Pubdate: Sun, 30 Dec 2012
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2012 The New York Times
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author:John Tierney, The New York Times

LOCKING UP MORE, BUT AT WHAT PRICE?

Mass Incarceration Has Gone Too Far and Helped Little, Critics Say

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Stephanie George and Judge Roger Vinson had quite 
different opinions about the lockbox seized by police from her home 
in Pensacola, Fla. She insisted she had no idea that a former 
boyfriend had hidden it in her attic. Vinson considered the lockbox, 
containing a half-kilogram of cocaine, to be evidence of her guilt.

But the defendant and the judge fully agreed about the fairness of 
the sentence he imposed in federal court.

"Even though you have been involved in drugs and drug dealing," 
Vinson told George, "your role has basically been as a girlfriend and 
bag holder and money holder but not actively involved in the drug 
dealing, so certainly in my judgment it does not warrant a life sentence."

Yet the judge had no other option on that morning 15 years ago. As 
her stunned family watched, George, then 27, who had never been 
accused of violence, was led from the courtroom to serve a sentence 
of life without parole.

"I remember my mom crying out and asking the Lord why," said George, 
now 42, in an interview at the Federal Correctional Institution in 
Tallahassee. "Sometimes I still can't believe myself it could happen 
in America."

Her sentence reflected a revolution in public policy, often called 
mass incarceration, that appears increasingly dubious to both 
conservative and liberal social scientists. They point to evidence 
that mass incarceration is no longer a cost-effective way to make 
streets safer, and may even be promoting crime instead of suppressing it.

Three decades of stricter drug laws, reduced parole and rigid 
sentencing rules have lengthened prison terms and more than tripled 
the percentage of Americans behind bars. The United States has the 
highest reported rate of incarceration of any country: about 1 in 100 
adults, a total of nearly 2.3 million people in prison or jail.

But there is growing sentiment that these policies have gone too far, 
causing too many Americans like George to be locked up for too long 
at too great a price - economically and socially.

The criticism is resonating with some state and federal officials, 
who have started taking steps to stop the growth of the prison 
population. The social scientists are attracting attention partly 
because the drop in crime has made it a less potent issue 
politically, and partly because of the financial problems facing states.

State spending on corrections, after adjusting for inflation, has 
more than tripled in the past three decades, making it the 
fastest-growing budgetary cost except Medicaid. Even though the 
prison population has leveled off in the past several years, the 
costs remain so high that states are being forced to reduce spending 
in other areas.

Three decades ago, California spent 10 percent of its budget on 
higher education and 3 percent on prisons. In recent years the prison 
share of the budget rose above 10 percent while the share for higher 
education fell below 8 percent. As university administrators in 
California increase tuition to cover their deficits, they complain 
that the state spends much more on each prisoner - nearly $50,000 per 
year - than on each student.

Many researchers agree that the rise in imprisonment produced some 
initial benefits, particularly in urban neighborhoods, where violence 
decreased significantly in the 1990s. But as sentences lengthened and 
the prison population kept growing, it included more and more 
nonviolent criminals like George.

Half a million people are now in prison or jail for drug offenses, 
about 10 times the number in 1980, and there have been especially 
sharp increases in incarceration rates for women and for people over 
55, long past the peak age for violent crime. About 1.3 million 
people, more than half of those behind bars, are in prison or jail 
for nonviolent offenses.

Researchers note that the policies have done little to stem the flow 
of illegal drugs. And they say goals like keeping street violence in 
check could be achieved without the expense of locking up so many 
criminals for so long.

While many scholars still favor tough treatment for violent 
offenders, they have begun suggesting alternatives for other 
criminals. James Wilson, the conservative social scientist whose work 
in the 1970s helped inspire tougher policies on prison, several years 
ago recommended diverting more nonviolent drug offenders from prisons 
to treatment programs.

Two of his collaborators, George Kelling of the Manhattan Institute 
and John DiIulio Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, have joined 
with prominent scholars and politicians, including Jeb Bush and Newt 
Gingrich, in a group called Right on Crime. It advocates more 
selective incarceration and warns that current policies "have the 
unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders" 
so that they become "a greater risk to the public than when they entered."

Some social scientists argue that the incarceration rate is so high 
that the net effect is "crimogenic": creating more crime over the 
long term by harming the social fabric in communities and permanently 
damaging the economic prospects of prisoners as well as their 
families. Nationally, about 1 in 40 children have a parent in prison. 
Among black children, 1 in 15 have a parent in prison.

George was a young single mother when she first got in trouble with 
drugs and the law. One of her children was fathered by a crack 
dealer, Michael Dickey, who went to prison in the early 1990s for 
drug and firearm offenses.

"When he went away, I was at home with the kids struggling to pay 
bills," George said. "The only way I knew to get money quick was 
selling crack. I was never a user, but from being around him I pretty 
much knew how to get it."

After the police caught her making crack sales of $40 and $120 - 
which were counted as separate felonies - she was sentenced, at 23, 
to nine months in a work-release program. That meant working at her 
mother's hair salon in Pensacola during the day and spending nights 
at the county jail, away from her three young children.

"When I caught that first charge, it scared me to death," she 
recalled. "I thought, ' My God, being away from my kids, this is not 
what I want.' I promised them I would never let it happen again."

When Dickey got out of prison in 1995, George said, she refused to 
resume their relationship, but she did allow him into her apartment 
sometimes to see their daughter. One evening, shortly after he had 
arrived, the police showed up with a search warrant and a ladder.

"I didn't know what they were doing with a ladder in a one-story 
building," George said. "They went into a closet and opened a little 
attic space I'd never seen before and brought down the lockbox. He 
gave them a key to open it. When I saw what was in it, I was so mad I 
jumped across the table at him and started hitting him."

Dickey said he had paid her to store the cocaine at her home. At the 
trial, other defendants said she was present during drug transactions 
conducted by Dickey and other dealers she dated, and sometimes 
delivered cash or crack for her boyfriends. George denied those 
accusations, which her lawyer argued were uncorroborated and 
selfserving. After the jury convicted her of being part of a 
conspiracy to distribute cocaine, she told the judge at her 
sentencing: "I just want to say I didn't do it. I don't want to be 
away from my kids."

Whatever the truth of the testimony against her, it certainly 
benefited the other defendants.

Providing evidence to the prosecution is one of the few ways to avoid 
a mandatory sentence. Because the government formally credited the 
other defendants with "substantial assistance," their sentences were 
all reduced to less than 15 years.

George said she could understand the justice of sending her to prison 
for five years, if only to punish her for her earlier crack-selling offenses.

"I'm a real firm believer in karma - what goes around comes around," 
she said. "I see now how wrong it was to sell drugs to people hooked 
on something they couldn't control. I think, 'What if they took money 
away from their kids to buy drugs from me?' I deserve to pay a price 
for that. But my whole life? To take me away from my kids forever?"

When she was sentenced 15 years ago, her children were 5, 6 and 9. 
They have been raised by her sister, Wendy Evil, who says it was 
agonizing to take the children to see their mother in prison.

"They would fight to sit on her knee the whole time," she recalled 
recently during a family dinner at their home in Pensacola. "It's 
been so hard for them. Some of the troubles they've had are because 
of their anger at her being gone."

The youngest child, William, now 20, dropped out of middle school. 
The older two, Kendra and Courtney, finished high school but have not 
followed their mother's advice to go to college.

"I don't want to blame things on my situation, but I think my life 
would have been a whole lot different if she'd been here," said 
Courtney, now 25, who has been unemployed for several years. "When I 
fell off track, she would have pushed me back. She's way stronger 
than any of us."

George, who has gotten a college degree in prison, calls the children 
every Sunday. She pays for the calls, which cost 23 cents a minute, 
with wages from two jobs: a regular eighthour shift of data 
processing that pays 92 cents an hour, supplemented by four hours of 
overtime work at a call center in the prison that provides 411 
directory assistance to phone companies.

"I like to stay busy," she said. "I don't like to give myself time to 
think about home. I know how much it hurts my daughter to see her 
friends doing things with their mothers. My boys are still so angry. 
I thought after a while it would stop, that they'd move on as they 
got older and had girlfriends. But it just seems like it gets worse 
every Mother's Day and Christmas."

She seemed undaunted, even cheerful, during most of the interview at 
the prison, where she sleeps on a bunk bed in an 11-by-7-foot cell 
she shares with another inmate. Dressed in the regulation uniform, 
khaki pants and work boots, she was calm and articulate as she 
explained her case and the failed efforts to appeal the ruling. At 
this point lawyers say her only hope seems to be presidential 
clemency - rarely granted in recent years - yet she said she remained hopeful.

She lost her composure only once, while describing the evening in 
1996 when the police found the lockbox in her apartment. She had been 
working in the kitchen, braiding someone's hair for a little money, 
while Courtney, then 8, played in the home. He watched the police 
take her away in handcuffs.

"Courtney called out, 'Mom, you promised you weren't going to leave 
us no more,' " George recalled, her eyes glistening. "I still hear 
that voice to this day, and he's a grown man." 
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