OUR MASS INCARCERATION OF NON-VIOLENT OFFENDERS IS THE GREATEST POLICY MISTAKE OF THE LAST FORTY YEARS
The United States incarcerates more of its citizens per capita than any other nation on earth. Who are these people and what do they have to do with healthcare violence? Talking tough on drugs sounded like a good idea back in 1970. Mandatory minimal sentences were adopted supposedly to frighten drug users into sobriety. Let’s look at these tough sentences and what they have cost us. Of prisoners serving life sentences without parole in the US, 79% committed a non-violent drug crime. Minorities have suffered the most from our failed War on Drugs. Non-violent prisoners are costing U.S. taxpayers over $1.7 billion dollars more than if life without parole were not a sentencing option, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Due to mandatory sentencing laws non-violent drug offenders have cost taxpayers over a trillion dollars since the War on Drugs began.
Hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders are serving sentences of twenty years to life for doing what is now legal in Colorado. Taxpayers are shelling out billions every year to house and feed these non-violent drug offenders, who may be serving incredibly long sentences for mistakes made in their teens and twenties. The country’s War on Drugs has become a cash cow for the private multibillion dollar prison industry.
Federal and state governments across the nation funnel money into private prisons, which are paid more for longer sentences. The prison industry spends millions of dollars lobbying for even more prisons while their executives are paid like Wall Street tycoons. There is a long list of industries, institutions, and individuals that profit from our mass incarceration. Every one of these have financial incentives to imprison more people for longer sentences. Include on that list the phone companies that charge astronomical rates for prisoners to call their families, for-profit prison health care providers, commercial food vendors who charge sky high prices in their vending machines, and the powerful correction guards’ unions.
I recently visited a federal minimum security prison. I was shocked by this experience. The nice dormitory buildings with semi-private rooms were arranged like a summer camp. I saw immaculate grounds. There was no barbed wire. I saw no armed guards. Visitors were allowed to show their driver’s license and spend almost all day Saturday and Sunday with their friends or relatives. Nobody searched me. I noted that no one was allowed to bring food. All food consumed in the large hotel-lobby style visiting area had to come from vending machines. A sandwich costs $6 from one of these machines. A candy bar costs at least a dollar. Drinks were $2.
I was at this minimum facility on a Saturday and the visiting area was packed. Every inmate in this particular federal facility was a “white-collar” offender. I met accountants, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. Most of them had been forced to plead guilty to income tax violations. I didn’t meet a single person who had a trial. Everybody I talked to was given the choice of pleading guilty to whatever they were charged with or having their families charged as co-conspirators. I asked about their possibility of early parole. Almost as one person, these inmates stated that their case manager had little reason to get them out early, since the institution would lose money if anyone went home early.
I left this facility wondering why any of these people were incarcerated. How could they pay the back taxes and fines they owed if they were not working? By the time they got out, many would be unemployable. Back home, their families were struggling from day-to-day. What a terrible waste of educated people.
If a person is not a flight risk and is non-violent, what purpose is served by incarcerating him for long periods of time? We seem to have lost all perspective of what it means to deprive someone of their personal liberty for even a year. With mandatory minimum sentencing laws, judges have lost the ability to hand down reasonable sentences, while prosecutors have enormous discretion in determining how long an individual goes to prison. Drug offenders often get 5-10 mandatory extra years because they were caught with a certain number of ounces of a drug.
How effective has mass incarceration been? Despite the fact that we incarcerate more people per capita, and give out much harsher sentences than nearly all developed countries, this incarceration has not resulted in lower crime rates than our peers’. We incarcerate 173 times more inmates with life sentences without parole than the United Kingdom. Only two European countries even imprison offenders without parole. Our imprisoned citizens have no voice. No one is handing out millions to politicians to get them out of jail and into drug treatment programs or back to work.
The War on Drugs has been the greatest failure of policy in this country over the last forty years. Millions of young men have lost the best years of their life for a mistake they made at age 19-30. At the same time we were dumping the paranoid schizophrenics out into the street and closing mental health facilities, we were spending trillions to house non-violent offenders without mental illness. Our emergency departments are the destination of last resort for the mentally ill, but we have nowhere to send them.
I’m not implying that all mentally ill patients are violent, or that they should replace the non-violent inmates in institutions. I’m saying we wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent on the treatment of mental illness and drug dependence. Most of the perpetrators of the notorious mass shootings we hear so much about not only had a history of mental illness, they had no access to mental health services when they were in crisis.
A logical solution would be to declare the War on Drugs a failure and to dismantle the prison industry that thrives on the incarceration of non-violent people. Non-violent IRS offenders have little reason to be in jail at all. So many small businessmen are forced to choose between sending tax payments to the IRS and paying their employees. By the time their businesses fail, they owe more taxes than they can ever pay. I believe that long sentences for IRS offenders are primarily for the intimidation of other taxpayers.
Rapidly moving mentally ill patients from emergency departments to mental health evaluation and treatment facilities would decompress all emergency departments and lessen the risk of violence in emergency departments. There is enough money wasted on the incarceration of non-violent people in this country to fund a uniformed armed guard in every emergency department in the country, to fund the implementation of every known environmental preventive violence measure in every emergency department, to fund the evaluation and treatment of the mentally ill, and to fund drug treatment centers. We have invested in punishment instead of rehabilitation and prevention.
I know you have heard this before, but we need to think of it again in the context of mass incarceration of non-violent people. A definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing and expect different results. I didn’t think that I agreed with Mr. Eric Holder on anything, until I heard him say that the mass incarceration of non-violent Americans was a tragedy. Sometimes sanity comes from the most unlikely source, in this case, the Attorney General of the United States.
