Eric Holder Gets One Right on Crime

 

Eric Holder Gets One Right on Crime

If you added up every person incarcerated in the United States and considered them as a single town, where do you think it would rank among the most populous American cities? About the size of New Orleans, perhaps, number 52? Or Minneapolis, number 49? How about Washington, D.C., the 25th most populous? Surely not larger than Phoenix, number six?

In fact, if you lumped every American who is in prison -- all 2.3 million -- together into one city, it would rank just above Houston, Texas as the fourth largest in the United States. It would be larger than the populations of San Francisco, Boston, Denver, and Orlando combined.

Add in the 5.1 million Americans on probation or parole and, at 7.3 million people, Prison City is second only to New York, and larger than the next two -- Los Angeles and Chicago -- put together.

According to the Pew Center on the States, one in every 31 people in the U.S. is under correctional supervision, either in prison, on parole, or on probation.

The human cost is terrible. This is especially true in the African American community. At current rates, one in every three African American males born today is likely to end up in prison during his lifetime, according to the NAACP.

The fiscal cost, too, is becoming catastrophic. Prisons now cost taxpayers $60 billion per year. At 10 percent of the state’s budget, California now spends roughly as much on prisons as it does on higher education.

Beginning with Chuck Colson's courageous founding of Prison Fellowship and Pat Nolan's leadership since Chuck passed away, there has been a resurgence of serious conservative thought about prison reform. Right on Crime, a movement I am affiliated with, has led the way on this issue working closely with Prison Fellowship.

Conservative leaders at the state level have introduced major prison reforms in recent years, pioneering a less expensive and more humane system without compromising public safety and while maintaining the rule of law.

In Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, to name a few, conservative governors have taken steps to return non-violent offenders to community supervision rather than imprisonment, saving their states tens of millions of dollars. These innovative strategies have proven much more efficient at holding low-level offenders accountable, and they ensure states have the resources to keep behind bars those criminals who really need to be there.

Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced corrections reforms which follow the course these conservative governors have set toward more sensible sentencing laws. While it would have been better for Holder to ask Congress to make these changes rather than doing so by executive fiat, he has hit upon an important goal.

We lock up too many non-violent people, and the recidivism rate (the number of released prisoners who end up back in jail) is extremely high. As many as 60 percent are arrested again within three years. The corrections system is not correcting.

Seventy percent of prisoners rank in the lowest two levels of reading ability, according to the National Institute for Literacy. Many studies have shown that prisoners who obtain a G.E.D. while incarcerated are dramatically less likely to return to prison than those who do not. One of the greatest steps we could take toward rehabilitating prisoners and reduce the chances they return to prison is to use new learning technologies to give them better opportunities for work when they reenter society.

Every prisoner in America, unless they have a college degree, should spend a significant portion of their time working through free, personalized online learning systems like Khan Academy or Duolingo. At the same time, they should take digital courses focused on rehabilitation to help them learn to be decent members of society. Their privileges in prison and evaluations for parole should be tied to progress in such a program. Even a decade ago this would have been cost-prohibitive to implement for all prisoners, but today much of the material is available virtually for free.

Technology may also offer us better ways to hold people who aren’t dangerous accountable for breaking the law. For many non-violent offenders, electronically-monitored probation or parole could be much more productive than prison, allowing offenders to stay in the community, work, keep their families together, and avoid learning from the hardened criminals in prison, while still restricting them significantly. Some combination of GPS and video could monitor to make sure they go only where permitted, stay within a curfew, and avoid further criminal activity.

Finally, Van Jones (who will join me as a co-host of Crossfire on CNN this fall) has suggested an incentive system for wardens and prison personnel, to give them an interest in rehabilitating (rather than merely housing) the prisoners. Wardens, he proposes, should get a bonus for significant improvements in the rate of their prisoners who do not return.

When one in every 31 Americans is under correctional supervision, it’s clear that something is very wrong. The United States stands above all for freedom, and yet we have by far the highest rate of incarceration in the world. That's why we should do everything we can, including sensible prison reform, to help more Americans learn to live in freedom. It is good to see Attorney General Holder take a step in this direction.

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