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SUNDAYREVIEW | EDITORIAL | NYT NOW
End Mass Incarceration Now
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MAY 24, 2014
For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been
issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused
by Americas now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its
citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness
of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.
In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens
society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called
for immediate correction.
Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and
compelling proof yet that the United States has gone past the point where
the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits, and
that mass incarceration itself is a source of injustice.
That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study prepared
by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of
the Justice Department and others. The report highlights many well-
known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nations prison population has
quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the worlds biggest. That is five to 10
times the incarceration rate in other democracies.
On closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of
state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every
nine, or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences nearly a third
of them without the possibility of parole.
While politicians were responding initially to higher crime rates in the
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late 1960s, this historically unprecedented growth is primarily the result
of harsher sentencing that continued long after crime began to fall. These
include lengthy mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses that
became popular in the 1980s, and three strikes laws that have put people
away for life for stealing a pair of socks.
And even though the political climate has shifted in recent years,
many politicians continue to fear appearing to be soft on crime, even
when there is no evidence that imprisoning more people has reduced crime
by more than a small amount.
Meanwhile, much of the world watches in disbelief. A report by
Human Rights Watch notes that while prison should generally be a last
resort, in the United States it has been treated as the medicine that cures
all ills, and that in its embrace of incarceration, the country seems to
have forgotten just how severe a punishment it is.
The severity is evident in the devastation wrought on Americas
poorest and least educated, destroying neighborhoods and families. From
1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers in prison rose from
350,000 to 2.1 million. Since race and poverty overlap so significantly, the
weight of our criminal justice experiment continues to fall overwhelmingly
on communities of color, and particularly on young black men.
After prison, people are sent back to the impoverished places they
came from, but are blocked from re-entering society. Often they cannot
vote, get jobs, or receive public benefits like subsidized housing all of
which would improve their odds of staying out of trouble. This web of
collateral consequences has created what the National Academy of
Sciences report calls a highly distinct political and legal universe for a
large segment of the U.S. population.
All of this has come at an astounding economic cost, as tallied by a
report from the Brookings Institutions Hamilton Project $80 billion a
year in direct corrections expenses alone, and more than a quarter-trillion
dollars when factoring in police, judicial and legal services.
Many of the solutions to this crisis are clear, even if the political path
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to them often is not: Reduce sentence lengths substantially. Provide more
opportunities for rehabilitation inside prison. Remove the barriers that
keep people from rejoining society after they are released from prison. Use
alternatives to imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, drug addicts and
the mentally ill. Release elderly or ill prisoners, who are the least likely to
re-offend. And since more than 95 percent of inmates are eventually
released, rate prisons on their success in keeping former inmates from
returning which as many as two-thirds currently do. Some states have
already taken smart and effective steps in these directions, but there is a
long way to go.
The insanity of the situation is plain to people across the political
spectrum, from Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, who agree on the urgent need for change. The research is
in, and it is uncontestable. The American experiment in mass
incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster. It
cannot end soon enough.
Meet The New York Timess Editorial Board
A version of this editorial appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page SR10 of the New York edition
with the headline: End Mass Incarceration Now.
2014 The New York Times Company