Proponents of extended mandatory sentencing point to statistics which reveal extremely high recidivism and re-arrest rates as strong evidence that money spent on rehabilitation programming was wasted due to the fact that many prisoners return to a criminal lifestyle shortly after release. This line of reasoning appears to have some credence when one reviews the recidivism statistics. The Bureau of Justice Statistics as far back as 1983 reported that of the 108,580 prisoners released from prisons in 11 states in 1983, representing more than half of all released state prisoners that year, an estimated 62.5% were re-arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, special report, Recidivism of Prisoners released in 1983. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.) In a separate study, BJS gathered 3 years of criminal history records for a sample of persons released from prison in 1983, the percentage of drug offenders re-arrested within three years of release was 50.4% (BJS Page 26 Drugs and Crime Facts 1994).

  This study revealed that a disproportionately high number of serious drug abusers were re-offending at an alarmingly high rate. Aggravating the situation is the fact that while free, substance abusers committed a high proportion of violent crimes. Among violent offenders in state prisons, 50% reported being under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of their offense. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Drugs and Crime facts, 1994 pg. 6). A strong push for stiffer mandatory sentences for substance abusers was initiated when it became clear that this particular population was disproportionately contributing to the overall crime rate. Based on such reports, proponents of mandatory prison sentencing found it easy to conclude that high recidivism rates could be interpreted as evidence that prison rehabilitation programs do not work.

   Proponents of mandatory sentencing ignored a large body of existing research by behaviorists on the ineffectiveness of punishment and surveys of treatment or rehabilitation options offered at the time by U.S. prisons revealing that treatment within U.S. prisons was relatively speaking, non-existent. (Ref. Pg. 10) As increasingly harsher mandatory sentencing policies were implemented and statistics became available reflecting the results of those policies, it was clear that drug violators were making up a quickly growing proportion of U.S. jail and prison populations.

   In 1980 drug offenders accounted for 25% of the Federal Prison population. In 1986, drug offenders made up 38% of the federal prison population. ((3) ONDCP 1994) ONDCP Drugs and Crime clearinghouse from Bureau of Prisons Key indicators strategic support system. January 25 1994.) The proportion of Drug Offenders in state prisons soared from 9% in 1986 to 21% in 1990. The proportion of drug offenders in local jails soared from 7% in 1983 to 23% in 1987. (ONDCP)

   Faced with rapidly increasing crime rates and the failure of probation or the threat of incarceration to stem this disturbing trend, legislatures came under increasing pressure from the public to do something about the growing problem of crime and violence. In 1981 politicians questioned the public as to what the people felt should be done to reduce the crime rate. In 1981 and 1989 two Gallup Polls were taken of the American public. Respondents were asked, "What is the most important thing that can be done to help reduce crime?" In 1981, 3% of the respondents mentioned cutting the drug supply, while harsher punishment, the most frequent response was mentioned by a full 38% of respondents. Only 5% reported that they felt provision of treatment programs for substance abusers would have any positive impact on the problem. (1993 BJS Source book of Criminal Justice Statistics, bureau of Justice Statistics, Drugs and Crime Facts 1994 Pg. 32.) In an effort to appease public sentiment, drug abusers, one of the quickest growing and most violent segments of the offender population were quickly targeted by new legislation based on the erroneous assumption that harsher punishment as expressed through longer, mandatory sentences would reduce crime.

   New and even harsher sentencing guidelines went into effect in 1986, 1987 and 1988. These new anti-drug abuse laws prescribed stiffer sentences and mandatory minimum incarceration terms for Federal offenders. The average Federal prison sentence for drug offenders rose from 62 months in 1986 to 86 months in 1991. The average percent of sentence served until first release increased from 60% in 1985 to 68% in 1990. Contributing greatly to these increases were the harsher sentencing guidelines that went into effect in 1987 and the 1986 and 1988 anti-drug abuse laws. (BJS Pg. 18 Drugs and Crime Facts, 1994.)

   Unlike many other industrialized nations who were dealing with addiction as a public health problem, the American people acted out the belief that drug addiction was a moral problem that would disappear if the punishment were made severe enough. This was despite the fact that addiction has been defined as a behavior that persists despite severe negative or punishing consequences. It was not long before these ungrounded policies began to result in an astronomical increase in our prison populations and began taking a heavy toll on U.S. taxpayers who were unwittingly paying the enormous costs associated with the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens.

   By 1993, drug offenders accounted for a full 61% of sentenced inmates in Federal Prisons. (ONDCP Drugs and Crime Clearing House from Bureau of Prisons Key indicators strategic support system, January 25, 1994.) U.S. prison populations began to grow astronomically. By the end of 1996, over one million one hundred eleven thousand Americans were behind bars. (BJS) Undeterred by prison overcrowding and rapidly escalating incarceration costs, U.S. policy makers continued to act as if harsher punishment in the form of longer mandatory sentences would keep offenders off the streets and deter them from criminal activity. By midyear, 1996 the total incarcerated population increased by 5.9%. (Prison and Jail inmates at midyear, 1997, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin. January, 1998, NCJ-167247 by Barrell K. Gillard and Allen Beck, Ph.D. BJS statisticians.) By midyear 1997 an estimated 1,725,842 persons were incarcerated in the nations prisons and jails. In 1996 an estimated 23% of state prison inmates and 60% of federal prison inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses. (NJC-167247 January 1988, Prison statistics, summary findings, U.S. Dept of Justice- bureau of Justice Statistics.) On December 31, 1997 state prisons were operating at between 15 and 24% above capacity, while Federal prisons were operating at 19% above capacity.

   A political attempt to deal with substance abusers through mandatory sentencing had resulted in epidemic prison overcrowding throughout U.S. prisons with 44 states having labored under Federal Court order to address overcrowding issues. (FBI statistics: www.sentencingproject.org).

   Despite burgeoning inmate populations and rapidly increasing evidence that countered the belief that longer and harsher punishment would eventually put an end to the drug use and criminal behavior of addicts, the crime rate remained almost unchanged. Every one involved with mandatory sentencing seemed to loose sight of the fact that untreated substance abusers were being released from our prisons on the back end, almost as quickly as they were being incarcerated on the front end.

   The emperor besides having no clothes also had an extremely expensive, invisible, revolving door of unprecedented proportions completely paid for by the taxpayers of this country with other more productive social programs being drained of funding to feed the prisons. Without challenging the soundness of the reasoning behind the incarceration of such massive numbers of people, or researching the damage done them and their families, the federal government instead reacted to the inhuman conditions being created by prison overcrowding. In some states super-max units were being looked at by some as cruel and unusual punishment. Due to the fact that they had crept into wide spread usage, they could not be considered unusual and consequently could be said to be cruel, but not unusual, evading legal challenge with regard to being cruel and unusual.

   In reaction to epidemic state prison overcrowding, federal courts issued orders mandating states to alleviate overcrowded prisons. This order motivated a rash of massive prison building projects. Dan Macalliar of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in California, commenting on the tremendous prison building spree taking place in that state reported that, since 1984, California had built 21 new prisons and only one new university. He went on to say, The prison building binge that California has engaged in has not had any effect on crime, in fact, in many cases, it has gotten worse (CNN 1996) November 2, 1996.). The immense number of U.S. citizens being incarcerated under mandatory sentencing policies was put into perspective by a WSWS news analysis presented on 8/7/98. This report stated that; as a proportion of the American population, the number of imprisoned people in the U.S. had quadrupled over the last 25 years. There are now as many incarcerated Americans as there are people in Houston, the fourth-largest city in the nation, and more than twice the number who live in San Francisco. In the state of Texas alone, there are 80,000 people in jails and prisons. This number is larger than the prison population in France or the United Kingdom, and roughly equal to the number incarcerated in Germany, a country of 80 million, four times more populous than Texas. (WSWS News and analysis, Jerry White August 7, 1998. WSW.ORG) Other prison monitoring groups assessing the seriousness of the situation also attempted to bring the immensity of the problem to the attention of the public.

   The Prison Sentencing Project Organization published a series of reports highlighting the fact that the U.S. incarceration rate is six to ten times higher than most other industrial nations in the world. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nations prison population beginning in 1973. The rate of incarceration within the U.S. of 645 per 100,000 is second only to Russia and represents a level of incarceration 6-16 times that of most other industrialized countries in the world. (Prison Sentencing Project 1998: www.sentencingproject.org.) Sentencing Project Organization spokeswomen Jean Gainsborough reported that at present, Russia has 685 people out of every 100,000 behind bars.

   A planned amnesty of 100,000 prisoners in Russia and continued increases in the U.S. inmate population means the United States probably will become the worlds leading jailer in a year or two.

   A 1997 analysis of prison population figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicated that the nations prison and jail population would reach a total of two million inmates by the year 2000 if current trends continue. (Prison Sentencing Project: www.sentencingproject.org).

  To bring the situation into clearer perspective, the New York Times reported that if the current trend continues - as law enforcement experts and criminologists predict it will - the number of Americans behind bars or on probation or parole will soon approach the 6 million students enrolled full-time in four-year colleges and universities. Within a decade the number of people behind bars will exceed the entire New York City Population, currently about 7.3 million. (Fox Butterfield, New York Times, August of 1995). The cost to the taxpayer of providing food, housing, security and medical care for these massive populations is enormous.

   Between 1980 and 1993 Federal spending on correctional activities rose in current dollars by 521percent The budget for adult corrections alone throughout the U.S. in 1996 was in excess of 27 billion 565 million dollars. (BJS) Expenditures are so enormous that other countries have taken note. The annual expenditure on criminal justice throughout the U.S. exceeds $70 billion.

   In many jurisdictions the cost of adult corrections alone rose by several hundred percent during the past two decades. (Wayne Northely - Director of victim Offender Programs of the Mennonite Central Committee in Canada.) What is the U.S. public getting for the 27 billion 565 million dollars spent on adult corrections and the overall 27 billion spend each year on the criminal justice system? Have mandatory sentences and longer incarcerations deterred criminals or decreased the recidivism rates? Are our streets safer than they were twenty years ago? In 1994 the Department of Justice reported that the great majority of recidivism studies of Federal Prison releases revealed that the amount of time inmates serve in prison does not decrease the likelihood of recidivism for non-violent substance abusers, whether recidivism is measured as a parole revocation, re-arrest, re-conviction, or return to prison. (Department of Justice Report, An Analysis of Non-violent Drug Offenders with Minimal Criminal Histories, Feb. 1994.)

   This document is optimistic in the face of mounting evidence indicating that the longer and harsher the incarceration, the higher the probability of recidivism. This makes intuitive sense considering a new prisoner is totally immersed twenty-four hours a day, often for years in an abusive society of violent felons. In 1983 the Bureau of Justice Statistics produced a special report that clearly showed the ineffectiveness of incarceration with regard to changing the behavior of incarcerated substance abusers. This three-year study revealed that the percentage of drug offenders re-arrested within three years of release was 50.4% (BJS Page 26 Drugs and Crime Facts 1994)

Another 11 state survey in 1983 reported that more than half, 62.5% of all state prisoners released were re-arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years. (BJS Special Report, 1983, Recidivism of Prisoners, Bureau of Justice Statistics.) Despite imprisoning at a greater per capita rate than any nation on the planet, the U.S. is experiencing a spiral of failure in crime reduction. (Wayne Northey Director of the victim offender programs of the Mennonite Central Committee in Canada.)

In 1991 an U.S. Senate Judiciary committee described the U.S. as holding the distinction of being the most violent and self-destructive nation on earth, leading the worlds democracies in murder, rape and robbery rates. The American public seems to subscribe to an Out of sight, out of mind philosophy with regard sending criminals to prison. The public does not appear to be aware of the fact that virtually all prisoners are eventually released directly back into their communities in the same or worse shape than when they were originally incarcerated. Prisoners being released without treatment and after being subjected to years of punishment and abuse are usually not in the best of moods upon release. Virtually nothing has been done to address the problems they entered prison with as rehabilitation programs which potentially could have helped them change are virtually non-existent or so small that they make no appreciable difference. If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always have got, and in our case there is no doubt that a steady stream of increasingly angry and maladjusted prisoners are constantly being released into our society with little or no treatment while incarcerated. Consider these statistics; of all federal inmates, only 9% were enrolled in some form of drug treatment on June 29, 1990. Among state prisoners, only 14% in confinement facilities were enrolled. (BJS Drugs and Crime Facts 1994, Pg. 22). Such statistics reveal that at about the time mandatory sentencing was initiated, rehabilitation programs were virtually non-existent.

This says nothing of the poor quality of contracted programs run by personnel with little experience with correctional populations and even less interest in monitoring the effectiveness of the outcomes of their programs. The result; after years of being subjected to a harsh, abusive prison environments, surrounded by some of the most violent and deviant human beings on the planet forcing compliance with inmate society values, virtually all of these people are then released into our communities, often in a state of turmoil. Many are unprepared to cope in a free society. Often they are set free with no job, little money and no place to go. After years of forced dependence on a prison system where all their physical needs are met and most of their decisions are made for them, society expects these people to function as normal, law abiding citizens. There is little awareness that people coming out of prison are not the people who went in, they are much too often changed for the worse. They are not the same human beings that they were prior to sentencing, but the changes are all too often not ones that would benefit society. Large numbers of prisoners are emerging from these "gladiator schools" after having spent more time learning tricks of the trade from other criminals that surround them than many of us spend in formal education in our life time.

When their terms are finished, after years of total immersion in a criminal subculture, they are released in a hardened, enraged, emotionally dead or crippled condition, mistrustful of society, government and authority, often without the benefit of half way houses to help them make the transition. Thrown directly onto the streets without the benefit of comprehensive relapse prevention programming during incarceration, unable to cope in a free society, many head for the nearest liquor store or crack house.

Society’s problems are further acerbated by the incarceration and immersion of large numbers of the mentally ill within these deviant criminal populations due to the scarcity of affordable mental health services in our communities. Proposition 13 dismantled large mental institutions, partly with the intent of treating mentally ill people in a more normal community setting, in a less costly environment. Funds were transferred from large state hospitals to community mental health centers and then slowly withdrawn making it very difficult for the mentally ill to get appropriate and affordable treatment anywhere. Difficulties getting mental health services that would have permitted many mentally ill people to remain stable in the community resulted in large numbers of these people, unable to get treatment ending up in prison. Unknown to the public, our prisons throughout this country have picked up the function of non-existent or seriously under-funded community mental health centers.

The mentally ill fared far worse within prison settings than they ever did in state hospitals and are often much more disturbed when released back upon society. Unable to be managed by conventional means, the mentally ill were often moved to the highest security settings and many served their time totally isolated or incarcerated with the most violent and disturbed of inmates. The federal government having deemed the kind of treatment the mentally ill were receiving bordered on cruel and unusual punishment, ordered prisons across the country to improve mental health services. Prisons were told that it was not acceptable to continue increasing the custody levels of the mentally ill to the point of their being locked in isolated cells similar to the primitive treatment they received over a century ago. Now, instead of being managed through community mental health centers at a cost of a few hundred dollars per year, the mentally ill, while incarcerated were costing taxpayers upwards of $28,000 per year. Bronstein, Director of Emeritus of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union reported that the number of mentally ill inmates in state and federal prisons burgeoned during and after the Regan years when government funding for the mentally ill was cut. Bronstein, noted that due to the difficulty of managing the chronically mentally ill inmate in harsh prison environments with inadequate mental health care, many of the seriously mentally ill ended up in maximum security units where they never saw the light of day. Referring to mentally ill inmates who were locked down in one western prison 24 hours a day, Bronstein reported, Your just creating monsters, when they come out their going to be so dangerous and so hostile and so out of touch with reality that they are like walking time bombs.

Stuart Grassian, a Harvard Psychiatrist on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School speaking on the same topic reported that there are many prisoners in these settings being released directly into the community in the most violent, crazed states. We think we are getting tough on inmates, were getting tough on ourselves. (Tucson Weekly) Not only have longer, mandatory sentences resulted in less than satisfactory results for the massive amounts of money being spent, but emerging research is indicating that the more severe the treatment of inmates, the higher their recidivism. Craig Haney, a national expert on the psychological effects of long term, solitary prison incarceration speaking of conditions found in a SuperMax unit in one western state said; "The long term lock down imposed on prisoners inside the states two supermax’s is, figuratively speaking, the prison systems sanctioned version of a straight jacket, yet even with inmates being forced to do such harsh time, this state has an overall recidivism rate of 39.5%."

It was later pointed out that this rate was probably in reality much higher but could not be accurately measured due to the transient nature of both the state's population and difficulties tracking releasees. Wayne Northerly, the Director of victim offender programs for the Mennonite Central Committee in Canada, responding to the cry of the Canadian public for harsher prison sentences after the commission of some particularly heinous crimes in that country summed up the results of massive U.S. incarceration to Canadian law makers in this manner:

Recent, highly publicized murders and other crimes across Canada have resulted in renewed calls for harsher punishments for offenders from political parties, victims groups and others. But harsher punishment such as longer sentences, restricted or no parole and a return to capital punishment will not lead to a reduction in crime. If harsher punishment was the answer, then the U.S. would lead the world in crime reduction. But crime has not been reduced in that country, despite the fact that the prison population doubled between 1980 and 1990. It seems politically expedient at present to call for harsher treatment of offenders.

I hope that the Canadian Government resists such pressures, for they are clearly counterproductive to the restoration and healing of persons. For if we give in to a tit-for-tat mentality when it comes to crime, we may ultimately destroy all that makes us civilized. Practicing an eye for an eye, as Martin Luther King observed will lead to a world of morally sightless people. (Wayne Northey, Director of Victim Offender Programs, Mennonite Central Committee, Canada.)

Full prison unit participation in Computer Assisted Programs
Figure 3. Click to enlarge.

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