It was Cory Booker who said, “All across the country, communities, cities, and states are working to advance our national ideals of ‘equal justice under the law.’” Like any system designed by human beings prone to error, our criminal justice system has its flaws, and it now that our society is less convinced of absolute accuracy in our criminal justice system. For one, prisons and jails have been society’s answer to a number of social problems. Although prisons proved part of a resolution to the question of crime control, prisons face issues of their own – concerns that our current generation now faces and must explore in terms of to what extent these long-standing issues have become problematic for prison administration, how these issues could be addressed, and what issues may arise in the future.
Overcrowding. Health care. Mental health care. Racism. Privatization. Inadequate funding. Ineffective correctional services. These are just a few of the major difficulties facing prisons today. Instead of focusing on one, better to examine the most pressing emblematic of challenges facing the wider community: prison overcrowding, racial disparity, and mental health.
Let’s put prison overcrowding in perspective. According to the Bureau for Justice Statistics,” the number of adult federal and state prison inmates increased from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 502 per 100,000 in 2009” (qtd. in Galvin) – that is an increase of 261%. With less than 5% of the world’s population, America accounts for the world’s largest prison population, with nearly 2.3 million people currently living behind bars and the total number of Americans under some form of penal supervision is over 7.2 million.
How did this come to be? The Great Depression led to an increase in crime – the start of our nation’s prison overcrowding crisis. By the 1970s, conditions worsened by President Nixon's “War on Drugs”, followed by other “get tough on crime” laws – like the three strikes laws, popular in the 1990s (under President Clinton), which ordered “mandatory life prison sentences for offenders convicted of three felonies” (Schmalleger, 384). As a result of these measures, the U.S. saw a 500% increase between 1970 and 1999. Our prisons became dangerously overcrowded and are today.
Yet, for the most part, incarceration rates have been dramatically out-of-sync with the proliferation of crime in America, resulting in American prisons reaching 96% of their capacity. But prison administration is being reprimanded for it. For example, in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California – the largest state in the nation by population – has a state prison system that was (and is) critically over-crowded, denying prisoners their constitutional right to uncompromised access to medical and mental health care. This is “a fact that the state knowingly ignored court orders to remedy the situation for more than 10 years”(Cornelius). But it isn’t just California’s prison administrations under fire. A recent study of the New York City Jails shows that the city spends nearly $168,000 per year per inmate, nearly three times the rate of the rest of the state – which already spends the most per prisoner among the states – making New York City’s correctional system “the most expensive system per prisoner in the world” (Cornelius).
To add on to these issues – with every week, new reports of prison abuse fill the media. Like other social problems, perhaps the first step to resolving an issue is addressing it. Whether political involvement is how change can be brought about is now questionable. Why? Because despite the slow downward trend in mass incarceration, this could change under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “The harsher federal policies and rhetoric introduced by the new administration will likely raise the federal prison population instead” (Wilson).
But, despite that, “a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. It’s clear that too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason. It’s clear, at a basic level, that 20th-century criminal justice solutions are not adequate to overcome our 21st-century challenges. And it is well past time to implement common sense changes that will foster safer communities from coast to coast” (qtd in Reese).
In acknowledging that, within the last 30 years, the prison population more than quadrupled – it goes without saying that the racial disparity in those numbers must be addressed as well: almost half of all those incarcerated in the United States are black. In 2013, at the “Let Freedom Ring” celebration to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, U.S. Representative John Lewis spoke on the inadequacies of the American penal system and the challenges left to be solved. “The scars and stains of racism still remain deeply embedded in American society, whether it is stop-and-frisk in New York or injustice in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, the mass incarceration of millions of Americans…” According to the American Civil Liberties Union, black individuals are imprisoned at nearly six times the rate of their white counterparts and Latinos are locked up at nearly double the white rate.
But perhaps the bigger issue for prison administration is that the root of racial disparity in our criminal justice system does not begin there. Police throughout our nation have been under a microscope due to the deaths of African-American males in Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, Missouri, New York – incidents which have ignited protests and raised accusations against law enforcement of excessive force/unfair treatment. This problem may also worsen in the future if not reformed, to the point of dragging prison administration equally under fire.
Combined with the illegal immigration problem in America, correctional supervisors and trainers must be well advised to come up with good training about interacting with minorities and illegal immigrants. Fair treatment, combined with a respect for basic for human dignity may result in several things: a professional image for corrections, “smooth” shifts in the institution, and a credible defense against unfair accusations of negative treatment. When young people are incarcerated, the effects last a lifetime. When this occurs disproportionally in low income and minority communities, the effects reach far beyond those immediately involved.
Reforming corrections is critical to the safe management of inmates, the maintenance of security and public trust, and enhancing positive interactions with inmates. But, there are several reasons for concerns, especially when it comes to the issue of caring for mentally ill inmates. Recent research by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that more than half of all inmates have mental health issues. In fact, around 1.25 million prisoners suffer from mental illness. Studies show that people with mental illness are two to four times more likely to end up in prison.
It is clear more training is needed in this area and can always be improved. Mentally ill inmates continue to be housed in our nation’s jails at an alarming rate. “Accordingly, all jail officers who interact with inmates should be trained in recognition of mental illness, how to interact and communicate with mentally ill inmates as well as referring the inmate to qualified staff for management” (Winters). Despite battling inadequate funding and understaffing, another resource can come from enlisting the assistance of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. Law enforcement agencies such as the Crisis Intervention Team are also offering specialized training. With mental health awareness on the rise, so will scrutiny of how prison administrations implement reform. But not all concerns can easily be reformed with training, resources, funding.
Another concern voiced by prison advocates for the mentally ill is that “prolonged segregation may be physically and mentally harmful. Humans are social creatures and activity and interaction with others are beneficial” (Winters). But some inmates are dangerous, uncooperative, and pose threats to the prison community – handling their segregation to ensure safety could prove just as difficult as other reforms necessary to handle incarcerated mentally ill.
At the end of the day, social problems are invariably more complex than they look and even more complex to resolve. It will take experience and trial and error to design the policies capable of grappling with this complexity that is the prison reality. David Brooks said it best, in his op-ed for the New York Times titled “The Prison Problem”: “In the real world, crime, lack of education, mental health issues, family breakdown and economic hopelessness are all intertwined.” The situation cannot be altered without a comprehensive surge in which the corrections branch of the criminal justice system is revitalized by economic, familial, psychological and social repair.
The United States faces serious questions in regards to the way it seeks justice, ones that can no longer be ignored. Does it seek justice based on societal prejudices? Is its treatment of its prisoners making the situation worse? The most crucial question that remains: what is more important in this society – punishing the crime or reforming the criminal? After all, “there is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizens’ freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice.”