The number of inmates in America's prisons is growing by 900 people each week. The total number, according to the Department of Justice, has reached 2.1 million, or one out of every 138 U.S. residents. A newly established 21-person commission is now studying issues of safety and abuse in America's prisons. Funded by the Vera Institute of Justice, the commission is planning to release its findings in the spring of 2006. It has held hearings in Tampa, Florida, and will conduct sessions in Newark, New Jersey, on July 20; it is also planning sessions in the Midwest and in California.
When I read about these developments, I recall all the visits I paid to prisons during the years 1971-81, when I was a member of a congressional committee assigned to monitor the nation's state and federal prisons and jails. The memories of hopeless visits I had with prison officials and inmates flood back into my soul. These encounters were painful then. They are more painful now that the number of inmates in the last 20 years in prisons has increased from 501,886 in 1980 to 2.1 million in 2004.
I remember talking with a nurse in Missouri's federal prison hospital about convicts who severely injure themselves in order to get to a different and more humane place of incarceration. I remember listening to officials describing the difficulties of controlling inmates who are habitually violent and uncontrollable. I learned also of the substantial number of prisoners (possibly up to 25 percent) who are mentally ill and who should not be incarcerated but placed in an institution for the mentally ill. Many prisoners were wary of talking to a member of Congress in the presence of prison guards, but several communicated their sense of humiliation, their feeling of desperation, and their deepest desires for a better existence -- some hope, some way of reconciling with their families.
I will not soon forget talking with five women inmates in a state institution in California. They were not very well-educated, and had been jailed for some petty crime. They were desperate to see their children.
I remembered these women several years later, when I read that South Africa, some time after it gained its independence, released all mothers with children under 10. The government in Pretoria did this after it ratified the United Nations Covenant on the Rights of the Child. That treaty suggests that the priority of a child's rights is greater than whatever rights the government has to incarcerate a mother. This charter has now been ratified by all 191 nations that belong to the UN -- except for the United States.
In the decade I was a representative, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and several national groups worked with Congress to try to put in place some rehabilitation plans for the prevention of crime and a rational approach to correction and rehabilitation. But even then the destructive forces were being adopted. Parole and probation were being eliminated. “Three strikes and you're out” was gathering steam. And the federal sentencing guidelines were being developed.
The tragic scene of America's unbelievably large prison population is getting more complicated every day. As of 1995 there was one prison staff person for every 2.6 inmates. In 2003, that number was 4.3.
Congress in the '70s tried to understand the complexity of the problems of prisons gangs, rapes, violence against guards, and the astonishing number of recidivists. We tried to monitor other factors that were then evolving: the outsourcing of prisons to private companies, the creation of prisons for white-collar criminals like John Mitchell, the Nixon administration attorney general. But there was already a trend toward harsh sentencing.
State and federal laws punishing the use and sale of narcotics somehow obtained acceptance. The tragedy is compounded because the increasingly strict sentencing of drug offenders is so universal that any member of Congress who allows him or herself to appear “soft on crime” is putting his seat at risk.
I have repeatedly tried to improve the administration of criminal justice in the United States, but the scene is grim. Some time ago I spoke at the annual meeting of the National Organization of Prison Chaplains. This is a nondenominational group of religious ministers who help the 2.1 million incarcerated Americans. They know the problems involved. They are not optimistic. Some engage in the ministry in religious ways followed and made known by evangelical leader Charles Colson. But the chaplains seem to be pessimistic about any substantial reform in the way prisoners are now treated.
Religious groups in the United States, and especially the U.S. Catholic Conference, have pleaded for changes in prisoner treatment. But their recommendations are not heard or followed. The central thesis that prisoners could be kept close to their families, for example, is not followed when prisoners are sent to institutions created in remote locations (because a rural town has lobbied successfully to import a new industry to replace factories that moved away).
But it has to be acknowledged that religious groups in the United States have not come together with a consolidated plea to change and improve the prisons of the nation. They should. Is it fanciful to think that the evangelicals should come together with the mainline churches on the topic of prison reform? Could Colson's work unite mainline religious groups in America? Could prisons be the place for some faith-based initiatives?
When one reviews the last 30 years of crime and crime control in the United States, it is easy to be discouraged. Vast networks of federal and local police work with zeal and devotion. But the focus is on punishment and prisons as the one response to wrongdoing.
There are, however, a few rays of hope. In August 2004, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke at a meeting of the American Bar Association (ABA) in San Francisco. Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee and normally a conservative voice on the bench, startled his audience by proclaiming that there are too many people in jail in the United States, and for periods that are too long. The audience of 2,000 lawyers gave Kennedy a standing ovation.
The ABA has since created a committee that is reviewing all of the proposals made in the recent past to change the administration of U.S. criminal justice. Yet few are hopeful that Congress will act on any of these proposals.
But the hostility to criminals and to ex-cons continues. Some 5 million former felons cannot vote, especially in southern states. What's more, the federal Higher Education Ammendments of 1998 ban ex-felons from receiving federal student loans!
Another issue is whether the Democrats should speak about changes in how the country sentences and incarcerates criminals. If Democrats pledge anything that could be construed as leniency on crimes, they could be open to the tired but effective charge of being “soft on crime.” But the issue cannot be avoided. The whole world is wondering why the United States keeps 12.6 percent of all its black men in their late 20s in jail while only 1.7 percent of white men in that age group are locked up.
The quadrupling of prisoners in the United States in one generation has occurred silently and surreptitiously, with no mass protests. A few civil-rights groups have complained, but hundreds of thousands of suspects have been allowed by their public defenders to plead guilty and to serve extended sentences in jail.
I have witnessed this tragic phenomenon since 1971. Can the liberals and progressives in America turn the tide? The time to act is now.
Robert F. Drinan, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, served as a member of Congress from Massachusetts from 1971 to 1981.
