America Behind Bars: Why Attempts at Prison Reform Keep Failing

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared plans in January 2005 to reform California's prisons, starting with a rebranding campaign (it's the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation now), his announcement signaled much-needed relief for California taxpayers, whose overstretched, scandal-prone prison system was screaming for an overhaul.

But three years later, California maintains the second-highest prison population in the country (171,444 in January 2008) and the highest recidivism rate (a staggering 70 percent).

From the start, people familiar with the embattled prison system were skeptical. "Everybody's going to get new business cards and letterheads," said Lance Corcoran, vice president of the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association, "but we haven't changed with respect to providing inmates anything different."

Gov. Schwarzenegger's largely failed attempts at prison reform -- e.g. reducing the overall prison population and releasing low-risk, nonviolent offenders early -- is a reflection of a larger economic and political dynamic playing out across the country. On one hand, people are starting to realize that bloated prison systems are a resource suck on an already troubled economy. On the other hand, many people -- even in that liberal bastion, California -- cling to the misguided idea that locking up large numbers of lawbreakers will keep the public safer. That leaves politicians like Schwarzenegger trying to straddle a line between appearing "tough on crime" and pushing for meaningful reform. So far, the former has won out. In many ways, California is a microcosm of the American prison crisis -- one that has reached alarming proportions.

The most recent proof is summarized in the title of a report released last week by the Pew Center on the States: "One in 100: Americans Behind Bars 2008." The study examines the state of adult America (no juveniles were included) to deliver a sobering new measure of our incarceration nation. The title statistic alone is jaw-dropping, representing a historic high (or new low, depending on how you look at it) when it comes to American justice. With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in its prison population, well ahead of China (1.5 million) and leaving Russia in the dust (890,000). "Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America is also the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry," the study reports, "outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran."

As always, it turns out the "citizenry" disproportionately consists of black men over 18 (one in 15 are imprisoned) -- and particularly those between the age of 20 and 34 (1 in 9). Recidivism rates are also sky-high. According to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than a third of the people admitted to prison in 2005 were arrested on parole violations. "Nationally, more than half of released offenders are back in prison within three years," the Pew study reports, "either for a new crime or for violating the terms of their release." In 1998, thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, the number of nonviolent prisoners hit 1 million -- and has risen since then. The number of women prisoners is also rising, and black women are a microcosm of the national prison epidemic: One in 100 black women in their mid- to late 30s is behind bars.

It's a clarion call for reform, no doubt, but beyond its record-breaking numbers, the Pew study breaks no news -- at least not in the larger scheme of the American criminal justice system. It's a crisis decades in the making, and a 50-state Pew analysis released at the same time last year provided similarly startling projections of where our prisons and jails are headed, to far less fanfare. But one in 100 is a stark figure (and, in fact, the exact number is worse: 1 in 99.1). Thus, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran stories -- with the Post holding an online Q&A with one of the study's authors the day after it was released. The report even nudged its way into the presidential race: Hillary Clinton issued a press release on her campaign website that day bemoaning the "heartbreaking statistic" and invoking the need for "a president who will be tough on crime, but smart about it too." (As a senator representing a state whose rural regions are littered with the architecture of a prison explosion fanned during her husband's administration, it's an important statement -- if only a statement).