Strange Bedfellows

I was sent a copy of the recently released NAACP report calling for a change in current incarceration policies. The report appropriately titled “Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate” (http://naacp.3cdn.net/01d6f368edbe135234_bq0m68x5h.pdf)  is a scathing indictment of America’s love affair with prisons. What was truly ironic is who is standing with the NAACP and their clarion call for reform. Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform – a conservative advocacy group – stood directly behind NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous as he presented the report. Republican Presidential hopeful and former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich sent a letter of support. What would bring such diverse parties together? Sadly, it is the growing realization that this nation’s prison system is failing. They say politics makes strange bedfellows. Perhaps justice requires even stranger ones.



The NAACP report is eye opening for its simple, direct message. They call the current system the “prison industrial complex”. That is quite an apt name for a system nationwide that costs almost $70 billion per year to maintain. As I’ve pointed out before, the lucrative sweetheart contracts given by state DOC’s to conglomerates like Keefe and Global Tel Link line private pockets at the expense of taxpayers, inmates and their families alike.


As the recent Pew Center Study (http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/Pew_State_of_Recidivism.pdf)  showed, increased spending and incarceration rates have done nothing to reduce recidivism. In fact, the opposite has happened. Shortly after the Pew Study was released, Virginia began touting the fact that “sixteen years after banning parole, Virginia has defied the nation’s unshakably high recidivism level…”


The story reported that Virginia’s 2007 recidivism rate (for inmates released three years earlier) was 28.3 percent versus a national rate of 43.3 percent. Buried just below that “amazing statistic”, attributable to Virginia’s unjust denial of early release to model inmates, was this fact, “the rate has edged up slightly since 2000”. In other words, the rate was lower just after parole was abolished. Sounds to me like the trend is going the wrong way.


As the Washington Post noted in an editorial on April 18, the “NAACP report…is the most recent to argue convincingly that public safety can be preserved and tax dollars saved with smarter policies…Individuals must be held accountable for breaking the law, and in many cases, especially those involving violent offenses, imprisonment is the best way to protect public safety…But the levels of incarceration are financially unsustainable and in many instances counterproductive…”


The “radical proposals” the NAACP came up with that are supported by all these conservatives include shortening prison terms (recommendation # 8) and increasing parole release rates (recommendation # 9). Ironically, at the recently completed session of the General Assembly, Delegate Donald McEachin’s proposed bill to give Virginia inmates enrolled in vocational or educational programs (and the classroom aides) ten days of earned good time credit (versus the current 4 ½) never made it out of committee.


Sadly, it appears that the NAACP report, along with all the other evidence being compiled to show that prison reform is needed is falling on deaf ears here in Virginia.


In a Washington Post letter to the editor (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/window-dressing-in-virginia/2011/04/15/AFFX03vD_story.html) on April 15th, Vienna resident John Horejsi, a member of Governor McDonnell’s “Prisoner and Juvenile Re-entry Council” noted that of the numerous recommendations made by this group on issues addressing recidivism, parole, taxpayer costs, “only one…unfortunately, was presented to go forward.” He then said the following:


“There is widespread agreement that we, a group of citizens asked by the governor to serve, were perhaps no more than window dressing.”


Is Governor McDonnell just another politician using “tough on crime” sound bites to buy votes or is he courageous? The answer will be seen if he becomes a strange bedfellow of the NAACP report.