Overcrowding; Who To Release? By Austin Newton
Equities.com. (n.d.). Releasing Nonviolent Drug Offenders Would Save Billions. Retrieved from https://www.equities.com/news/releasing-nonviolent-drug-offenders-would-save-billions
Neyfakh, L., & Neyfakh, L. (2015, March 04). Supporting Prison Reform Is Easy. Deciding Which Prisoners to Set Free Is a Lot, Lot Harder. Retrieved from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/prison-reform-releasing-only-nonviolent-offenders-wont-get-you-very-far.html
Most of us are aware that overpopulated prisons are a huge problem facing America. Moreover, the majority of us can agree that a lot of people who are prison right now don’t need to be in prison. Now, the solution that many good-natured, reform-minded individuals come to as a solution to this problem is to release non-violent offenders. Simple enough, right? Well, not exactly. The question of who should or should not benefit from reform bills is more complex than one may think. Some say that while violent offenders should be locked away for good, non violent offenders ought to have a second chance. On the other hand, some say that violent offenders should be provided the same privilege or that “violent” offenders responsible for violent crimes actually aren’t violent people at all, that it was just simply a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. In the articles below, we’re invited to observe two different perspectives on the issue of who should or should not benefit from leniency in order to solve America’s overpopulated prison crisis. One side says non-violent offenders should benefit from it, the other side asks us to consider the context in which a crime is committed and why it has been deemed “violent.”
Article #1: This first article, written by Ryan Bhandari in July of 2015, focuses on the commuting of forty six drug offenders by former president Barack Obama, whose crimes were not congruent with the punishment given them by the U.S. prison system. At the time, Obama had called for a reduction in mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offenses. In the article, Bhandari states that while the U.S. makes up a mere 5% of the world population, we account for nearly 25% of the world’s prison population, which is a problem. As Bhandari states, most would agree that U.S. prisons are unnecessarily overcrowded with people who really don’t need to be there, most of them with drug problems that could just as easily be treated outside of prison. The U.S. spends upward of nearly 60 billion dollars keeping people locked up, and if we consider the fact that most people incarcerated are locked up because of petty drug offenses, then we can agree that this is a colossal waste of money. “Drug abuse is a medical condition and not a criminal concern, and we are wasting billions every year keeping these individuals locked up,” says Bhandari. In fact, the U.S. could save nearly 9.3 billion dollars a year by releasing all non-violent drug offenders and getting them the help they need. According to this article, prison is meant to lock away dangerous individuals and thereby keep law-abiding citizens safe from them—murders, rapists, etc.—yet some drug crimes are considered felonies, and really, if you think about, most people who use drugs are really hurting themselves, so if the U.S. penal system abides by this logic, then perhaps we should also, “…outlaw cigarettes and alcohol immediately.” The author closes the article by asking us what our prisons are for, too keep dangerous people off the street or punish people who do things the state deems as unacceptable. Bhandari also begs the question of why alcohol consumption is seen as more acceptable than drug use. Perhaps if we reconsidered our stance on drug use, our prison sizes would decrease and we might have a cure for the overcrowding issue.
Article #2: In reference to the first article, Bhandari states, “Most people agree that we need to keep violent criminals locked up.” In an article by Leon Neyfahk, however, he asks us to ponder what we as a society see as “violent” and “non-violent.” People commit crimes for a variety of reasons; some are committed out of necessity due to poor socio-economic conditions, some people are born into it and don’t know otherwise and people simple have diseases or mental conditions which causes them to commit “crimes” but would better be treated outside the context of prison. In his article, he quotes Jonathan Simon, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley, who says, “violence is much more capacious legal category than most people assume.” Petersilia, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center and member of the Department of Justice Scientific Advisory Board furthers this argument by saying in reference to branding people or crimes as violent and non-violent, “They’re not clean labels…Legislation is being based on these categories that don’t reflect the seriousness of the offender.” What is Neyfahk trying to say with all this? When we label a crime or a person as non-violent or violent, and make prison reform bills exclusive to “non-violent offenders,” we’re actually treading murky territory. For example, someone who’s considered to be non-violent or has committed what is seen as a non-violent crime could’ve actually gained their title and thus the leniency of a prison reform bill simply by pleading guilty to a rather violent crime. On the other hand, someone seen as a violent criminal whose committed a violent crime could’ve simply been the victim of the way our judiciary system views certain crimes—these include illegal gun possession, being in the vicinity and/or associating with someone whose committed a violent crime or driving the getaway car for someone whose committed, let’s say, a bank robbery. What Neyfahk means by all this is that the person behind what is considered to be a violent crime may not actually be a violent person at all. And passing reform bills which only benefit non-violent offenders won’t necessarily solve the prison overcrowding problem or help to reform “criminals.” As we all know, a good majority of the time, prison simply breeds better, harder criminals, so if you take a non-violent person whose been convicted of a violent crime and throw them in prison, and a bill is passed that only benefits those convicted of non-violent crimes, no justice or reformation is really done. Petersilia and Joe Margulies, visiting professor of law and government at Cornell University, use something with inmates called risk assessment tools which uses “a variety of facts about the offenders’ criminal history, mental health status and prison record to statistically predict whether he or she is liked to commit crime in the future.” This seems a more beneficial way to assess who should benefit from certain reform bills rather than simply saying that “non-violent” should be the beneficiaries of said bill. The first article suggests we ought to consider the reasons why we see drug use as a crime in reference to prison overpopulation, and this article asks us to rethink what we see as “violent” and “non-violent” so that perhaps the U.S. prison population can decrease and everyone in prison has a fair chance at reformative justice. One thing both these articles asks us to do is rethink the way we’ve been taught to view certain things. Prison doesn’t work, so we need to think of new ways justice can work.
