Arizona prosecutors, corrections officials, even legislators say they’re appropriately tough on crime and don’t put people in prison unnecessarily.
They point to education, diversion and rehabilitation programs at work in the county and state that, indeed, are doing some good work.
They say that, and yet statistics show that — on the broad point — they’re dead wrong.
Arizona had just 3,377 state-prison inmates in June 1979, when the state’s population was 2.6 million, an auditor general’s report noted. Now with Arizona’s population at about 6.7 million, the number of prisoners is higher than 42,000.
That’s more prisoners than in any state of similar size in the United States. Washington has about 18,000; Indiana has about 28,000; Massachusetts has about 11,000; Tennessee has about 20,000.
It’s not about crime rates — ours have been going down for more than a decade.
This state is completely out of whack. And yet, rather than working to curb our costly incarceration mania, we are going out to bid for 2,000 more prison beds.
That’s $50 million more down the drain.
As my colleague (and wife) Patty Machelor and former colleague (and not wife) Emily Bregel showed last Sunday, there are several proven ways to keep people out of prison or help them re-enter society without reoffending. Rather than embracing cost-efficient and productive ways to deal with non-dangerous criminals, though, we dabble in them.
Under the prisoner transition program, for example, inmates get out up to 90 days early in order to receive drug rehabilitation services. Among prisoners who went through the program in 2011, 10 percent reoffended within three years. That compares to 20 percent of those released that year who did not go through the program.
But even though the program has reduced recidivism and helped create productive citizens, few get the chance to take part.
About 18,000 prisoners were released in the fiscal year that ended Tuesday, but only 940 prisoners participated in the program.
Why so few in a program that has proven successful? The Department of Corrections blames it on the laws that govern the program. DOC spokesman Andrew Wilder told me the department wants to expand the program, but eligibility requirements would have to be loosened by the Legislature in order to allow more prisoners in.
But state Sen. Steve Pierce, a Prescott-area Republican, told me the department has been setting administrative rules that keep prisoners out of the transition program. He sponsored a bill last session that would have forced the Corrections Department to put the most eligible 3,500 released prisoners in the program this fiscal year, and 5,000 the next year.
“They say, ‘We don’t have enough people to go into it,’ “ Pierce told me. “My bill was going to say, ‘You have to put people into it.’ “
The bill didn’t pass, of course. Jeff Taylor, who lobbies for the Salvation Army and worked with Pierce on the bill, told me they call those who make it into the program “the chosen few.”
So while we wait for the transition program to be expanded, the state is requesting for 2,000 more beds that wouldn’t be needed if we released more prisoners early through the transition program.
“The DOC budget has never been cut,” Taylor said. “We went through our worst budget crisis ever, and they’ve grown. We are rewarding bad behavior with more money.”
Why would we do that? It looks like a combination of ignorance, entrenched interests and political fears.
Many legislators don’t understand the complexity of the corrections system, so they keep in place mandatory minimum sentences and requirements that prisoners serve 85 percent of them. The corrections industry, public and private, also protects its perverted interest in keeping people imprisoned. And elected officials worry about being called soft on crime. Still.
As Taylor said, “You don’t get a lot of votes for letting people out of prison early.”
Assistant Pima County Public Defender Joel Feinman accused County Attorney Barbara LaWall in the Star on Wednesday of not using enough alternative approaches and taking too much of a tough-on-crime view of defendants. Feinman is planning a run for the Democratic Party nomination for county attorney against LaWall.
“The county attorney’s office has tremendous resources that they are underutilizing,” Feinman told me, pointing especially to programs that allow for deferring the prosecution of defendants who complete a program. “Diversion is a gigantically underused resource.”
LaWall pointed out she’s the one who’s been pioneering programs such as diversion and the Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison.
“One of the things I’ve always talked about is being tough on violent crime. You’ve got to hold them fully accountable, as much as possible,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for alternatives to incarceration. I’ve been a strong proponent of that from the beginning of my career.”
“I think that’s being smart on crime.”
“Smart on crime.” It sounds like a phrase that could win votes, or at least fend off accusations that a candidate is soft.
So why are we still stupidly spending our money on more prisons?
