Incarceration Nation

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently revealed in a Time magazine column what those of us inside already know – America is now “Incarceration Nation”.  America, “land of the free” and “home of the brave” has over 6 million people under “correctional supervision”.  That’s more people than Stalin held in the Soviet Union’s infamous gulag system.

There are many reasons for this, some benign, some well-intentioned, too many the result of political myopia.  But, as Zakaria noted, the worst of the American political system can be seen in the growth of the prison-industrial complex.  “Tough on crime” politicians – in Virginia it’s been “abolish parole”/longer sentencing politicians – helped fuel the money trail.  “Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals . . . Partly as a result; the money states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the last 20 years.”

Governor McDonnell touted relief for Virginia families facing ever increasing tuition demands from the Commonwealth’s university system.  He gave higher education lip service while turning a blind eye to the bloated, badly mismanaged bureaucracy that is Virginia’s Department of Corrections.  Thirteen thousand employees, almost 40,000 inmates, over $1 billion a year to maintain a system that houses a majority of those inmates in level 1 or 2 facilities, all the while the recidivism rate remains flat and not one dollar of state money goes to the very program that reduces recidivism:  college education. 

Like his predecessors, Governor McDonnell talks a good game; most snake oil salesmen do.  But, Virginia needs leadership.  And, leadership means it’s time to change the way things are done.

In a May 2011 release, the Institute for Higher Education Policy advised that the single most effective determiner to recidivism was an inmate earning a college degree.  No prison program has a more lasting effect in breaking the cycle of recidivism than college.  Ironically, forty-three states participated in the study.  Virginia chose not to.

As I read the Institute’s findings and reflected on my own experience in here working with the college students, I understood how right, how easy, it is.  Give an inmate an education and you give them hope and skills to make it on the outside. 

So why does Governor McDonnell refuse to spend even one dollar on the college program here, a program internationally recognized twice in the last month?  Why is the Governor willing to spend millions on a software program that is easily manipulated (questions seek to determine remorse and empathy levels) to identify “recidivism risk” rather than any money on the one identifiable method of eliminating recidivism?

Perhaps things will change.  The founder of Governor McDonnell’s law school, Regents University, recently came out in favor of prison reform and dramatic reductions in America’s incarceration levels.  Rev. Pat Robertson joins a growing list of Republicans and Conservatives who are calling for drastic changes in America’s love affair with corrections.  The leaders in that movement, RightOnCrime.org released new polling data from the Pew Center which showed 84 percent of respondents agreed that tax dollars could be shifted from prisons to community corrections alternatives for non-violent, low risk inmates.  Significantly, 77% of responding Republicans and 85% of independents agreed.

Perhaps change is coming to America’s, to Virginia’s, love affair with prison.  Each day I pray that today is that day.