Incarceration comparisons factsheet

August 31, 2002

The comparision of incarceration rates on the top of prisonsucks.com has been turned into a factsheet suitable for redistribution to the public. Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment is a one page PDf file. Download, make copies, and distribute in your community today. (Sept 4 update: The link works now.)

INS bails-out stagnating prison industry

August 14, 2002

The Village Voice just posted an excellent article Detainees Equal Dollars: The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom. The reporting is powerful and there is some great analysis in it. Here's two quotes:

It was a shaky spring for the correctional workers of Hastings, Nebraska (pop. 24,064), as the stagnation in the nation's prison population and the increasingly high costs of incarceration jostled the sleepy town, some two hours' drive from Lincoln. On April 9, the 84 employees of the Hastings Correctional Center were told that the 186-bed facility would be closing at the end of June. State funds were scraping bottom, and the $2.5 million annual price tag for the prison was too big a burden to carry. "We really didn't know what we would do," says Jim Morgan, who had been working at HCC for 15 years and lives to this day in the house where he was born. "There aren't a lot of job opportunities out here, and most of us have homes and kids and couldn't even think about moving somewhere else." For two months, the workers scrambled, filling out applications at nearby meatpacking and cardboard-container plants and anticipating long hours in the unemployment office. Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center. "It's a win-win," says Morgan. The INS is desperate for more beds for its ever expanding detainee population. And the state of Nebraska, collecting $65 per detainee per day from the INS, rakes in more than $1 million a year over and above the cost of running the place.

Longtime anti-prison activists see some scary writing on the wall. "The lesson of the drug war was that it didn't make sense to lock people up for everythingoit wasn't necessarily good for them or for society," says Kevin Pranis, an organizer with Not With Our Money, the national network resisting prison profiteering. "But a policy argument didn't get through to anyone as long as you had prison capacity and pressure to keep it filled. Immigrant activists have to start organizing not just around the injustice of detention, but also to reduce capacity." Otherwise, as one incarceration boom trails off, another will be in line to take its place.

On the related subject of the fiscal crisis and state's declining ability to pay for corrections, we should draw your attention to a report that has been in our database since February: Cutting Correctly: New Prison Policies for Times of Fiscal Crisis by Judith Greene and Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute. The report argues that the financial crunch facing the states since 9/11 creates a need to cut the corrections budgets that have been spiralling upwards. And most importantly, the report makes specific suggestions for cuts to be made that will not just enhance fiscal security, but public safety as well.

The Facts About Crime

August 14, 2002

The Prison Policy Initiative and the Arizona Area American Friends Service Committee today released a new one page -- 17 footnotes -- factsheet.

In PDF format for ready re-distribution, the factsheet informs the reader that: