The results of the drug war in America are gruesome at every level. We are creating a vast prisoner underclass in this country who are increasingly unable to function in normal society, at a huge expense to tax payers.
The money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7 billion on the UC system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.
Even Pat Robertson has admit he was wrong about his harsh stance on incarcerating drug uses. If he can admit it, surely it is not too much to ask the same of America’s political leaders.
The California Reentry Program, a San Quentin-based nonprofit that helps soon-to-be parolees find jobs, housing and treatment, is hosting their second annual fundraiser concert.
This year the concert will feature a performance by the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash. According to Billboard magazine, the band captures the lonesomeness of Cash, the stripped-down melodies of Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, the rowdiness of Steve Earle and morphs them into a captivating collection that blends twang and sophistication. Not to missed!
Concert Details
Date: Sunday, Jan. 15
Time: 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Location: The Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. between Valencia and Guerrero Map
Cost: $40 (all proceeds go directly to the program)
Refreshments and drinks provided
You can buy a ticket at the door or online at: http://crp.pingg.com/show. (Be sure to switch the username in the top left corner.)
Working to Solve the Prison Crisis
With the recent Supreme Court ruling requiring California to reduce its prison populations, the services of CRP are more important now than ever. Releasing prisoners on the street will do little to reduce our prison population if parolees do not receive the assistance they need to reintegrate back into society.
By supporting CRP you are helping to reduce California’s overblown prison budget (currently greater than the education budget), while giving an ex-offender a second chance at life. This is a win-win scenario for taxpayers, our communities and all those who believe the criminal justice system unfairly targets low income and minority neighborhoods.
With Republicans signing pledges not to raise taxes and the likelihood that increased government austerity is going to make matters worse for struggling Americans, the only way out of the current debacle may be to entice the wealthier member’s of our society to put their money to work for the good of the country.
According to a recent report by JPMorgan, the need for social investing by the wealthy is acute because the scope of our social problems vastly overwhelms the ability of government and nonprofit organizations to finance solutions.
Wealthy American’s on average donate about 3.1% of their income to charitable causes, but much more is needed. To increase their level of financial commitment to bettering society is going to take significant monetary incentives. Fortunately, there is a new investment vehicle called a Social Impact Bond, which could potentially attract enough private capital to solve some our countries most egregious social and environmental problems.
What is a Social Impact Bond?
The UK investment firm, Social Finance, came up with the concept of Social Impact Bonds in 2009 as a scheme to fund large scale social innovation.
Social Impact Bonds enable governments to contract with private investors to provide funding for nonprofits working on long-term preventative programs that if successful would save taxpayers serious money. For example, if capital raised from the sale of a Social Impact Bond were used to funded ex-offender reentry programs that nationally reduced recidivism rates by 10%, state and federal governments could potentially save $3 to $5 billion per year.
Thus, conservatives are happy because taxpayers save money and progressives are happy because reducing recidivism will help end the new Jim Crow cast system brought on by the drug war and mass incarceration policies of the past 40 years.
Here’s how they work. First the government contracts with a mission-driven financial organization (MDFO), such as Social finance, to fund solutions to some social problem (e.g. reducing high school dropout rates). On the basis of this contract, the MDFO issues Social Impact Bonds to raises capital from investors. The MDFO uses this capital to hire qualified social service providers (i.e. non-profits) that can deliver the services necessary to meet performance targets set by the government. If the social targets are met (e.g. high school dropout rates decline by 10%) the government repays investors their principal plus a financial return. The size of the return is dependent to the degree to which outcomes improve.
This is really a Win, Win, Win scenario. The government takes on no financial risk, mission driven financial organizations have the financial freedom to experiment with potential solutions to serious social/environmental issues, and the investor receives a return if the outcome successfully saves the government money.
Are Critics Missing the Boat?
Not everyone is elated about the potential of Social Impact Bonds to solve social problems. Critics of this approach believe that its government’s responsibility to fund the public good and that commercializing this process will eventually jeopardize services that don’t actualize a monetary gain for taxpayers.
This argument, however, seems spurious as Social Impact Bonds don’t cut out government services. Instead, they target preventative solutions to reduce spending on programs that are often the result of massive bureaucratic inefficiencies. Such inefficiencies, such as programs that increase spending on prisons while decreasing spending on the rehabilitation of prisoners, arise from short-term political thinking, special interest lobbies and the fear of making a mistake with taxpayer’s money.
Many of us may feel that government has a moral duty to alleviate social injustice – especially those resulting from the institutional failures of our economic system. In reality, however, this approach has rarely worked because those in power have little incentive to pursue long-term creative policies. Social Impact Bonds offer a mechanism by which those with wealth and power (as well as those of us with more moderate means) can become part of the solution. Monetizing the social good may sound distasteful to some, but in the economic system we live in today, it may be the only chance we have for solving some of our most entrenched social and environmental problems.
...let these stories, these poems, these testimonies, these songs from behind bars, serve ever to remind us of the people we are locking up — men and women who are, for all they have done and that has been done to them, our brothers and sisters.” - Junot Diaz
Prison has been a fertile setting for artists, musicians, and writers alike. Books describing the prison experience, including the Autobiography of Malcolm X, have inspired audiences around the world and encompassed a wide range of literary styles.
This tradition continues at San Quentin Prison where the writing collective Brothers in Pen have just released a new Anthology titled “Six Cubic Feet.” The anthology is a collection of short fiction stories and memoirs by eighteen members of the collective and is available for purchase on-line from North Block Press at lulu.com. It is the sixth volume released by Brothers in Pen since there inception in 2006.
The range of subject matter in Six Cubic Feet is as wide as the imagination – illuminating all aspects of struggle and the human experience. These are stories about loss, failure, revolution, science fiction, success, pain, wonder, pride and love. These are stories about men who had made mistakes, men who had sacrificed for their families, men who were trying to envision a new and different world.
The foreword for Six Cubic Feet was written by Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot visited the collective several times during the writing of this most recent book to help inmate authors flex their narrative muscles and free their inner voice.
The Anthology is a culmination of over a year’s worth of labor by these men, many of them Lifers, all serious writers. All proceeds from the sale of this book go through the William James Association to support this creative writing class through the Arts-in-Corrections program.
The members of Brothers in Pen would love to get feedback from the general public about their work. You can leave comments for the authors by sending an email to brothersinpen@yahoo.com.
Arts in Corrections Programs
Brothers in Pen is part of a larger movement to bring arts into the prisons. These programs create opportunities for prisoners to participate in theater, painting, music, writing, and film production. Many in the movement believe that arts programs help inmates develop a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem, which are vital for a successful reintegration back into society.
A California Department of Corrections report also showed that participation in Arts in Corrections programs could reduce recidivism rates by 27%, potentially saving taxpayers millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, support for arts programs in prison have been gutted at the state and federal level. The work still continues, however, through the determination of volunteers and non-profit organizations. With the need for programs to accommodate the multitude of prisoners who want and need to change for the better, organizations like the San Quentin Arts In Corrections program and the William James Association deserve everyone’s support.
The guidance, experience, opportunity and rehabilitative prospects these groups offer to prisoners and the general public are outstanding and necessary.
One of the biggest supporters of prison privatization is Wells Fargo, a major beneficiary of the TARP bailout in 2008. The bank owns 4 million shares in the Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, and 50,000 shares in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the country. These shares combined are valued at more than $120 million .
Other major investors in one or both of these companies include Vanguard, Lazard, Scopia, Wellington Management, FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock and Bank of America.
Companies such as CCA and the Geo Group do not earn their money by providing goods or services to customers. Rather, they make their money solely from the government fun running immigrant detention centers, and federal and state penitentiaries. Detentions of immigrants alone is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year, much of which goes directly into the coffers of privatization firms.
As hedge fund managers and finance industry leaders like Wells Fargo increase their investment in the prison privatization complex, there is increased pressure on companies serving this sector to grow. To help secure profits CCA, the GEO Group and other firms have turned to lobbying congress for harsher punishments and longer sentencing guidelines, largely through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporatist conservative political group. According to the Nation:
ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.)
ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees.
ALEC helped amend the Prison Industries Act in 2004 to allow correctional institutions to withhold inmate wages in order to offset the cost of incarceration and pay for the construction new prison facilities. Because of these changes to the Act, prisoners are become a growing cheap labor force that is starting to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In fact it has become so cheap that several states are now looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor.
These are just a few examples of how privatization companies and Wall Street are shaping our criminal justice system and spurring on the continued mass incarceration of U.S. citizens (especially minorities and the working poor).
Meanwhile the growth of the industry has been very profitable for investors. A recent report by the Justice Policy Institute, called ‘Gaming the System’, found that since 2000, the number of prisoners held in private federal prisons increased by 120 percent, while those detained in private state prisons shot up by 33 percent. Perhaps more important to shareholders, however, is the fact that revenues have increased by over 160% during the same period. This has occurred at the same time that crime rates throughout the country have been in decline.
To help fight the ongoing privatization of prisons, community groups and unions across the US, are calling on all public and private institutions to divest their holdings in CCA, the GEO Group and other American private prison corporations.
They are also asking Wells Fargo customers to ask their bank to divest. If that doesn’t work, then perhaps its time to move your money to a Community Bank of Credit Union. Why not put your savings to work building neighborhoods instead of destroying lives.
The following video was produce by Immigrants For Sale to illustrate how private prisons companies are profiting from the detention of undocumented (and documented) immigrants.
When it comes to state spending, one of the biggest boondoggles is our prison budget. California spends almost 11% of its general funding on maintaining its overcrowded prison population, about 25% more than it spends on education. Not only is this insanity helping to bankrupt the state, but it is sacrificing the future of our children. We are simply throwing money down a rat hole in order to warehouse a large population of non-violent offenders, in overcrowded conditions (currently, non-violent offenders make up over 60 percent of the prison and jail population, with drug offenders accounting for about a quarter of the population).
To reverse the mass incarceration policies of the past 40 years and help end wasteful taxpayer spending on a broken system, Senator Jim Webb (D) introduced the National Criminal Justice Act (NCJA) in congress. This Act would establish a bipartisan commission charged with studying the effects of the drug war and prison overcrowding at the national, state, local levels. Its findings and recommendations would then be released in the first comprehensive report since 1965 on the state of criminal justice in America.
The bill is supported by organizations across the political spectrum, from the NAACP and the ACLU to the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Fraternal Order of Police.
Unfortunately, like most bills in congress these days, partisan belligerent has stopped the NCJA dead in its tracks. Given the opportunity to champion a more fiscally responsible approach to criminal justice, Senate Republicans put their foot squarely on the breaks and said hell no.
Republicans claimed they voted against the NCJA because it would encroach on state’s rights. In a slew of interviews following the vote, opposing Senators had virtually nothing to say about the state of the criminal justice system in the US or its effect on states’ budgets. Instead, they simple criticized the bill for overstepping its authority.
A recent editorial in the New York Times admonishes the short-sightedness of Republican’s for refusing to support the Act (see below). For a group that is so dogmatic about slashing spending, their refusal to even look at ways to reduce wasteful prison spending is the height of hypocrisy.
Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, has a smart proposal to create a bipartisan commission to review the nation’s troubled criminal justice system and offer recommendations for reform. The National Criminal Justice Commission Act would be a valuable first step toward reducing crime as well as punishment. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans derailed the bill recently, with some falsely claiming that it would encroach on states’ rights.
As a means of controlling crime, America’s prisons are notoriously inefficient and only minimally effective, often creating hardened criminals out of first-time offenders. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, yet 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. In the past generation, the imprisonment rate per capita in this country has multiplied by five. There are 2.3 million Americans in prisons and jails. Spending on prisons has reached $77 billion a year.
While crime has gone down notably, just 10 to 25 percent of the decline can be credited to the increase in imprisonment. The rest is from the waning of the crack epidemic, the aging of the baby boomers and other factors.
Even as the prison population has grown, less than half of the inmates are serving time for violent crimes. Far too often, prison has become a warehouse for people with drug or alcohol addiction. More than half of the population has some form of mental illness. Without proper addiction and psychiatric treatment, many end up back in prison soon after their release.
The incarceration rate has had a devastating effect on minority communities. African-Americans, who make up one-eighth of the population, now make up about 40 percent of those in prison. African-American men have a one-in-three chance of spending a year or more in prison. The trend affects whole communities, depressing earnings and increasing recidivism.
There are, however, ways to end this cycle of incarceration. This could be done by reducing sentences for nonviolent offenses, ending mandatory minimum sentences and cleaning up drug markets nationally. Reasonable senators should support the bipartisan commission that Senator Webb is calling for, which would cost only $5 million and could help bring about compelling reforms.
In the video below, former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger(R) in 2010 state of the state speech talks about how 11% of the general budget is spent on prisons and only 7.5% on education.
