After two decades of the biggest prison-building boom in history, the number of inmates in state and federal prisons--now at 1.4 million--has tripled since 1980. Several studies have shown that more prisons and stiffer sentences have had little deterrent effect on crime, and in fact serve only to swell inmate ranks and increase the crime rate by throwing hardened criminals out on the street to make room for lesser offenders.
Despite this evidence, and the fact that the crime rate has remained largely stable for years, Americans have been sold the biggest bill of goods since the days of Joe McCarthy--the lock em up and throw away the key approach to deterring crime. People are afraid, and their fear is being exploited by opportunistic politicians and those who stand to profit from the nation's hottest growth industry. If this is beginning to sound familiar, remember Ike's farewell warning, nearly four decades ago, about the military-industrial complex.
Consider the recently-passed, $30.2 billion federal crime bill, which was pushed hard by the Clinton administration. Only $6.9 billion of this funding will go toward crime prevention programs, which, though less politically attractive in the current climate than punitive crackdowns, are the only efforts known to actually reduce crime. The rest goes to hiring more cops and border patrol agents, building yet more prisons and juvenile boot camps, and instituting the three strikes, youre out law already adopted in California.
In the bill-signing ceremony, Clinton twice invoked the name of Polly Klaas, whose tragic and brutal murder inflamed public rage around the country and led to the push for three strikes. Pollys father Marc Klaas, who now heads a foundation dedicated to preventing the kind of violent crimes that claimed his daughter, was there for the signing. But Marc Klaas has now reconsidered his initial support for Californias version of the law, labeling it "ill-conceived and unfocused" and pointing out that three out of four crimes addressed by it are not violent.
Meanwhile, a Rand Corporation study concluded that Californias three-strikes law will cost a whopping $5.5 billion, or $300 per taxpayer, per year. Where will the money come from in this cash-strapped state? Either from massive tax increases (not likely) or deep cuts in education, parks, environmental cleanup, and social services (highly likely). The state education budget, once 2.5 times greater than the corrections budget, has already been eclipsed by prison spending. If the law stays on the books, the states prison population will increase by more than ten times its 1980 levels by the end of this decade.
The federal version has been similarly criticized by the American Bar Association and many law enforcement specialists. No one knows where the money will come from; Congress says it will come from savings achieved by downsizing the federal bureaucracy, but those savings have already been allocated to dozens of other programs. It will, no doubt, come out of the same programs as those in Californiaand the same ones that were sacrificed on the altar of the Cold War. As for the emphasis on punishment over treatment, Robert Gangi, head of the Correctional Association of New York, told Time magazine that Building more prisons to address crime is like building more graveyards to address a fatal disease.
Gangi's statement is more than just an apt metaphor. Crime is a disease, born of the savage inequities that festered throughout Americas Cold War fixation and remain ignored by the new war on crime: grinding poverty, the lack of decent jobs, severe cuts in education and health spending, and environmental injustice. Serious, long-run policies that address these ongoing crises will lead to a lowered crime rate. Macho posturing and draconian punishment will not.
But still the drumbeat pounds out of Washington, and the transition from the Cold War economy to the Crime War economy continues. The type of political careers that once were built on rooting out Commies are now built on locking up criminals. Republican whip Newt Gingrich wants to turn nearly all of our closing military bases into jails, and hes already getting some of what he wants: dozens of bases around the country are indeed being converted into prisons, and the pentagon has published a handbook for communities seeking to do so.
Even a formerly liberal Democrat, Rep. Pat Schroeder, is using her role as chair of the Research and Technology subcommittee to push the transfer of military technology to law enforcement. In response, Congress has authorized $41 million to establish the Center for Defense and Law Enforcement Technology. And several prime defense contractors, sniffing out a new government gravy train, are now retooling to manufacture high-tech law enforcement equipment.
If Americans want to rest easier about crime, they need to confront the many domestic ills that were engendered and/or exacerbated by our perceived need to wage the Cold War. Now that its finally over, we need to tend to the blighted soil in which crime has its roots, rather than convert the entire country into a Gulag state. After all, isn't that what we gave the pentagon all those billions to protect us from?