The U.S. is on a prison building spree constructing "security housing units" which are, in many aspects, a return to medieval dungeons in that prisoners are confined in small concrete boxes with steel-plate doors. Prisoners live in silence, except when they scream, and they are "extracted" from their cells by teams of guards in combat gear armed with stun guns.
Children as young as 10 years old are now considered to be competent to stand trial in juvenile court in many states, and most treat children as young as 14 as adults. As many as 150,000 children are now locked up in adult jails and prisons, and more than 2,300 of them are serving "life" terms, including 73 who were 14 or younger when they were arrested.
State prison costs now exceed every other public spending category, except for health care. In 2008, the states spent an estimated $47 billion on prisons–approximately $29,000 per prisoner. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has 36,000 employees deployed at 115 institutions to confine 204,000 inmates at an annual cost of $5.6 billion.
State and federal prison authorities are increasingly warehousing their prisoners in commercial facilities operated by private corporations. The Corrections Corporation of America operates 64 facilities netting an income of almost $38 million per year. One lawsuit against the corporation alleges that it operates overcrowded facilities requiring inmates to sleep on the floor. The ACLU believes private companies are "notorious for cutting essential costs that need to be provided to maintain a safe and constitutional environment for prisoners."
Although some states are revising their mandatory sentencing laws and allowing early release of nonviolent offenders to reduce their prison populations and costs, we as a society have to fear a legislative conclusion in the future that all prisoners should be forced to work to pay for their own incarceration. We must never forget the words, Arbeit macht frei, or "work brings freedom," displayed above the entrance to Nazi concentration camps or our own Depression era chain gangs that resorted to whippings, tying prisoners to posts or locking them in "sweat boxes" to compel hard labor.
Or, might some fiscally concerned legislature decide that the cost of incarceration for murderers and repeat offenders is too high and that life sentences should be eliminated in favor of death sentences for everyone who poses a substantial risk to society? The United States is the only democracy that carries out executions, more than a thousand since 1976, including 22 juvenile offenders. We also voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution in December 2007 that called for a global moratorium on the death penalty. Are we going to follow the lead of China where more than 1,718 prisoners were executed last year, some for economic crimes?
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that a poor person accused of a crime has the right to competent and effective legal representation. With increasing case loads and decreasing budgetary resources, state and local public defenders have become so overburdened that some are refusing to accept more cases. In 2000, the Justice Department found that public defender "contracts are often awarded to the lowest bidder without regard to the scope or quality of services, organizational structures are weak, workloads are high, and funding has not kept pace with other components of the criminal justice system. The effects can be severe, including legal representation of such low quality to amount to no representation at all, delays, overturned convictions, and convictions of the innocent." This report was issued during flush economic times. What will become acceptable as the public coffers are emptied?
Can we expect President Obama to be more respectful of individual rights than President Bush was? An answer can be found in his recent request for the Supreme Court to reverse its own 23-year-old decision prohibiting police from questioning a represented defendant until his lawyer is present.
President Obama has already sought to restrict the right of prisoners to test the genetic evidence used to convict them, invoked the "state secrets" privilege to block essential discovery in civil lawsuits, and has decided to continue the imprisonment of "enemy combatants" in Afghanistan without trial.
Scared yet? Fear is not a bad thing, unless you let it paralyze you. Do all you can–before it’s too late.
