Support the Timberjay by making a donation.

Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

It’s time to end America’s love affair with prisons

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 8/14/14

For the past thirty years, America has had a love affair with prisons. It’s a remarkable development for a society founded on the principles of liberty and limited government— since there is …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

It’s time to end America’s love affair with prisons

Posted

For the past thirty years, America has had a love affair with prisons. It’s a remarkable development for a society founded on the principles of liberty and limited government— since there is nothing that runs more counter to these basic values than the government choosing to put millions of its citizens in a cage.

Prisons are a hallmark of authoritarianism, and it’s well known that America now imprisons its citizens at a far higher rate than any other country on Earth. As of today, about 2.4 million Americans currently reside in some form of detention, be it a state or federal prison, or a local jail. That’s more than ten times the number of prisoners held in American jails back in 1971 and represents the fallout from our previous bipartisan consensus to “get tough on crime,” which began in earnest during the Reagan administration and continued right through the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

As a result, while the U.S. is home to about six percent of the world’s population, we now house fully a quarter of the world’s prison population.

And we do so at enormous cost, both to taxpayers and to the individuals who become enmeshed in the machinery of our penal system.

The question is, do the benefits of mass incarceration outweigh the costs?

Advocates of the American prison state argue that crime rates in the U.S. have dropped in response to such policies. And there is little doubt that overall crime rates have fallen over the past twenty years, by nearly half, in fact. That’s an impressive statistic. Some have argued that the decline in crime was inevitable, a result of the aging of the baby boom.

In a sense, the argument misses the more important point. Even if we accept the hypothesis that a crackdown on crime has reduced its incidence, the question we should be asking is if there are methods of achieving the same results without the high cost and without robbing so many Americans of their basic liberty. Rather than just being “tough on crime” can we be sensible on crime and achieve similar ends through smarter policies?

The good news is, the answer is yes, as Minnesota continues to demonstrate. While the U.S. has an unprecedented prison population, the disparities between the individual states are vast. Many Southern states, like Texas and Louisiana, imprison their citizens at remarkably high rates. Texas, on average, sends its residents to prison at more than four times the rate as here in Minnesota, which has the second lowest rate of incarceration in the country. Right next door, Wisconsin sends nearly two and a half times the number of its citizens to prison as we do here—about 22,000 versus fewer than 9,000. That’s about 375 Wisconsinites in prison per 100,000 population, compared to 135 per 100,000 residents in Minnesota.

The disparity makes a natural case study, since Minnesota and Wisconsin are remarkably similar demographically. They also have very similar crime rates. But when it comes to the cost of corrections, Wisconsin spends almost two and half times as much as Minnesota, about $1.2 billion annually in the Badger state, compared to about $460 million here.

Minnesota, once again, has shown that progressive crime policies can yield positive results at much lower cost. Minnesota has achieved this success for a number of reasons, most notably through its community sentencing policies that date back to the 1970s, and through relatively sensible sentencing guidelines, that don’t typically send non-violent drug offenders to prison. In Minnesota, we rely much more on probation and other supervised programs to protect the public, while saving vast amounts of money on needless incarceration. And such policies have proven at least as effective in bringing down crime rates in Minnesota, as has the much more punitive approach used in Wisconsin.

Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, it’s tough to argue about this one. Neither liberals nor conservatives could reasonably argue for spending more than twice as much to achieve similar results. And that message is starting to be heard. Just as tough sentencing policies once enjoyed bipartisan support, calls for reform are being heard today from the right as well as the left.

That’s a hopeful sign, but we still have a long, long way to go to return to a more sensible and cost-effective approach to corrections. It’s worth noting that Minnesota’s rate of incarceration, while second only to Maine as the lowest in the U.S., is still higher than in most developed countries. Canada, for example, incarcerates only about 118 people per 100,000 population, a rate that’s nearly 20 percent lower than in Minnesota. Germany incarcerates its citizens at nearly half the rate as in Minnesota, and Finland at just over a third.

And the cost of corrections continues to be a growing burden to taxpayers here in St. Louis County. As we report this week, the cost of housing prisoners has been one of the biggest growth areas in the county budget over the past ten years. The cost of operations at the county jail, for example, have jumped from $6.6 million in 2004 to $11.2 million this year, the result of a combination of more prison stays and the rising cost to house those prisoners.

It’s time to rethink America’s love affair with prisons. They cost too much. They ruin the lives of far too many. And they don’t deliver any greater level of public safety than far cheaper and more sensible alternatives. While prisons are necessary to protect society from violent criminals, we have more constructive ways to address less dangerous offenders. Other countries manage to protect their citizens from criminals while incarcerating far fewer of their residents in the process. A nation that was founded on principles of freedom and limited government should certainly demand an approach to corrections consistent with those values.