‘Corrections’ system doesn’t live up to its name

In both World War I and World War II, the prison population in New Mexico experienced a remarkable transformation.

When people were released from the penitentiary, they almost never returned. Their life of crime was over. Why? Because they left prison well trained in new skills and with a system in place that found them jobs almost immediately, according to an essay in the New Mexico Historical Review. And given the choice between work and jail, all but one or two percent chose work.

Right after both wars, however, a conservative mood hit the state. Job training and job placement were seen as coddling prisoners. When they were cut, recidivism shot right up again, sometimes to as high as thirty-five to fifty percent.

Prison reform has worked in the past, and it can work again, as U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., is trying to convince the nation. Webb introduced legislation in March called the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, calling for the creation of a “blue ribbon” commission to do a “top to bottom review of the nation’s entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform.

“America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace,” Webb argues. “With five percent of the world’s population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.”

In some New Mexico prisons, drug-related recidivism can be as high 75 percent.

In 2006, 7.2 million American adults were either in prison or on parole — that’s 3.2 percent of the national population and almost four times the population of New Mexico.

If anything’s to be done to reform America’s prison system, we must start by asking who profits from the way it exists today. And the answer has much to do with corporations and drug profiteers.

Stockholders of private prisons profit. Criminal gangs and drug cartels profit from our criminal justice system because it does nothing to decrease demand for drugs. The prison system, and its legions of employees, if not profiting from the current system, certainly makes a livelihood from it.

Various subcontractors and vendors make a mint supplying everything from food to laundry. And politicians can underfund police agencies, and treatment and rehabilitation facilities, and make themselves look good as budget cutters because they know the system will just scoop people up and dump them far from sight.

The first thing we have to do is get rid of private prisons.

Even though they only house some five percent of the nation’s prison population, they have strong and pervasive lobbying effort that helps set the draconian tone toward crime in state legislatures and Washington, D.C.

Their so-called cost saving results in something like a 50 percent high rate of inmate violence against staff than in federal and state prisons, and some 65 percent higher rates of violent conflict between prisoners. Why is this? Skipping on guards and supervisory personnel.

And private prisons do nothing to help stem the recidivism rate. They often shift prisoners around from facility to facility to make room for influxes, keeping prisoners away from the positive and therapeutic influences of their families.

With private lockups, the potential for corruption is always there, as we found out when two Pennsylvania judges confessed last month to taking more than $2.6 million dollars in bribes from a juvenile detention center for sentencing youths to profitably long terms in jail.

Nothing will happen in prison reform until drug laws are reformed, and mandatory sentencing is done away with. Profit must be taken out of the drug trade, and that can only come with legalization, taxation, regulation, and controlled government sale of drugs that is both supervised and mitigated by a full scale anti-drug campaign and abundant opportunities for rehabilitation.

And judges must be allowed to tailor sentences to the specific circumstances of each prisoner’s life and take the elective and public heat for doing so.

The one thing, it seems to me, that makes prison reform next to impossible is the perception on the part of potential inmates that the system is fundamentally unjust, corrupt and unforgivably harsh. That creates a collective disrespect and even hatred of the law and those to represent and enforce it.

The history of New Mexico’s Department of Corrections during the two great wars of the 20th century show us that a prison system that is serious about vocational training, general education, psychological aid, and, most important of all, available jobs and job placement after release, is a prison system that works to deplete its population rather than expand it.

There are those who will argue that prisons can’t be reformed and inmates are unredeemable. But the evidence is sharply opposed to that view. As one old time prison official told me about a month before the most violent prison riot in America took place at the New Mexico State Penitentiary in February l980, “when all prisoners have to do is sit around and think up ways to get into trouble, you’re sitting on a power keg.”

The prison that year was horribly crowded, housing perhaps as many as 400 more people than it was meant to. And the very successful education and recreation program that had kept the place relative calm from 1970 to 1975 was no longer operating. Prisoners were kept in lock down for weeks at a time. Response to conditions had become so volatile crushingly strict measures were imposed.

When you treat people like abused animals they behave like abused animals and lash back. New Mexico’s state government had nothing but the worst expectations of their prison populations. Inmates were treated inhumanely.

If prison systems start out with high expectations for inmates and operate good in-house schools and job training with strong chances for meaningful employment upon release, if, in other words, they treat inmates like human beings with a chance in the world, history has shown that most inmates will behave responsibly.

Of course, when you reform state and federal prisons, you must also reform county and city lockups around the country. They house most of the prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, often in appalling conditions.

As much as I hate to sound sappy, prison reform is really about applying common sense principles of the Golden Rule. Treat people as you like to be treated, and most of them will respond in kind and start to flourish.