Moms Rising & PeaceTeam.net & William Saletan / Slate – 2016-02-28 15:02:20
http://action.momsrising.org/sign/Sentencing_Reform_2016/
1 Million Women Are Behind Bars in the US
Moms Rising
(February 25, 2016) — The United States has the largest prison population and the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. Children lose the most in this trend with more than 2.7 million children in the US having an incarcerated parent.
1,000,000 women, mostly mothers are behind bars in the United States. [1] Two-thirds of the women in federal prisons are serving time for challenges related to nonviolent drug abuse. They need treatment and counseling, not incarceration.
Our justice system is failing families, hurting our economy and in need of some serious reforms. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, which is nothing to brag about. [2]
In fact, we are living in a time when more than 2.7 million children in the US have an incarcerated parent and approximately 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives. [3]
Harsh sentencing practices have done more harm than good. Strict penalties designed to combat the distribution of illegal drugs have done little to stem the drug trade; instead the result has been a massive sweeping of people experiencing challenges related to drug addiction into an ever-expanding criminal justice system that directly fractures families and hurts our economies.
Overall, the United States has the largest prison population and the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. [4] Children and families lose the most in this trend with more than 2.7 million children in the US having an incarcerated parent. That is 1 in 28 children. [4] Women are the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population. [5]
This excessive incarceration is harming our nation, our economy and our families while for-profit prison corporations earn billions of dollars. [6]
Furthermore, mandatory minimums have been used against people from communities of color at a staggeringly disproportionate rate: Over the past several years, the US Sentencing Commission has reported that about seventy percent of mandatory minimums are imposed on African American and Latino individuals. [7]
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act is one step in the right direction and will enact much needed changes to our justice system. By reducing lengthy prison sentences for certain nonviolent drug offenses and providing those currently incarcerated with the opportunity to petition the court for a reduction in their sentence.
ACTION:Tell the Senate to act now! The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act doesn’t fix everything, but it is a step in the process of reducing America’s alarming incarceration rate.
We know that no ONE piece of legislation can solve all of the problems, but the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has some positive measures. The bill includes reforming the “three strikes” penalty that mandated life sentences for certain individuals by reducing it to a term of 25 years. A similar provision that mandated 20-year sentences for certain individuals has been reduced to 15.
Judges are given more discretion to sentence below prescribed mandatory minimums by the expansion of the existing “safety valve” and the creation of a new authority for judges to depart from certain mandatory minimums.
These measures work toward ensuring that strict mandatory minimums are not imposed on individuals who have little or no criminal history and whose alleged conduct was not the sort envisioned by these strict penalties.
However, we are concerned about some provisions in the bill that would add new mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes. Our country would be better served not by including this provision, but by making investments to strengthen community health and prevent crime. There is a lot of good in this bill and your voice is needed to help move it forward!
Not only are many mandatory minimums reduced, there are excellent provisions in this bill that provide for the expansion of pre-release and reentry programming. These programs will assist incarcerated persons as they prepare for life after release and will help lower the chances that they will reoffend.
America should be a nation of second chances. With this bill, individuals who had no hope of ever leaving prison will be given release dates and can look forward to returning home to their families and contributing to their communities.
Provisions of this bill also provide for the expansion of pre-release and reentry programming. These programs will assist incarcerated persons as they prepare for life after release and will help lower the chances that they will reoffend.
The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act is a much needed first step to creating a fairer criminal justice system,but we have a long way to go! Join us for the long haul by making it a launching pad for other necessary reforms in the future.
Citations
[1] [7] http://action.momsrising.org/go/6628?t=10&akid=7679.2340067.NKxGGA
[2] [6] The Pew Charitable Trusts: Pew Center on the States. Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility. Washington, DC. 2010
[3] [5]http://action.momsrising.org/go/6630?t=13&akid=7679.2340067.NKxGGA
[4]https://action.momsrising.org/go/6580?t=15&akid=7679.2340067.NKxGGA
States of Incarceration: The Global Context
Prison Policy Initiative
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its US counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world.
— Cindy Chang, The Times-Picayune, May 13, 2012
Introduction
The state of Louisiana is often called out for having the highest incarceration rate in the world. But in the global context, how far behind are the other 49 states, really? This report finds that the disturbing answer is “Not very far.”
Around the globe, governments respond to illegal activity and social unrest in many ways. Here in the United States, policymakers in the 1970s made the decision to start incarcerating Americans at globally unprecedented rates. The decades that followed have revealed that the growth in the US prison population can be more closely attributed to ideological policy choices than actual crime rates.
The record also shows that our country’s experiment with mass incarceation has not managed to significantly enhance public safety, but instead has consistently and disproportionately stunted the social and economic wellbeing of poor communities and communities of color for generations.
In the above graphic, we charted the comparative incarceration rates of every US state alongside the world’s nations. While there are certainly important differences between how US states handle incarceration, placing each state in a global context reveals that incarceration policy in every region of this country is out of step with the rest of the world.
The Data
The US incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. In fact, our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world. Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations, the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country.
Nearly all of the countries with relatively high incarceration rates share the experience of recent large-scale internal conflict. But the United States, which has enjoyed a long history of political stability and hasn’t had a civil war in nearly a century and a half, tops the list.
If we compare the incarceration rates of individual US states and territories with that of other nations, for example, we see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, which is the nation with the second highest incarceration rate in the world.
New Jersey and New York follow just after Cuba. Although New York has been actively working on reducing its prison population, it’s still tied with Rwanda, which has the third highest national incarceration rate.
Rwanda incarcerates so many people (492 per 100,000) because thousands are sentenced or awaiting trial in connection with the 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people.
Next comes the state of Washington, which claims the same incarceration rate as the Russian Federation. (In the wake of collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia used to rival the United States for the highest incarceration rate in the world.
An epidemic of tuberculosis in the overcrowded prisons, however, encouraged the Russian government to launch a major amnesty in 1999 that significantly lowered that country’s incarceration rate.)
Utah, Nebraska and Iowa all lock up a greater portion of their populations than El Salvador, a country with a recent civil war and one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
Five of the US states with the lowest incarceration rates — Minnesota, Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island — have higher incarceration rates than countries that have experienced major 20th century social traumas, including several former Soviet republics and South Africa.
The two US states that incarcerate the least are Maine and Vermont, but even those two states incarcerate far more than the United State’s closest allies. The other NATO nations, for example, are concentrated in the lower half of this list. These nations incarcerate their own citizens at a rate five to ten times lower than the United States does:
Conclusion
These data reveal that even the US states that incarcerate the smallest portion of their own citizens are out of step with the larger community of nations.
As US states continue to reevaluate their own hefty reliance on incarceration, we recommend that they look to the broader global context for evidence that incarceration need not be the default response to larger social problems.
Methodology
US State data: The Bureau of Justice Statistics has not published state-level estimates of the US jail population — which makes up 30% of the total mass incarceration pie — since 2006. To fill this gap, we used US Census 2010 data that shows the total number of people in each state who are confined in local, state, and federal adult correctional facilities.
This powerful census dataset comes with one quirk worth discussing: the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as if they were residents of prison locations rather than their home communities.
In the case of state prison systems that send a large number of people to prisons in other states, or in the context of federal prisons, this Census Bureau residence determination can influence a state’s incarceration rate calculated with that data.
But given the sheer size of the federal prison system alone — larger than the total prison population of every nation on the planet except for seven (China, Russian Federation, Brazil, India, Thailand, Mexico, and Iran) — it wouldn’t be appropriate to exclude this population from our data.
And while it is the federal government, rather than individual states, that determines how federal criminal laws are written and enforced, state politics certainly influence whether and where federal prisons are built.
Country Data
This report and graphic draws incarceration rates for individual nations from the World Prison Population List, 10th edition, (2013) prepared by Roy Walmsley at the International Centre for Prison Studies (available at: http://www.prisonstudies.org/resources/downloads/wppl_10.pdf).
To make the comparisons more meaningful, we’ve chosen to only include nations with a total population of at least 500,000 people. The United Kingdom figure in the graph about incarceration rates among NATO founding members is calculated from the incarceration rates reported by Roy Walmsley’s World Prison Population List for the individual nations of England & Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
About
This report was a collaboration between Peter Wagner, Executive Director at the Prison Policy Initiative, Leah Sakala, Senior Policy Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, and Josh Begley.
Earlier collaborations have included an infographic about whether the states that bar the most people from the polls should in fact be picking the next president and Prison Map, a website exploring the geography of incarceration.
Citations
1. Cindy Chang, “Louisiana is the world’s prison capital,” The Times-Picayune, May 13, 2012. Accessed January 29, 2014 from: http://www.nola.com/crime/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html.
2. For an in-depth discussion of the limited relationship between crime rates and incarceration rates, see The Crime Drop in America, Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2000.
3. See, eg. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds. (New York: The New Press, 2002); Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect of Economic Mobility, (D.C.: Pew Charitable Trusts), 2010. Accessed January 29, 2014 from: http://www.pewstates.org/2010/Collateral_Costs.pdf.
4. To make the comparisions more meaningful, we’ve chosen to only include nations with a total population of at least 500,000 people.
5. Jan van Dijk, John van Kesteren, Paul Smith, Criminal Victimisation in International Perspective: Key findings from the 2004-2005 ICVS and EU ICS (The Hague: Book Juridische uitgevers), 2007. Accessed January 29, 2014 from: http://www.unicri.it/services/publications/ICVS2004_05report.pdf See especially Chapter 2.
6. Genocide statistic from United Human Rights Council, “Genocide in Rwanda” webpage. Acccessed on January 29, 2014 from: http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/rwanda.htm.
7. See BBC News, Amnesty for Russian prisoners, May 26, 2000 and see ITAR-TASS Russian MPs to consider amnesty bill in final reading, December 13, 2013 for the fact that there have been 18 successive amnesties in recent Russian history. (Accessed on June 10, 2014.)
8. World Bank, “Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people)” webpage. Accessed June 10, 2014 from: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?order=data_value-last&sort=asc
9. Roy Walmsley’s World Prison Population List (see methodology) provides incarceration rates for the individual nations of England & Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Because the multi-country United Kingdom is a NATO member, we aggregated Walmsely’s figures for the prison and national populatons for each member country to calculate the United Kingdom-wide figure for this comparison.
10. Iceland is a founding member of NATO but is excluded from this report, along with all other nations that have a total population of under 500,000 people. For the record, however, Iceland’s incarceration rate is 47 per 100,000, lower than even Norway’s.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
