Many state officials are seeking ways to cut spending. States like Mississippi are now open to reviewing alternative ways to reduce the budget of prison costs.
Members of the Mississippi House Corrections Committee met this week where Marc Levin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Dave Louden of Justice Fellowship on behalf of the Right on Crime Coalition shared ways they have worked to reduce spending in other states.
By releasing non-violent offenders into supervised work release programs, ex-offenders are able to reenter the society and be closer to their family. In states like South Carolina, crime rates have dropped and the incidence of repeat offenders has lessened.
Dave Louden of Justice Fellowship shared an example of what South Carolina has been able to accomplish over the last two years with reforms:
"In South Carolina where you got a very Republican legislature and a very Republican governor, they enacted these reforms two years ago, they saved close to 200 million dollars."
The Mississippi article described the dire need for reform saying, "the state of Mississippi spends $330 million dollars a year on adult corrections. The cost per day to house a prisoner is $41.74, which officials say is lower than what most states spend."
Click here to read the full article and watch the video.
Craig DeRoche, former Michigan Speaker and now Director of External Affairs at Justice Fellowship talks to Michigan Matters host Carol Cain about his issues due to alcoholism as well as the problems and remedies of America's prison system. Click here to see the full interview.
Lisa M. Rea, a former Prison Fellowship staff member and the founder of the Justice and Reconciliation Project, offers her thoughts on the future of restorative justice in a paper released by the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University.
In "Restorative Justice: The New Way Forward," Rea urges her readers to reconsider the very nature of crime, and how we have defined it as a society. "[Crime] is not an offense of a criminal against the state," she argues, "but an offense committed by one individual (the offender) against other individuals (the victims). . . . Restorative justice acknowledges that crime breaks the peace within communities. Offenders, therefore, must make things right with the community as well, if possible."
Rea concludes:
Restorative justice promises to move us away from warehousing offenders and toward a system that leads offenders to personal accountability and allows victims to heal. It needs the support of all who are committed to doing justice, to restoring the lives of victims, and to transforming the lives of offenders. It requires champions who advocate for public policy changes to make restorative justice a reality throughout our justice system.
Do you agree with Rea? What are the limitations to a restorative justice approach to corrections?
This week in Washington, DC, as conservatives gathered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to see presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, Justice Fellowship (JF) educated attendees by hosting a panel on overcriminalization.
Justice Fellowship’s panel “Criminal Justice Reform: Too Many Crimes, Too Many Criminals” educated those in attendance about the problem with locking too many people away for too long for non-violent offenses. Justice Fellowship President Pat Nolan moderated the panel and opened the time with a convicting speech marking with great detail the problems that arise when the government raids businesses like Gibson Guitar instead of directing scarce resources to go after violent criminals.
The Gibson Guitar Raids by the federal government serve as one example of overcriminalization. The esteemed panelists revealed other examples of overreach by the government. Panelist at the Justice Fellowship hosted event were: David Keene, President of National Rifle Association; Eli Lehrer, Vice President of The Heartland Institute; and Mary Schmid Mergler, Senior Counsel at The Constitution Project.
The federal criminal code continues to swell with arcane laws making criminals out of honest citizens, sending good people to prison for very long sentences. The federal government has dramatically expanded its federal criminal code with over 4,000 criminal offenses and at least 10,000 federal rules. These laws increasingly focus on regulatory violations, which are unlawful because of government decree – not for defying moral law.
The overcriminalization of our society erodes the rule of law and threatens liberty. This undermines public confidence in the law code, expands government control over individual freedom, and increases the likelihood of people committing crimes unknowingly. Justice Fellowship stands to make clear that when we lock up so many people for too long for non-violent offenses, we impact their families and ultimately impact society. Visit JF’s overcriminalization page for more information.
Students at George Washington University's Institute for Documentary Filmmaking have been awarded the the inaugural Washington Best Film award for their documentary Released to Life. The film follows several recently-released inmates who are seeking to reenter a society that is not inclined to help them rebuild their lives or assist them in staying out of prison.
"We all went into documentary filmmaking because of its power to tackle tough social issues and inspire change," says Yavar Moghimi, one of the student producers of the film. "This recognition will help spread the film's ultimate message: that incarcerated people are transitioning back into society more than ever and we need to make sure they are prepared for the struggles that await them."
In recent years, the number of women being incarcerated has grown exponentially. Most of these women are non-violent, first-time offenders. And some of them will give birth while in prison
A bill in the Virginia state legislature seeks to end the archaic practice of shackling pregnant inmates. At a joint press conference of groups in favor of the bill, Justice Fellowship staffer Kristin Turner, who is pregnant herself, fought back tears as she urged legislative support:
As a pregnant woman, it horrifies me that women succumb to this barbaric and unnecessary practice…I can’t imagine bringing my child into this world in such a degrading and humiliating manner. Restraining inmates during labor and childbirth is cruel and offends the dignity of the mother, endangers the child, and is a stain on our society.
Sadly, the criminal justice system has been too slow to adapt to the increase in female inmates. The female prison population suffers from deficient OB/GYN care. Justice Fellowship advocates for attention to women's distinct needs.
With the proposed legislation in Virginia, the issue drew support this week from groups across the political divide. However, the legislation, as the Post points out, has run into opposition from the Virginia Sheriffs Association, claiming there is no evidence of mistreatment of pregnant inmates in state correctional facilities. Contrary to the claims of the Sheriff’s Association, the ACLU of Virginia has documented several stories of women who have recently gone through the horrific experience of giving birth in shackles.
Delegates Hope and LeMunyon’s bill in Virginia would prohibit the shackling of a pregnant inmate unless authorities determine she is a flight risk or a safety threat. Unfortunately this bill was tabled in subcommittee just today, threatening the safety of women and their babies in Virginia for another year.
Visit Justice Fellowship’s Women in Prison page for more information.
Initially, it was thought that such policies would serve as a deterrence for crime. Not only has this proven not to be the case, but states that have enacted such measures are experiencing increased costs for incarceration and crowded prisons. Community supervision programs are often more effective in reducing future criminal activity, and can be done at a much lower cost to taxpayers.
The Right on Crime article is available here. More information on mandatory minimums can be found on the Justice Fellowship website.
A member of the Virginia House of Delegates is proposing legislation that will allow juvenile offenders who have previously pleaded guilty for crimes that would have been felonies if committed by adults to apply for a writ of innocence.
Delegate Gregory D. Habeeb has introduced this bill in response to the case of Edgar Coker, Jr. In 2007, Coker, then 15, was accused of raping a 14 year-old acquaintance. On the advice of counsel, Coker pleaded guilty to juvenile charges to avoid being charged as an adult. Two months after being sentenced, his accuser admitted that the sex was consensual.
Coker was released from the juvenile detention facility after serving 17 months. He is still listed on the sex offender registry - a fact that recently resulted in Coker's arrest when he attended a football game at his high school alma mater and was recognized by a police deputy.
"A juvenile pleads guilty sometimes for different reasons than a grown-up," says Habeeb. "We don't pass legislation for one person. But I think oftentimes one person can highlight a hole in legislation."
"As a very conservative Republican, my view is that it is better to err on the side of not doing a wrong to somebody, especially when it comes to kids," Habeeb says. "This bill wouldn't make a whole bunch of felons innocent."
Lawyers representing Coker are appealing his original conviction. An circuit court judge has ruled that since Coker is no longer behind bars, the court no longer has jurisdiction. The case was recently argued before the Virginia Supreme Court.
Should a guilty plea, even if the person pleading is later found to be innocent, bar that person from having the original ruling vacated? Or does public safety mandate that all names added to a sex offender registry be etched in stone and made publicly available? Let us know what you think!
Adam Gopnik writes a fascinating article on “The Caging of America” for The New Yorker. Gopnik poses a good question: Why do we lock up so many people?
Gopnik presents the problem when he writes:
“The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)”
He ends by presenting some possible solutions:
“Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities.”
Gopnik presents a very real picture of the problem with our prisons. As Prison Fellowship has experienced for 35 years, and Justice Fellowship knows well, there’s not necessarily a miracle cure for the problems in our prisons, but there is reason to intercede with “a thousand smaller sanities,” as Gopnik writes.
Read Gopnik’s work and consider what he poses, that every society has a “poor storm that wretches suffer in.” Every generation has its problems. Every generation has its injustices. Do we “wait for a better world” or do we do something now? But in all of your thinking, never forget what Gopnik makes clear, “At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life…and in every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away.” We agree with Gopnik’s point that prisons are our “this” and we do well to take more care.
A new report called the Price of Prisons explains that incarceration costs taxpayers more than state budgets would suggest. The average cost to incarcerate an inmate for a year? More than $31,000.
A January 26 article from PR Newswire explains why this first-of-its-kind report from the Vera Institute of Justice should matter to taxpayers and policymakers alike:
While it is common knowledge that some prison costs are tracked outside their budgets, The Price of Prisons marks the first time these costs have been quantified for prisons across the states. To calculate the total price of prisons, Vera developed a survey tool that tallied costs outside corrections budgets. The most common of these costs were fringe benefits, underfunded contributions for corrections employees' pension and retiree health care plans, inmate health care, capital projects, legal costs, and inmate education and training.
"This new tool changes the equation. It paints a far more accurate picture of the costs to taxpayers," said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States. "State leaders already have been questioning whether corrections spending passes the cost-benefit test, especially for nonviolent offenders."
