ARE OUR PRISONS REALLY FULL OF POT SMOKERS AND HUBCAP THIEVES?

The cost of incarceration and the impact of certain crimes on minorities fuel the demands for criminal justice reform

Recently Bob Walsh noted that because of Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison realignment program, California’s prisons are now “housing ‘real bad guys’ instead of pot smokers and hubcap thieves.” Very clever, that Bob. But it might surprise him that two mortal enemies – liberals and conservatives - are now allied in demanding new criminal justice reforms. Conservatives now agree with liberals that non-violent offenders should not be confined in our prisons. Of course though, each side is doing so for very different reasons.

Let’s start with the conservatives. The former ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ crowd has suddenly come to realize that their philosophy has driven taxes sky high. Apparently it never occurred to conservatives before that someone has to pay for keeping all the criminals locked up. And now that their pocket books are being emptied, they are calling for ‘community based rehabilitation’ and for the release from prison of ‘nonviolent’ criminals.

Liberals, on the other hand, are exercising their intellectual gray matter by claiming that our prisons are full of pot smokers and that incarceration for non-violent drug crimes disproportionally impacts minorities, especially young African-American men. Their solution is to legalize marijuana and, like their now conservative allies, are demanding community based rehabilitation for non-violent criminals.

How about all those pot smokers in prison? I’ll grant you there are a lot of inmates doing time for possession of marijuana, but is that really what they got busted for? The liberals would have us believe the prisons are full of inmates doing time for simple possession of pot. Nothing could be further from the truth! You can bet that the overwhelming majority of inmates doing time for possession were actually busted for sales of marijuana, and it wasn’t for selling just a couple of joints. These dope dealers were able to plea bargain the more serious sales charges down to possession in order to receive a lesser prison sentence. And you can also bet that some of these dealers committed acts of violence, charges for which were dismissed as part of the plea bargain.

Now, what about the disproportionate impact the imprisonment for drug crimes has on young African-American men? Liberals claim that whites get away with selling white powder cocaine while blacks get busted for selling a few rocks of crack cocaine. Even President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder keep bellowing that mantra. I can’t argue with them. But there is a good reason for that. Those white white-powder cocaine dealers are much more sophisticated than those black crack dealers. They sell their dope clandestinely and are much harder to catch. Young African-American men can be found openly selling dope on every street corner in predominantly black neighborhoods. And by the way, many of their customers happen to be white.

Those pot possession prison sentences are not ruining the lives of young black men. Those men are ruining the lives of everyone they sell dope to. They should be locked up, no matter how disproportionate their numbers may be. They have chosen to make their livelihood selling illegal drugs on their own volition and, if caught, should be made to pay the price for their unlawful activities. That price should be incarceration in prison.

One last word about the liberal mantra that our criminal justice system is discriminatory. NYPD’s ‘Broken Windows’ approach to crime, also known as ‘Quality-of-Life Maintenance Policing,’ holds that in [minority] communities contending with high levels of disruption, maintaining order [by enforcing all laws] improves the quality of life for residents and reduces crime. The liberal critics of Broken Windows claim that it imposes a white, middle-class morality on urban populations. Say what? Are they serious? Do they really mean that the black underclass is to be held to a lower law enforcement standard than the white middle and upper classes? Obviously they do. Liberals emphasize that Eric Garner, who died while resisting New York cops trying to arrest him for the illegal sales of untaxed cigarettes, was a victim of Broken Windows because his crime was an accepted way, among other unlawful activities, of earning a living in New York’s black neighborhoods.

To lower taxes, conservatives no longer want to send Bob’s ’hubcap thieves’ to prison, opting instead for community based rehabilitation. Sounds good, but is it? The idea being that low-level non-violent criminals can be rehabilitated better in the community than in prison. Actually, those low-level criminals are not doing time in prison for the first time they got caught stealing hubcaps. Almost all first-time non-violent felons are given probation, a form of community based rehabilitation. And time after time, many of these probationers continue to commit new beefs before the courts have finally had enough and send these career criminals to prison.

Let’s have a look at Texas where a cost-conscious conservative legislature instituted some 'cost-saving’ criminal justice reforms. Here are some excerpts from a January 13 article in the Prison Legal News:

According to a November 2012 report published by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, the Texas state jail system is an expensive failure – with 90% of the cost of conventional prisons, but a much higher recidivism rate. The report recommends initially placing all state jail defendants on probation instead of incarcerating them and establishing a system of rehabilitation programs for those on probation and probation violators who are sentenced to state jails.

In 1993, the Texas Legislature sought to reduce the overcrowding in the prison system by creating a new class of offense – the state jail felony. Many crimes which had formerly been third-degree felonies and some that had been Class A misdemeanors were reclassified as state jail felonies. The idea was to divert the low-level drug and property defendants out of a track that led to prison. To accomplish this, judges were required to first place convicted state jail defendants on probation, only sending them to a state jail for 60 days as a kind of "shock" probation or for a maximum term of two years if they violated the probation or were convicted of a subsequent state jail felony.

The state jails were also supposed to be part of the community supervision system and heavy on treatment and education to assist rehabilitation. Perhaps this approach was a little ahead of its time because, before it was fully realized and without any evidence of the success or failure of the state jail concept, the two subsequent Legislatures instituted changes that made state jails little more than warehouses for low level felons. Unlike prisoners in the state prison system, state jail prisoners had no opportunity to earn good conduct time. With no rehabilitation programs, industrial jobs, or good conduct time and few privileges, state jails became difficult to manage.

Eventually, the state jails were folded into the state prison system and prisoners incarcerated there were allowed to earn some good conduct time. Thus, they completed their transformation from an extension the judges' community supervision to a branch of the state prison system.

In 2012, 99.7% of state jail defendants were sentenced directly to state jail incarceration for sentences ranging from 6 to 24 months with no guarantee of rehabilitation or treatment options. State jails cost nearly as much as state prisons, yet state jails releasees recidivate faster and in greater numbers than those released from state prisons.

The reincarceration rate within three years of release for state jail prisoners released in 2007 was 31.9%. The 3-year rearrest rate for 2006 state jail releasees was 64.2%. This contrasts with a reincarceration rate of 26% and a rearrest rate of 48.8% within three years of release for prisoners released from state prisons. In short, the reincarceration rate for state jail releasees was 23% higher than the rate for state prison releasees. This also adds to the overall costs of state jails.

Why didn’t Texas fund any rehabilitation programs to go along with probation and those state jails? The answer is quite simple. The conservative legislators did not appropriate the money needed for such programs. Cost savings, you know.

So, to answer the question: Are our prisons really full of pot smokers and hubcap thieves? No they are not! They are full of career criminals, drug dealers, sexual predators and vicious thugs. And if those locked away in our prisons are disproportionately black, it’s because a disproportionate number of young African-American men chose to follow the path that led them to prison.