Mass Incarceration in America
Consider for a moment the explosion in Ohio’s prison population over the past thirty years. In 1929, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, Ohio’s prison population was 8,804. In 1955, when Dr. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 10,483 people were imprisoned in Ohio. In 1963, the year of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Ohio incarcerated 11,644 people. And in 1968, the year Dr. King was assassinated, there were 10,189 people in Ohio’s prisons. Ten years later, Ohio incarcerated approximately 12,000 prisoners. But soon thereafter Ohio’s prison population began to soar. By the time I joined the Ohio Justice & Policy Center in 2002, there were 35,000 prisoners in Ohio. Today, Ohio’s prison population is 50,600, and the correctional budget is a staggering $1.6 billion. I am convinced that if Dr. King were alive today, he would be working to end mass incarceration in America.
So what happened? How did we get here? Ohio’s story is not unlike other states across the country. In the early 1970’s, we rewrote our criminal code. We followed the popular politics of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York and the tough on crime mandatory minimums. Prisons packed with drug offenders and low level offenders soon followed.
The way in is often the way out. We can reduce our prison populations through sentencing reform that emphasizes safety and risk versus retribution. We can return resources, money and also people who are fathers and mothers, to efforts to restore the damage that has been done and build a better a future.
Recently I had the opportunity to discuss possible solutions to Ohio’s mass incarceration problem on WOSU’s All Sides. http://wosu.org/2012/allsides/mass-incarceration-social-economic-costs/. Also joining me on the program were Jeremy Travis, President of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Melissa Kearney, Director of The Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution.