An article by Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit organization that monitors prison conditions, was published in The New York Times recently. Below are portions of the article I feel are relevant to the federal prison system. My editorial comments are in brackets.
Last Wednesday, changes to New York’s notorious Rockefeller drug laws went into effect, allowing judges to shorten the prison terms of some nonviolent offenders. This measure will further reduce New York’s prison population, which has already declined in the past 10 years.
Nevertheless, mainly because of opposition from the correction officers’ union and politicians from the upstate areas where most of [New York’s] correctional facilities are, the state has been slow to close prisons. It was not until earlier this year that policymakers in Albany, confronted with fiscal crisis, mustered the will to shut three prison camps and seven prison annexes — a total of about 2,250 prison beds — in a move that is expected to save $52 million over the next two years.
[Contract prisons and prisons run by private corporations will no doubt object to continued closings because they are in the business of incarceration solely for profit.]
There are other ways for [the BOP] to lower the prison population. For starters, lawmakers could repeal the mandatory sentencing provisions that remain on the books. They could also increase the number of participants on work release. In 1994, more than 27,000 people [in the New York state system] were in this time-tested program that helps them manage the transition back to their communities. Today, about 2,500 are enrolled.
In addition, the state[s], [not the federal system because there is no parole in the federal system] could reduce the number of people — last year, more than 9,000 — who are returned to prison for technical parole violations like missing a meeting with an officer or breaking curfew . . . [E]ligibility for so-called merit time, which reduces prison terms for inmates who complete educational and other programs, could be [implemented in the federal system, and even] expanded to people convicted of violent offenses [provided they occurred] many years ago.
[For alien prisoners, prisoner exchange programs should be liberally utilized and aggressively pursued where there are no treaties between countries. It is incredible that both Colombia and the Dominican Republic have no such treaties, and Mexico’s prisoner exchange treaty with the U.S. is used ever so grudgingly. Early deportation should also be liberally and efficiently utilized. For example, inmates who commit non-violent crimes, such as drug couriers, should be eligible for deportation after serving half of their sentence. U.S. law allows the Attorney General of the United States to implement this type of early deportation program, but he has never exercised the power. The number of substantial drug dealers who control or otherwise supervise narcotics trafficking is miniscule compared to the number of cogs in the narcotics trafficking wheel that strain the prison system.]
Taken together, these actions could cut the [federal] prison rolls, enabling the [Bureau of Prisons] to not just ease overcrowding, but actually close [several] prisons the size of Attica [in New York State], which holds 2,100 inmates, or a [large] number of smaller facilities.
After New York passed the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973, a mandatory sentencing movement swept the country, raising the nationwide prison population to nearly 2.4 million, from 300,000. This experiment in mass incarceration was a failure. There is no conclusive evidence that it enhanced public safety, and some research suggests that time in prison makes people more prone to violence. It wasted billions of dollars a year. And it has devastated the low-income minority communities where most of our prisoners come from.
Save money—downsize the prison population.