Mississippi Adopts California's Prison Policy Disaster
'Tough on crime' is a trap.
It's hard to imagine two more different states than Mississippi and California, but in at least one respect this odd couple will soon be forever in perfect harmony.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections, dancing to the state legislature's 'tough on crime' drumbeat, is leading the Magnolia State down the road to perdition. Criminal justice policies imported from other states are filling Mississippi's prisons to the rafters, creating a critical shortage of the resources, housing, and programming necessary to ensure those who enter the criminal justice system can be rehabilitated and need not come out worse than when they came in.
While the siren song of 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' is hard to ignore, Mississippi voters are far from helpless. If nothing else, let them avail themselves of a free glimpse at the future such fear mongering is tricking them into buying with their hard earned tax dollars before the whole show smashes itself to pieces on a reef called reality.
Over the last 30 years the California state lawmakers have crafted a Gordian knot of 'tough on crime' laws that have resulted in more than 35,000 people being sentenced to life in prison. The vast majority of them remain inside California's prisons to this day, alongside countless others sentenced to decades, hundreds, or even thousands of years. Despite recent efforts to steer out of the inevitable slide right off a fiscal cliff, 'lock 'em up' still haunts their state legislature in the form of a Department of Corrections whose annual budget has ballooned from 6.8 billion to 14.7 billion dollars in the same decade and a half that California's prison population actually declined from 170,000 to 94,000.
With such a massive need for correctional officers to staff so many prisons, and with such a mind boggling amount of money in the pipeline being diverted to corrections, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association rapidly became the most powerful union in the state. With its newly acquired vast resources it then took on an outsized role in California politics, using an overdeveloped lobbying arm to bribe or force state lawmakers to back draconian, nonsensical policies designed to keep as many people in prison for as long a time as possible.
When the state was flush nobody batted an eye despite the incredible efforts made to undermine the institutions of family and community and replace them with prison guards and parole officers, but now that California is skirting bankruptcy year after year by kicking the can down the road the evidence is only becoming clearer: once such a toxic system is given leave to grow, it roots deep.
Instead of investing in solutions to the causes of criminal behavior and finding ways to rehabilitate its prison population, California spent its money perpetuating the cycle. A bloated budget feeds union coffers, and union money flows back to amenable politicians who promise prison guards job security by ensuring those unfortunates who run afoul of the law will be thrown into the maw of a grinding machine that spares no thought for humanity. The irony is that running prisons like industries undermines the very thing they are supposed to protect: public safety.
"We do little or nothing to prepare people for the return to society in spite of the fact that we parole 10,000 people a month from our prison system. And I absolutely believe that we make people worse, and that we are not meeting public safety by the way we treat people. . . and for California to be in the shape that it's in is just unbelievable. " -Jeanne Woodford, former Acting Secretary of the California Department of Corrections
But that's California's problem. This is Mississippi. The Magnolia State is nothing like those folks out west.
Wrong. Mississippi is blindly following the exact same game plan. 'Tough on crime' is a trap. It's a tar pit that sounds good: the guilty should be held accountable and people need to be safe. Criminals can't be allowed to run wild [Dash] we can't be 'soft on crime.' But this false dichotomy is precisely the problem. There is no need to be either tough or soft on crime. God gave us brains, so we can instead choose to be smart on crime.
Tough on crime locks people up and throws away the key. That keeps them off the street, but it makes no provision for rehabilitation. What sense is there in imprisoning people if there is no effort made to show them a better path? To simply warehouse people for decades is expensive and pointless; if we are not releasing people with the job skills and self awareness to make a better life for themselves then what outcome might we reasonably expect? Instead of building a wall around them, we must build a bridge so that they can earn their way back to being contributing members of our shared society and good neighbors.
'Lock 'em up' and 'build more prisons' promises that no effort will be made to build a bridge at all. The proof of how such a hopeless scenario plays out sits just a few days' drive west along Interstate 10. Beyond the bright lights of the big cities and the glitz and glam of Hollywood, the Golden State's albatrosses hang like silent indictments tucked well out of sight.
California's thirty-odd state prisons, crammed to the gills, have become hotbeds of drug use and gang violence, quagmires of corruption and dysfunction whose medical and mental health services have degraded so far below the minimum constitutional standards of common decency that they are under receivership after the repeated intervention of the federal courts; they are also amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in contempt of court fined and are spawning new lawsuits by the day. The situation in California has reached a terminal phase, and against all logic the expense of running these toxic institutions continues to soar even as the prison population declines.
"The California Department of Corrections is the only agency whose costs keep rising even as the number of individuals they service goes down. If we were educating half as many children as we used to, the schools wouldn't cost twice as much, so why are we spending twice as much for the prisons after reducing the population by half? It makes no sense.” -Phil Ting, California state legislator
A reasonable question with an ugly answer: because the problems running rampant in California's prison bureaucracy and the continued maintenance and operation of its crumbling facilities are a cancer eating away at the bones, way past the point of no return. The wheels have come off and the state's entire criminal justice system may well grind to a halt because of the legislature's inability to manage the monster prison union money drove them to create.
Mississippi's own lawmakers have plotted a course along the same doomed route, embracing the foolish notion that expanding prisons and filling them past the breaking point makes communities safer. As overcrowding increases services degrade and the chance for rehabilitation dwindles to nil.
The cost of staffing such bleak dens of misery skyrockets because they become dangerous, necessitating ever more incentives to draw employees. Once prisons become hopeless hellholes few decent souls wish to work there so indecent ones line up to fill the gap. Drugs flood the cellblocks and abuse runs rampant, bringing with them the inevitable cascade of consequences: violence, riots, neglect, death, class action lawsuits and federal intervention, rising staff suicide rates and more crime in the communities into which these abandoned souls are released.
And that's just the introduction to the nightmare of not choosing value people and investing in being smart on crime rather than tough. Should there be any doubt as to where the 'lock 'em up' train pulls into the station, any Mississippian worth their salt ought to cast their eyes westward and see what becomes of a state that sells out its own citizens and neighbors, and turns their prisons into a for profit industry.