Pubdate: Sun, 29 Nov 2015
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2015 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: Evan Halper, Tribune Newspapers

JUSTICE REFORM A HOT TOPIC ON '16 TRAIL

But Many Hopefuls Demanding Change Struggle With Plans

INDIANOLA, Iowa - After years of plunging crime rates, hugely 
expensive incarceration budgets and troubling racial disparities in 
criminal punishment, it has become fashionable on the presidential 
campaign trail to declare the United States' uncommonly high rate of 
imprisonment unacceptable.

Just don't press candidates to explain how to significantly change it.

Democratic hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton began demanding an end to 
the "era of mass incarceration" almost from the day she launched her 
campaign. And her party rival Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently 
made a pledge that would include cutting the prison population by 
more than one-quarter within four years.

On the Republican side, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky called mass 
incarceration the Jim Crow of our time. Gov. Chris Christie of New 
Jersey said the country's distinction of having more people locked up 
than any other nation is not what he has in mind when trumpeting 
American exceptionalism.

But ask what it would take to accomplish their goals, and all their 
campaigns struggle. The politically palatable prescriptions packed 
into bullet points in the candidates' criminal justice plans don't 
get the country even close.

Currently, the U.S. imprisons roughly 2.2 million people, according 
to the most recent figures from the government's Bureau of Justice 
Statistics. The runner-up, China - a much larger country that places 
a far lower premium on freedom - is believed to imprison about 1.7 
million, according to an international study.

The proposals the candidates have embraced so far would make but a 
tiny dent in the U.S. population.

If the candidates are aware of this, they aren't letting on.

Sanders has made the most specific promise, generating considerable 
excitement among liberal activists for a pledge he made earlier this 
month at Indianola's Simpson College.

"I don't make a whole lot of promises," Sanders said, "but here is 
one I will make to you: If elected president, by the time I end my 
first term, this country will not have more people in jail than any 
other country."

The vow came as Sanders railed against what he characterized as a 
racially unjust prison-industrial complex that feeds on mass incarceration.

Scholars questioned whether Sanders was aware of just how big a 
promise he was making. Cutting the U.S. prison population by the more 
than half a million people needed to get down even to China's number 
could only be accomplished by substantially softening penalties for 
violent criminals, they say.

Nothing in Sanders' detailed prisons plan suggests he grasps the 
immensity of the task.

Sanders explained to the audience that his goal was embedded in his 
broader policy vision. Raising the minimum wage, eradicating youth 
unemployment and legalizing marijuana would substantially reduce the 
flow of Americans into the prison system, he said.

"If anyone thinks there is not a direct correlation between 
outrageously high youth unemployment and the fact that we have more 
people in jail than any other country on Earth, you would be 
mistaken," he said. "We spend $80 billion a year locking people up. 
In my view, it makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs 
and education rather than jails and incarceration."

The experience of the last several decades makes clear that the 
relationship between crime rates and unemployment is, at minimum, 
more complicated than Sanders' statement suggests. When unemployment 
soared during the deep recession that started in 2007, crime went 
down. Violent crime rose steadily from the late 1950s through the 
early 1990s, during good economic times and bad.

Moreover, Sanders' emphasis on marijuana legalization fits a pattern 
he shares with several other candidates: a strikingly ambitious goal 
backed by a squishy plan.

"If we are going to make the really significant reductions that are 
necessary to move us out of the top spot in the world, we are going 
to need to move beyond proposals that just deal with low-level drug 
offenses," said Ryan King, a fellow at the Urban Institute, a 
Washington think tank that champions shrinking the prison population.

Drug offenders make up only about 1 in 6 people in state prisons, 
which hold the lion's share of those incarcerated in the U.S., 
according to data compiled by the institute. Few of those are 
low-level offenders locked up for simple possession.

Reducing the combined federal, state and local prison population by 
the amount Sanders' pledge contemplates, King said, would require 
softening penalties for violent convicts too.

"No candidates are talking about that," he said.

Violent offenders convicted of such crimes as murder, rape and 
robbery accounted for 54 percent of the men in state prisons in 2013, 
according to statistics compiled by the Department of Justice. When 
the prison population surged between 1980 and 2009, for each new 
inmate who had committed a drug crime there were three new inmates 
who had committed a violent crime.

In a statement, Sanders' campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said that, if 
elected, Sanders would establish a high-level commission to figure 
out how to reduce prison populations. A Sanders administration "will 
rely on both legislative and executive actions to reorient the 
criminal justice system," Weaver said.

The numbers, however, are daunting. An online tool the Urban 
Institute created that charts how various policy moves would change 
the prison population suggests that even cutting the number of 
Americans jailed for drug offenses in half would shrink the state 
prison population by only 7 percent - and none of the candidates are 
suggesting specific changes that bold.

The report notes that mass incarceration would continue even if every 
single person in state prison for a drug offense were immediately released.

"There just is not an easy and politically palatable solution that 
reduces the prison population that much," Patrick Egan, a professor 
of politics and public policy at New York University, said of the 
goal Sanders set for himself. "While Americans have become more 
supportive of criminal justice reform lately, they are still quite 
afraid of and quite aware of crime."

Some advocates for reducing mass incarceration have proposed cutting 
sentences for violent criminals, which are longer on average in the 
U.S. than in many other developed countries. Few political figures 
have been willing to touch ideas like that.

"It's hard for candidates to talk about what to do with violent 
offenders," said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior counsel at the Brennan 
Center for Justice at New York University Law School. "It scares voters."

But, until candidates confront the issue of changing policy toward 
violent criminals, she said, they are just tinkering.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom