they are bad people we are becoming less empathic to those that are not so different from ourselves. They cease being humans, only examples of what not to do and a way for states to monetize on mistakes. We preach the idea of second chances but never give any. Until we make good on our promise, we are not truly a “Land of the Free.”