Criminals, especially violent criminals, must be punished appropriately for their actions. Many deserve to go to jail.
America has followed this simplistic rationale for decades, and our prison population has ballooned to an all-time high. A jarring New York Times story reports that 1 in 99.1 Americans is currently behind bars. The cost for keeping them there last year was $44 billion, and that price is expected to rise to nearly $70 billion by 2011.
These out-of-control statistics are a national disgrace.
America's disproportionate investment in corrections rather than prevention maintains what the Children's Defense Fund aptly calls the "Cradle to Prison Pipeline." This system is a terrible short-term and long-term investment, both fiscally and in lives.
In the short-term, corrections expenses eat up a massive portion of state budgets. The Times reported, "On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation." States are forced not to fund other, critical programs because of the inflexible expenses of keeping the prison system running as is. For example, programs to strengthen schools or improve neighborhoods -- programs that would help to steer kids away from crime -- are scuttled to fund jails.
In the long-term, more and more people will go to jail (as many as 1 in 3 African American males at some point in their lives), destroying an untold number of families. Expenses on corrections will continue to soar, nudging out of the budget more and more of other possible programs.
Without a substantive national effort to help at-risk kids find a path to hope and achievement (No Child Left Behind pays farcical lip service to this), many are falling needlessly into lives of crime and incarceration. Marian Wright Edelman wrote, "High school dropouts are almost three times as likely to be incarcerated as youths who have graduated from high school." We need to address the root cause of why many people commit crimes--that they feel as though they have no better options.
Many poor black or Latino men commit crimes years after they give up on school and themselves. This tragedy does not have to persist for future generations. We can make changes to provide support and better options for children before they are sucked onto the criminal path.
We can do more to make those better options available at the critical, early stages of life. Let's invest as much in vaccines as in hospital beds, so to speak, so that the future can hold promise for everyone. As a double bonus, we'll also have less crime and a lower tab on corrections costs.
The Children's Defense Fund assembled a thorough and important report on the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and how to dismantle it. Here are their top recommendations:
• Ensure every child and pregnant woman in America health insurance for all medically necessary services now.
• Lift every child from poverty by 2015; half by 2010.• Get every child ready for school through full funding of quality Early Head Start and Head Start, child care and new investments in quality preschool education for all.
• Protect all children from neglect, abuse and other violence and ensure them the
permanent families they need when their families break down.• Make sure every child can read by fourth grade and can graduate from school
able to succeed at work and in life.• Provide every child safe, quality after-school and summer programs so they can
learn, serve, work and stay out of trouble.• End child hunger through adequate child and family nutrition investments.
• Ensure every child a place called home and every family decent affordable housing.
• Ensure families the supports needed to be successful in the workplace, including
health care, child care, education and training.• Create jobs with a living wage.
It's hard to argue with the final lines of the report's recommendations:
"Repealing and not extending the tax cuts for the top one percent of the wealthiest taxpayers could provide $57 billion of the entire estimated $75 billion policy agenda listed above. The war in Iraq already has cost over $450 billion through 2007."
We can do this if we want to. Both Democrat presidential candidates have spoken of the need to make the American Dream reachable for everyone. They must continue to speak to these points directly. All we need to make this happen is the will from our electorate and our leaders.
Dan Brown is the author of the Bronx teacher memoir, "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle."
Follow Dan Brown on Twitter: www.twitter.com/danbrownteacher
I believe that it is because women have more incentive due to their having children in the free world. Many male inmates are disconnected from their children and those kids are being raised by their mothers. There are more absent fathers than absent mothers.
No, I suspect recidivism is a function of quality of employment/life, not families.
the illicit route.
It is, minimally, astonishing that we continue to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders. We ought to recognize that we have a problem here. We know not what we do, for example. We cannot even control prescribed drugs. We have, across the board, a drug problem in this nation. We compound it by deliberately being ignorant on the matter.
America has a tendency to ignore the root of any problem and instead of eliminating the root cause we keep fighting the symptoms for ever.
When we eat too much, we take a pill that makes us feel better.
When we spend too much, we look for better credit.
When our kids do crimes, we look for tougher penalties.
When we use too much energy, we start a war to access the resources.
So why continue this idiocy? Sadly America adores bad ideas. This one dates to the Harrison Act passed during Woodrow Wilson's presidency. Prohibition has failed to achieve its goals for nearly a century (the Chicago Cubs of legislation) yet it goes on and on with no intent to change course. The problem is an accurate reflection of American culture, our incredible blindness to our own failures. (Cultural insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results).
First, we fill those prisons with young black men. Wonder why? Secondly, the prison industry is now a political juggernaut, being privatized by corporations about as beneficent as Blackwater. Thirdly, politicians love to campaign against non-voters and look "tough on crime." Fourth, hack scientists make a good living grinding out propaganda against the evil drug du jour. Finally, drug trafficking is the purest form of capitalism. It produces immense revenues that can be deployed to corrupt every level of society.
All the named interests continue to profit from this feckless rhetorical war even though it is barbarism worthy of Victorian madhouses to treat the disease of addiction with the criminal justice system. Ours is a merciless culture, far more cruel than we would like to admit, easily blinded to our faults when there is money to be made.
The other thing is, our educational system should provide vocational training for all kids who won't be going on to college. Each one needs a skill set that will make it possible for them to be employed upon leaving high school. Our country instead, cultivates poverty as the main source of willing recruits for the military. By making sure a kid's options are very limited, they ensure a new crop of cannon fodder each year.
That is a bit odd, don't you think? Or do you see government as mommy and daddy?
How do you do that without monitoring what the child eats every day? That is going to be a fairly extensive new bureaucracy.
"We should willingly help provide the seed money for this investment through higher taxes".
Why not make it a check off on the tax form, like the one for the campaign money fund. If it is going to pay for itself anyway, why raise taxes?
I will crosstalk a bit, and say that both your and Hillary's article addresses the children, but not the parents. Your article also did not say anything about the fact that there are trumped-up laws designed to target blacks. You did not say anything about decriminalizing certain drugs. How about having a 3rd party audit of judge's sentences in non-capital cases, to see if there is an anti-black bias? There are many causes of child poverty and over-crowded jails.
I also feel that addressing the CAUSE of child poverty would be a better plan. The main cause of child poverty is... drumroll please... PARENTS IN POVERTY.
Secondary causes include dropping out of school and early pregnancy. There are many many studies on this. I personally reccomend any of the books by Barry Glassner (or Steven Leavitt!). Based on the findings in some social economist's work, the easiest, quickest and best method for alleviating child poverty would be to grant free abortions for those under 25. This is not my view, but it does give you something to think about. And before you point it out, I know that "free abortions and birth control" are not tradtional Republican values!
The three overwhelming factors in determining a person's economic status, and by extension, the economic status of their children, are:
1) The ability to stay in High School and receive a Diploma.
2) The ability to not have children until the mid-twenties at the earliest
3) The ability to have children while in a 2-parent relationship.
Throwing money at the problem does not fix anything, it just addresses the symptoms. This is one reason that I have historically voted for Republicans. If you give a person a fish he will eat for a day. If you teach him to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. Big spending on symptoms does nothing but apply a band-aid.
What we need to permanently fix child poverty is:
1) People staying in school and getting a diploma
2) Teaching Planned Parenthood and delayed parenting
3) Re-building a culture where people stay in a relationship
4) Jobs for those parents
Give generous tax breaks incentives to every employer that hires a released non violent prisoner.
The ex prisoners will pay taxes instead of drain taxes.
Make the released prisoner sign a waiver t upon their release to agree to forfiet all rights for another trial and automatically go back to prison for a minimum of six months if they get arrested again or quit their job without having another one.
Remember, only non violent criminals such as drug addicts, petty thieves like shop lifters, white collar criminals..
Its a start., Presently there are one out of every one hundred Americans being incarcinated at a cost of 50 billion dollars a year to taxpayers.
You include "white collar criminals" in your "acceptable" group. You'd hire a Ken Lay over an armed robber? I wouldn't...if I wanted to keep my business ad keep it successful. Some white collar criminals are very intelligent but are amoral sociopaths who can not be redeemed. They believe they have a right to screw everyone else. It's in their genes.
My brother works with the inner-city public school system, and the thing that becomes obvious is that the longer a population stays in a region associated with poverty, the higher the rates of incarceration seem to go. However, we have a tendency to get caught up in racial statistics and not cure regional problems.
We had a window when it seemed that urban renewal was helping to give hope to these areas, but we seem to have changed to an escape mentality, now. It seems that we encourage people to flee the areas, rather than trying to invest in recovering them. Places are tagged as "bad" and that's that. the people who live within them are encouraged to do whatever they have to do to "get out," then focus on improving themselves once they land in places with more resources for self improvement.
Is it possible that doing more research and analysis on WHERE people are, rather than WHAT people are, could change this trend? It seems that where gets lost in the racial make-up, rather than local resources, and this makes being a minority, within a minority area (a Hmong or Hispanic, for example, in a "black neighborhood") increases the feeling of alienation, and decreases the ability to create some feeling of community. That spiral seems to make it harder to recover a neighborhood. For instance, the police must be recruited from outside those areas, and this gives the people that live there the sensation of being occupied, rather than being helped by a community resource ( community jobs).
Please keep up the good work, and thank you again.
Look, we all want to improve education, prevent people from being poor, and eliminate sadness. You think it’s best done by forced transfers of wealth and more bureaucrats/nannies. Conservatives think there are better ways.
But, the main point of your blog is criticizing our criminal justice system, so let me focus on that. I know your view of how to prevent crime makes you feel better about yourself, but it is not practical and even harmful. Your view of poor people is psychologically patronizing. Phrases like, “falling needlessly into lives of crime and incarceration” and “before they are sucked onto the criminal path” assume that poor people are not capable of making rational decisions. I, of course, am not saying that being poor doesn’t increase one’s chances of commiting a crime. The problem is the government can’t make someone be “not poor”…and it’s not from lack of effort. When we transfer large amounts of money to the poor we subsidize and encourage poverty. Remember AFDC?
Certainly the government needs to encourage good decisions like graduating high school, but it also needs to discourage bad decisions like commiting crimes. Just because someone doesn’t have after school programs, wasn’t hugged enough as a child, or attends a school that doesn’t have enough money to have a lacross team doesn’t mean he or she can’t make a rational decision.
Do you think that Iran has a very low crime rate because it does a really good job at ensuring that all children have healthcare and good educations? Of course not. It’s because they have incredibly unjust punishments for committing crimes. My point is not to embrace these unjust punishments, but it’s ridiculous to assume that punishment is not the most logical solution to crime.
Oh, and tax revenues have increased after the Bush tax cuts…like they do after every tax cut.
I must take issue with your dismissal of my idea that for many, incarceration is the result of a lack of opportunities rather than just a bad choice. I work with students in the inner city and see constantly just how tenuous the straight road is in struggling neighborhoods. It's not all their fault. The government shouldn't be a "nanny" as you say, but it can help to put the American Dream within reach for everyone. For many, failure and crime is virtually preordained and that is a cycle that can be stopped with an effort coming from all sides, including from the government.
And there is a more humane way than Iran's policy to reduce crime. You are distorting a serious domestic issue by invoking Iran, an entirely other ball of wax.
I do not intend to diminish your article or your assertions put forth, but without including the insane War on Drugs and the over-the-top incarceration penalties for petty drug offenses, your prescription for improvement is grossly incomplete.
All of what you suggest is indeed laudible and progressive, but the end result of incarceration will still be a significant percentage if the drug laws and penalties are not addressed.
We all want to increase opportunities for the poor, but that doesn’t make incarceration a bad thing for people that committed crimes. Again, we need to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. I see more people in prision and lower crime rates as positive aspects of our society.
If your theory of structural barriers leading to a cycle of poverty and crime holds true, how can you explain the low crime rates of immigrants that move into these same poor inner-city areas? These poor immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and more likely to graduate high school because they don’t know that “failure and crime [are] virtually preordained.” The human race is not so pathetic that we can be minimized to mindless robots with predestined futures determined by our environments.
I brought up Iran to make the point that punishment does deter crime.