Tuesday morning I was folding laundry and vacuuming up dog fur. By Wednesday I was sitting in front of members of the Illinois General Assembly testifying on overcrowding in the state’s prison system. Early this week a family member asked me to speak in support of a friend at the Illinois House Judiciary-Criminal Law Committee’s subject matter meeting on prison overcrowding and meritorious good time credit, an early release program that the Governor suspended in 2010. (You can read about his decision and the House Committee meeting here.) I didn’t know much about the details, so I figured it would be an informal informational meeting with a few Illinois representatives held in a small austere government office room. But because my straight-A self doesn’t know how to put a cursory effort into any task, I researched the heck out of the Illinois prison system and wrote a 7-minute-ish long speech in one evening.
Good thing, because this meeting turned out to be much more formal than either of us realized. Wednesday morning I found myself in a big, bright wood-panelled committee room at the Bilandic Building on La Salle Street with about 80 other people, including journalists, a cameraman, the Director of the Illinois Department of Corrections and staff from the Governor’s office, and several members of the Illinois House of Representatives. And when the committee called forward those testifying on “proposed solutions,” I became a little star-struck as I sat down next to the Soros Senior Justice Fellow at Northwestern Law School, whose articles I had referenced in my research (and who was quoted in the above article link). The last to speak, I read my statement - with gusto - into the skinny table microphone, glancing up purposefully at to the two-tiered panel of Illinois representatives sitting under the state seal: “State Sovereignty, National Union.” Afterward, a few people shook my hand and the Senior Justice Fellow said I gave an “excellent speech.” I was just happy to have had the opportunity to participate so directly in an important civic dialogue. But I shook their hands and took the compliments because they were right: I friggin’ nailed it.
Here's what I said:
I live in Lincoln Park here in Chicago, and I’m reminded of Chicago’s crime legacy every day. Not because of gang violence or drug deals in back alleys. No, because of tourists. You see, I live near the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, where John Dillinger was shot dead. So a few times a week I see long buses of out-of-towners drive by on Chicago Gangster and Untouchables Tours. So when I was asked to speak here today, I couldn’t help but wonder, in that hugely celebrated era of rampant organized crime and violence in this country, how full were our prisons?
US Justice Department data reports that there was an average of 145,000 inmates in the United States every year during the 1920s and 1930s. Following that trend and adjusted for population growth, there should be around 350,000 people in our prison system today.
Except there aren’t: Today’s US prison system houses 2.2 million inmates.
Clearly those tourists on those buses in Lincoln Park are grossly misinformed. The real era of crime is happening right now apparently, right? Wrong. Here in Illinois, between 1995 and 2007, we saw a 44% drop in violent crime and a 30 percent drop in property-related crime. BUT, during that same time, the incarceration rate grew by 20 percent.
Crime is down, but imprisonment is up.
As if that paradox wasn’t troubling enough by itself, we don’t have enough room for everyone we want to put behind bars. And Illinois wins the bronze medal of the Prison Overcrowding Games: according to a recent white paper on Good Conduct Credit in Illinois, “only California’s or Alabama’s prison system is more crowded than Illinois’…” Indeed, The Taylorville Correctional Center in downstate Illinois, designed to hold 600 prisoners houses 1,200. The Lincoln Correctional Center is designed to hold 500 inmates, but today it holds almost 1,000. In total, 25 of the 28 state prisons are over capacity, and the system currently contains about 50 percent more prisoners than facilities were designed to hold.
So why are our prisons so overcrowded? When I asked Google that question, its glaring white search results page shouted answers like punitive sentencing laws, the war on drugs, and over-zealous efforts to lock up criminals for minor offenses and parole violations – not to mention the profit motives that drive the prison industrial complex. All of which increased my admiration for the scope of this committee.
But though the solution may be complicated, prison overcrowding’s impact is simple: it’s bad for everyone.
Prison overcrowding increases costs, increases violence, and reduces rehabilitation.
For me, the taxpayer, it increases costs. The Illinois Department of Corrections already has $1.4 billion budget, which is greater than all other state government departments excluding healthcare and human services. While each student enrolled in a public school costs the state of Illinois around $6,000 a year, each inmate in an Illinois state prison costs us $25,000 a year. Considering that at least half of prison inmates are there for non-violent crimes like drug possession, it’s worth noting that – again, while we spend $25,000 to house one inmate per year – the cost of treating a low-level drug offender ranges from $4,000 to $7,000. We thus must allow ourselves to consider alternative rehabilitation efforts for non-violent offenders, especially when we’re stretching our state prisons and our state budgets so thin.
For prison staff, prison overcrowding means they’re outnumbered and overworked. When there aren’t enough officers to watch over the inmates, the guards must work overtime. The East Moline Correctional Center reports that their guards are putting in collectively 200 to 300 hours of overtime per week on each of the prison’s three shifts. Of course, those overtime hours cost the state thousands of dollars of wages and pension payouts. One officer noted: “You’re paying retirement on a correctional officer who would normally make $55,000 a year, but because of overtime you’re going to end up paying them retirement for $90,000 to $100,000 per year.”
But we might need to consider that they deserve such a hefty payout because, when prisons get overcrowded, prisons get dangerous, for guards and inmates alike. The John Howard Association found Illinois facilities that were so crowded that administrators had no choice but to house hundreds of minimum-security inmates in flooded basements and vermin-infested dormitories with broken windows, leaking pipes and dilapidated roofs. And when inmates are stressed, violence erupts. In December 2009, one Illinois correctional center inmate took an employee of the prison library hostage for seven hours, and a fight at another center in Canton left one guard with a broken eye socket.
Unfortunately, it seems that the state of Illinois is on its way to attaining a California-level of prison overcrowding, which the US Supreme Court declared unconstitutional last summer: The court ruled in favor of the inmates because, it said, the medical and mental health burden of prison conditions amounted to a violation of the eighth amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
But overcrowded prisons might endanger people outside the prison walls as well. Several studies have suggested that overcrowded prisons lead to increased recidivism. For example, one study conducted in England in the 1980s found a strong relationship between overcrowding and prison effectiveness. Prisoners released from overcrowded prisons were more likely to be recommitted for subsequent criminal infractions. The relationship could not be explained away by other variables, leading the head researcher to recommend a reduction in prison overcrowding in order to improve the ability of prisons to reduce crime.
In consideration of these results of prison overcrowding, I find it puzzling that the state would ever enact a policy that would immediately overcrowd prisons. But that’s what happened in 2010 when Governor Quinn suspended the state’s 30-year-old Meritorious Good Time program that rewarded inmates’ good behavior with a 180-day early release. This early release program was a humane and cost-effective way of managing prison populations. But it fell because of partisan politics and the manipulation of public fears. But we must re-establish Illinois citizens’ confidence in this program - that that the state will always take proper precautions when awarding early release to inmates - – because incentivizing eligible inmates to return home early is a good, logical policy that should be reinstated.
I sit in admiration of this committee because of the scope of the problem you are addressing. Prison overcrowding is a sticky-side effect of a system where the status quo is overly-punitive and under-funded, and peppered with a heavy dose of partisan politics every time the Governor runs for re-election. But prison overcrowding is treatable. We should certainly address punitive sentencing, drug laws, and minor parole violations. But there’s something we can do right now, something we already did 30 years ago, to ease the burden of prison overcrowding on every Illinoisan. As a taxpayer and concerned citizen, I urge the state of Illinois to restore the Meritorious Good Time Program or to create a comparable good-conduct program that enables low-level offenders to earn time off their sentences.
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