PRISON crowding has reached crisis proportions: the legacy of the war on drugs and long, mandatory sentences.
The federal government can take one important step to help states comply: deport many immigrant criminals before they enter prison, not after.
Non-citizen criminals represent a significant percentage of American prisoners: in 2009, some 25 percent of federal prisoners and a smaller fraction of state prisoners were non-citizens; in California, 18,705 inmates were non-citizens. Although the federal government can deport many of them as soon as their criminal convictions become final, a century-old law provides that immigrants can be deported only after they have served their sentences here.
This provision, intended to ensure that the criminals are punished, was enacted in 1917. Fortunately, the law now contains a potentially useful loophole: deportable criminals can be deported without serving their full sentences if they committed non-violent offenses (with some exceptions), and if the appropriate officials request earlier deportations.
As simple as it seems, this exception has rarely been employed. The federal and state governments should use it to remove as many deportable criminals as possible from their prison populations.
Other options have already been tried and proved inadequate. It is costly and unpopular to build new prisons and hire more guards; Easier probation and parole have their limits. Structural changes, like decriminalizing non-violent offenses and reducing the length of sentences, are promising reforms but hard to accomplish politically.
Accelerating the deportation of criminals who will eventually be deported anyway would not end the overcrowding problem, but it would surely help.
By PETER H. SCHUCK
Published: December 6, 2010
Peter H. Schuck, professor of law, Yale University
Let us hope someone in Washington is listening. – David Zapp