Corrections

Oklahoma leads the nation in the per capita number of women serving prison sentences, a dubious national distinction. Many of the women in prison are serving time for nonviolent offenses. Some of these women are mothers, and their incarcerations often lead to family dysfunction, which creates even more problems.

Recognizing the problem, the Oklahoma House passed a bill last week that could eventually help lower the number of mothers serving prison sentences for nonviolent crimes. Let’s hope the bill gets signed into law. It’s a much-needed first step.

HB 2998, sponsored by state Rep. Kris Steele, a Shawnee Republican, would establish a pilot program that would help ease the reentry of incarcerated women with children. The program would identify women with children and develop a comprehensive plan for them, which might include diversionary sentencing rather than jail time.

Oklahoma incarcerates women at twice the national average. Almost 70 percent of all women incarcerated here are serving sentences for nonviolent offenses. I’ve written about this issue for several years. Read here, here and here. Here’s a section of a 2008 post that describes the philosophy driving the high incarceration rate:

Right now, the prevailing law enforcement and state corrections philosophy, supported by neoconservative ideology, is to incarcerate as many people as possible. The basic idea is that severe punishments, including long prison sentences, will deter crime. Yet the incarceration rates keep growing. Oklahoma, for example, has the highest percentage of incarcerated women in the nation, according to the Bureau of Justice. Ultimately, this distinction should be the state’s shame, not a point of honor in a numbers game often played by political leaders and by some people who work in our judicial systems and law enforcement agencies.

In a press release about the issue, Steele said:

This bill will give women convicted of nonviolent crimes access to community-based rehabilitative services that have proven effective. As policy-makers, we can be both tough and smart on crime. The average prison stay for nonviolent women is less than a year, but the impact on their children is lifelong and devastating. In-home rehabilitative services will keep these families together and allow Oklahoma women to receive the help they desperately need.

Again, this is a first step in a problem that needs even more serious solutions and initiatives. Keeping nonviolent women out of prison and ensuring they get treatment and counseling saves families and taxpayer dollars.

An upcoming summit will tackle the issue of Oklahoma’s nation-leading female incarceration rate.

The summit is part of Oklahoma Christian University’s Complex Dialogues series, and will be held at the campus on Tuesday, Jan. 26. The George Kaiser Family Foundation and Don and Donna Millican are helping to sponsor the event.

This is an important issue for Oklahoma, and one that I’ve been writing about for a long time. Last September, I published a commentary in the Oklahoma Gazette that began by asking a couple of basic questions.

Why in the world does Oklahoma lead the nation in the number of women incarcerated on a per capita basis? Do state leaders really want that distinction?

The numbers, as I pointed out in the article, reveal flaws in our state’s overall justice system.

The numbers tell a truly sad story: There are approximately 2,600 women imprisoned in Oklahoma, which reflects a rate of 131 per 100,000 residents. The national average is 69 per 100,000 residents. This makes Oklahoma No. 1 in the nation for female incarceration, which is a dubious ranking.

Most of the women incarcerated are serving sentences for non-violent crimes, many of them related to drugs.

Does Oklahoma have a cruel system when it comes to female incarceration? If so, does this cruel system only increase social problems when the children of incarcerated women find themselves without their mothers for extended periods of time? How does the system affect the state’s image?

The high cost of incarceration compared to other types of sentencing is another pressing issue, especially given the state’s current financial crisis. Parole and treatment programs are less expensive and help keep families intact.

The main problem, which the summit is sure to address, is that no one—prosecutors, judges and politicians—wants to appear to be soft on crime. How can the state reconcile the issue? What can it do to depoliticize some aspects of the system? Obviously, the system can never be completely depoliticized, but locking up women at the highest rate in the nation means something has gone awry here.

(Arnold Hamilton, editor of The Oklahoma Observer, has published an insightful article about the Voter ID issue in Oklahoma.)

(In addition, prison privatization pushes ordinary citizens away from keeping tabs on some of the most important institutions in the country. Private prisons, in particular, represent a horrid example of skewed values in The Corporate Age. It’s like something from a Dickens’ novel. When you put the profit motive in punishment, do you get more punishment or less punishment? You don’t need a MBA to answer that question.)

When you put the profit motive into the country’s prison system and each new inmate represents increased profits, then obviously some politicians will make sure corporate interests are rewarded with higher incarceration rates.

One would be naïve not to believe this. The use of private prisons in this country is yet another method to transfer taxpayer money to big corporations, not save taxpayer money. Both Republicans and Democrats have participated in this scam against the American people. How have private prisons affected the number of people who end up incarcerated? We do know America leads the world in incarcerating people. (More than 1 in 100 or approximately 2.3 million people are incarcerated in this country.) What we don’t often talk about is how the private prison system is so obviously dependent on harsh sentences, tough drug laws and an increasing prison population.

Note this paragraph from CorpWatch, for example, about how low incarceration is a “drag on profits” in a 2000 article about private prisons:

To be profitable, private prison firms must ensure that prisons are not only built but also filled. Industry experts say a 90-95 per cent capacity rate is needed to guarantee the hefty rates of return needed to lure investors. Prudential Securities issued a wildly bullish report on CCA [Corrections Corporation of America] a few years ago but cautioned, "It takes time to bring inmate population levels up to where they cover costs. Low occupancy is a drag on profits." Still, said the report, company earnings would be strong if CCA succeeded in ramp(ing) up population levels in its new facilities at an acceptable rate".

But just like the housing bubble, this country and Oklahoma, in particular, face a “prison bubble” that is unsustainable. As our prisons continue to swell, judges, prosecutors and politicians need to look for ways to reduce the incarceration rate, not look for new ways to expand privatization. Obviously, this could affect the bottom line for private prisons.

All this is somewhat obscured in the recent “discussion” about closing some state prisons in Oklahoma.

State Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee, according to a news report, apparently asked the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to tell him how much it would cost to close prisons in Oklahoma. The DOC then gave him a study, according to the report, on the costs on closing prisons in Granite, Stringtown and Helena, which added up to $23 million.

The report described Coffee as a “longtime proponent of utilizing more private prison beds to deal with inmate overcrowding.” This is the most important sentence in the article.

The Republican leadership denied, according to the report, there were discussions about closing specific prisons, but understandably state Sen. Tom Ivester (D-Elk City) expressed concern. The prison in Granite is in his district.

But the issue transcends the politics of the moment.

The issue, as I put it earlier, is the prison bubble. Oklahoma is often highest in the nation per capita in women incarceration. It ranks fifth in the nation, at least for now, in total incarceration. More privatization is definitely not the answer. The answer to reduce costs is to reduce the number of incarcerated non-violent offenders. Privatization only fuels the ongoing drug war, which has been an abject failure. Many non-violent drug offenders should be placed in the probation and parole system, which would save the state money.

Will Coffee, an Oklahoma City Republican, push for prison privatization this year or perhaps next year? Let’s hope not. In fact, in the past, Oklahoma’s per diem rate for inmates discouraged the state’s use of private prisons.

The privatization of our country’s prison systems is just another example of how corporations, which hold the most political power in this country, are setting social policy. (The largest private prison corporation is Corrections Corporation of America. It's in the same right-wing nomenclature as "Bank of America.") The underlying problem here is that large corporations (think of the recent problems with AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America) operate without appropriate regulatory oversight and profits are their only motive for existence. This has happened in our health care system as well. Corporate executives become instant millionaires and buy political power; ordinary taxpayers pay more for less and their political voices remain marginalized.

In addition, prison privatization pushes ordinary citizens away from keeping tabs on some of the most important institutions in the country. Private prisons, in particular, represent a horrid example of skewed values in The Corporate Age. It’s like something from a Dickens’ novel. When you put the profit motive in punishment, do you get more punishment or less punishment? You don’t need a MBA to answer that question.