Prisons are this century’s growth industry

PACKET EDITORIAL, April 26

By: Packet Editorial
   Plastics.
   Everybody remembers that one-word piece of whispered wisdom Mr. McGuire (played by Walter Brooke) delivered to the befuddled Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) in the 1967 hit movie, "The Graduate."
   Well, here it is 38 years later, and plastics is no longer the growth industry it once was. But there is plainly another career ladder the Mr. McGuires of the world should be importuning the Benjamin Braddocks of the world to start climbing without a moment’s hesitation.
   Prisons.
   What plastics were to the 1960s, prisons are to the 2000s.
   According to statistics released this weekend by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the prison population in the United States has been growing at a rate of about 900 inmates a week. In mid-2004, the nation’s prisons held about 2.1 million people, or one in 138 U.S. residents. This is a 2.3 percent increase over the number incarcerated in mid-2003, the bureau reported, and represents the largest prison and jail population in U.S. history.
   Fortunately, New Jersey does not mirror this national trend. As of January 2004, the population in state correctional institutions was 26,581 — down nearly 14 percent from a high of 30,263 in 1999. (This does not include the county jail population.) The ratio of state prisoners to New Jersey’s population is about one in 260 residents, well below the national average.
   Yet spending by the New Jersey Department of Corrections broke the $1 billion mark for the first time in the current fiscal year, and it’s expected to grow by another $50 million in next year’s "austerity" budget.
   And, unfortunately, in another important statistical category, New Jersey has the dubious distinction of outdoing the rest of the nation. In 2004, 61 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States were of racial or ethnic minorities. In New Jersey, the comparable number was 81 percent — 64 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic.
   If you watch a lot of television, you might think these numbers reflect the wave of violent crime that’s been sweeping the nation. After all, hardly a night goes by without the news at 6 and 11 offering multiple (and graphic) accounts of the latest homicide, rape, armed robbery, kidnapping or other violent crime perpetrated somewhere in the viewing area.
   But the violent crime rate in the United States has actually been falling steadily over the past decade — due primarily to a decline in the male population between the ages of 18 and 34, which has always been the most statistically significant variable affecting the nation’s crime rate. Our prisons are bursting at the seams — and eating up ever-larger chunks of state budget pies — not because more crimes are being committed but because prisoners are being sentenced for longer periods of time, mostly for drug offenses.
   The rash of get-tough-on-crime legislation in the 1980s and ’90s — laws like "three strikes and you’re out" for repeat offenders, and mandatory minimum sentences for crimes involving drugs — have greatly increased the amount of time the average inmate stays in prison. (In New Jersey, 63 percent of adult offenders are serving mandatory minimum terms.) So even as the crime rate has dropped, the number of people being sentenced to prison has outpaced the number being released — and the cost to taxpayers keeps going up and up and up.
   Something for that prescient, job-counseling adult lying around the pool to think about when "The Graduate" of 2005 comes home.