Are Prisons Bleeding Us Dry?

Of course we can't do anything about this--think of the unemployment! Ditto single payer and stopping the War on Some Drugs. Or we could just have lots fewer work hours for more pay and jack the minimum wage up to where it belongs.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/304-justice/20724-are-prisons-bleeding-us-dry

So why, then, is Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel lobbying the Illinois legislature to funnel more people into prison for longer? During the recent veto session last week, Emanuel requested that the legislature impose a mandatory three-year prison term on people who are convicted for the unlawful possession of a firearm.

Thankfully, the proposal failed, when Representative Ken Dunkin (D-5th) wisely requested information about the fiscal impact of the mandatory minimums. The analysis wasn't completed by the time the legislature adjourned, but had it been finished, it would have revealed a staggering price tag. The Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council estimated (PDF) that the cost of the Mayor Emmanuel's proposal could exceed $965 million a year.

Chicago's communities have been ravaged by mass imprisonment. The U.S. currently has the dubious distinction of having the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. And communities on Chicago's West and South sides have incarceration rates that are double-and sometimes triple-the national average.

This is not because more crime occurs in these neighborhoods. A National Institute of Health study that focused on the effects of mass incarceration on Chicago's neighborhoods found that communities marked by poverty and racial segregation experience incarceration rates that are more than three times higher communities with similar crime rates. The same study also found that "the combination of poverty, unemployment, family disruption, and racial isolation is bound up with high levels of incarceration even when adjusting for the rate of crime that a community experiences. These factors suggest a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps some communities trapped in a negative feedback loop."

Seventy percent of people in Illinois prisons are there for nonviolent offenses that in a more effective and cost-efficient system would be handled through community-based sanctions. Imprisonment frays community and family connections, interrupts employment and education, and is a deeply dehumanizing and traumatic experience. People returning home from prison struggle to reconnect with their families, find work and adhere to burdensome parole conditions. More than 50 percent of people who are formerly incarcerated in Illinois return to prison within three years of their release.