Civic Issues II: How did we get here?

Now that we understand the magnitude of the issue and how crowded and ineffective prisons are, it is important that we understand exactly how we have made it to this point. We covered it briefly in the last piece, but there is still much to study in order to understand how we have gotten more prisoners per capita than any other country on the planet. (Though, it is important to note that some countries may not be reporting their prison population accurately.)

Back in the founding of the country, much focus was put on fair trials and protecting those who had been convicted. Even in the 1800s, a French sociologist, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to the US to study prisons and was amazed by the prisons working to make conditions better and more livable, something he had never seen in europe. Of course, he was not in support of the US’s other similar solution, slavery.

The US continued to do pretty well with not filling up the prisons until the 70s. The US government at this time felt the need to fight a new war, so politicians from both parties with Nixon leading the charge started the fundamentally flawed War on Drugs. They began the rhetoric that we needed to be tough on crime. While Nixon started the work of the war on drugs, Reagan took it all the way. He entered office with a little over 300,000 in prison and left to see a population of over 600,000. These numbers were disproportionately from communities of color. Even at the state level, prison rates boomed. It wasn’t only the federal government pushing this. In 25 years, from 1978, Texas quadrupled its prison count. (1)

But things got worse. The democratic party wanted to be the party that was harsher on crime, but the republican party would not have this, so there was a constant war on pushing tougher and tougher laws to “fight crime” This led to Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which bloated prisons beyond what anyone had before. The Bill allowed states to pass even harsher laws to appear tough-on-crime. And, in that year, every state had passed a minimum sentence law. It encouraged police to send more people to prison and for them to stay for a longer period of time. This set a strong precedent and in 1996, the democratic party showed off the effects of the law and how “tough on crime” they were. They pridefully showed off how they arrested more people than ever before. They even taunted that they expanded to sixty more crimes that receive the death penalty and encouraged the trying of young people as adults. 

But rest assured, this is not a partisan issue, Republicans had also been fighting to fill prisons and appear tough on crime. In fact, Barack Obama, a Democrat, has been at the forefront of decreasing prison populations as for the first time they had started to decrease under his term.Interestingly enough a 1994 Gallup survey revealed that 58% of African Americans supported the bill, while only 49% of white Americans supported it. This was largely due to the Crack epidemic that these communities wanted to see an end to.(2)

The four decades of “tough on crime” laws built up a system that arrested a great many people while doing little to make these people change how they act. Two things determine how many people are in prison at any given time.These are the number of people arrested and sentenced every year and the length of every sentence. Both of these factors have become very high in the united states through our work to be tough on crime. It has even become harder to avoid a sentence as bail and other ways to end a sentence have become far more difficult to achieve, which is especially preventative to the poor as they have no chance of paying off. 

Back in 1984, there was debate in many cases about disparity in different sentences for seemingly similar crimes. Thus, the U.S. Sentencing Commission was created which set standards for sentence lengths. However, this simply pulled up many sentence lengths to match some longer ones and continued to contribute to the lengthier prison sentences of the United States. Mandatory sentences fill prisons for a very long time. For example, if you sell 2 grams of cocaine in Mississippi, you are required to serve life without parole. And, it is important to note that none of these laws have had any effect on drug use as it had remained stable for the 40 years in which the war on drugs mainly occurred (1970s-2010). Drug sentences make up a staggering 55-60% of those incarcerated to federal prison.

In the 1990s, there was another fear, the rise in violent crimes. A number of famous cases developed in many people’s mind that those who commited violent crimes could not be reformed and should be separated from society for the rest of their life.This produced the “Three-strikes” laws which would give those who commit two or three offenses a life in prison. However, the crimes that fell under this law was not simply violent crimes, but also oft covered other crimes. The ACLU covers some ridiculous examples that were part of the three strikes policy:

“The ACLU documented thousands of cases of people sentenced to life without parole under habitual offender laws for nonviolent crimes as petty as siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts, breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch, attempting to cash a stolen check, acting as a go between in the sale of $10 of marijuana, or possessing a bottle cap smeared with heroin residue.” (3)

In 1984, the federal government abolished parole and 16 other states were soon to follow. This made it impossible for many people to leave prison early on “good behavior”. Now that we understand why prisons are so full today and the history that brought us here, we need to explore the possible solutions in the next Civic Issues blog!