“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Time is running out for Congress to pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. Congress is adjourned until after Labor Day. At that point, there will be just five weeks to reach an agreement so the bill to receive a vote. All things considered (such as that it took 18 months for SRCA to get out of committee), the bill is dead in the water.

The SRCA would have reduced certain federal mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, established programs to reduce the number of repeat offenders and allowed many federal inmates to earn time credits for completing rehabilitative programs in prison.

It is widely publicized that the United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate. With less than 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. houses about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This system does not fit with the kind of America that so many have fought and died for or the nation that our Founding Fathers envisioned.

According to an article from 2015 in the Washington Post, “the United States relies more on jails and prisons for people who otherwise would have been diverted to non-institutionalized care (i.e., people with mental health or substance abuse issues, the homeless, the youth).”

More than 2.3 million people are held in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, 79 Indian country jails, military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers and prisons in the U.S. territories.

These figures should be a wake-up call, but the conditions behind bars — overcrowding, insufficient staffing, insufficient health care and abuse — add another level of urgency for the need to reform incarceration in America.

Who pays for this ineffective, enormous, punitive system? Mainly taxpayers, at the rate of tens of billions of dollars annually.

How did this happen in our country?

In a column last September the New York Times’ David Brooks stated, “First, the war on drugs got out of control, meaning that many nonviolent people wound up in prison. Second, mandatory minimum sentencing laws led to a throw-away-the-key culture, with long, cruel and pointlessly destructive prison terms.”

A more recent issue, Brooks noted, is that district attorneys are increasingly aggressive, bringing more felony charges against arrestees and thus sending more people to prison.

Brooks drew a conclusion that “the fundamental situation won’t be altered without a comprehensive surge, unless we flood the zone with economic, familial, psychological and social repair.”

The SRCA applies only to federal prisons but would have been a key step towards overall reform.

In absence of SRCA being passed, it is still possible to begin a sea change in our country, our state and our communities, starting with ordinary citizens taking action at the grassroots level. Send messages to lawmakers and sign up for human rights organizations like The Sentencing Project (sentencingproject.org) and American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org). Make your voice heard to improve this reprehensible, draconian system.

 

— Rochester Post-Bulletin, July 19