Prison and Sentencing Reform

Here are a couple questions I would like to see asked of all of the Presidential Candidates:

• What is the explanation for the trends depicted by the following two graphs?
• What is the relationship between the two graphs?

As presented in a previous post, the first graph shows the rapid growth in the share of income going to the top 10% since 1980.  The bottom graph portrays a remarkably similar slope over the same time period in the incarceration rate.

The bottom graph is taken from a very thorough wikipedia article on U.S. incarceration rates.  As the article points out, other nations have similar arrest rates, but prisoners in the U.S. serve much longer sentences for similar offenses, resulting in much greater numbers of people in custody.  Contributing factors cited in the article include the Three-Strikes laws passed by many states, a huge increase in people jailed for drug offenses, and the growth of the privatized prison industry which relies on a steady stream of new prisoners to stay in business.

Similar graphs can be drawn to show increases in health and educations costs, and probably for quite a few other  issues as well. 

Political Prisoners

I've been thinking about two political prisoners in particular lately because they have both been in the news: Chelsea Manning and Leonard Peltier.  Manning is looking at a couple decades of imprisonment.  Peltier has already served forty years.  Setting aside for a moment the particulars of their cases, one thing they have in common is that neither would present any danger to society if freed today. Their retention in custody primarily serves symbolic and political purposes.  The main function of these symbolic detentions is to deter dissent.  It probably does work to some extent to tamp down the rate of  similar offenses and associated dissent, but it does so at great cost.

And then there are all the essentially non-political prisoners, people incarcerated for a great variety of crimes.  A great many of those have been locked up for non-violent transgressions.  Many are elderly and in ill health like Peltier.  The rationale for keeping them locked up for extended periods seems very thin.   What portion of the prison population do they represent?  Thousands?  Hundreds of thousands?  A clue is to be found in the facts that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country and that the 2.2 million people in U.S. prisons represent a 500% increase over the past thirty years.   It seems abundantly clear that the whole judicial and penal system needs rethinking.