The administration that has made the most progress in recent years might surprise you.
Despite making some improvements, the U.S. continues to lead in the number of inmates worldwide, accounting for more than 20 percent of the global prison population.
This is a sad reality author Bill Keller knows all too well having covered this topic for the last few decades. Though mass incarceration is hardly an upbeat subject matter, Keller offers a surprisingly optimistic take on how to improve the current system in his new book, What’s Prison For?: Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
The now retired journalist spent decades reporting at The New York Times before becoming the founding editor-in-chief at The Marshall Project, a non-profit online journalism organization focusing on issues related to criminal justice.
“I never intended to write a book, but I felt I had some lessons to share about how we can do a better job of making prisons more humane and effective,” he tells KCM.
Here’s a breakdown of where prison reform stands now — and how Keller thinks it can be improved.
By the numbers
In 2019, there were just under 2.1 million Americans behind bars in the U.S — a record low not seen since 1995. To put that into perspective, that amounts to a nationwide incarceration rate of 810 inmates for every 100,000 adult residents ages 18 and older. By comparison, the incarceration rate in Canada is 104 per 100,000 (as of 2018), England and Wales are 130 per 100,000 (as of 2021), and Australia is 160 per 100,000 (as of 2020).
Unfortunately, unlike in other nations, there are also major racial disparities among those imprisoned in the U.S. — Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly 5 times the rate of whites, according to a report by the nonprofit organization The Sentencing Project. What’s more is that even though Black Americans make up just 12 percent of the U.S. adult population, they account for 33 percent of those inside prison.
But what makes addressing prison reform especially hard is that the U.S. doesn’t have a single “criminal justice system” per se but rather thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. This doesn’t even factor in the fact that America is among the dozen or so countries that operate some form of private prisons — which make an estimated $374 million annually. On the flip side, governmentally-run prisons cost taxpayers an average of $81 billion per year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. If these numbers don’t concern you, they should — more than a dozen states are spending at least $20,000 if not more on putting people behind bars than they do on educating children.
Room for reform
While reforming America’s prison system is no easy task, Keller says a good place to start would just be improving accountability and transparency of prison operations to the public.
Not only do jurisdictions have limited local independent oversight of their jails, but little is known about the actual conditions inside prisons. This grim reality was exposed during the coronavirus pandemic when the death rate among inmates was more than double the rest of the population. More than 2,800 inmates died of Covid-19 and nearly 438,000 people in prison were infected, not to mention the thousands of additional cases that were linked to county jails.
Things got so bad that many detainees were left with little choice but to sue. A pair of twin lawsuits in the D.C. area alleged that the state Department of Corrections failed to provide basic protection like hand sanitizer, and some inmates with underlying health conditions, such as 51-year-old Deon M. Crowell, died inhumanely, alone in their jail cells.
“The pandemic just took hold of prisons — they didn’t have any place to separate people, so they would take the prison recreation room and turn it into a room full of bunk beds,” says Keller. “There were also very slow to vaccinate staff and inmates and masking wasn’t even done.”
Then there’s the need to change the status quo — Keller hopes the Biden administration will reconsider the use of mandatory minimum sentences. These require offenders to serve a predefined term for certain crimes — for instance, selling 28 grams of crack cocaine triggers at least five years in prison.
Though President Biden has vowed to eliminate the minimum sentencing rules he helped create as a senator in the 1980s, these efforts have since stalled in Congress amid other priorities. (To be fair, the administration has been busy trying to curb a spike in violent crime — in 2020 alone, homicides rose by 29 percent.)
Hope for the future
Despite setbacks due to crime and Covid-19, the push for criminal justice reform remains a strong bipartisan issue, a rarity in the current polarizing political climate. This reach across the aisle was most recently on display in 2018 when Congress passed former President Trump’s First Step Act, which overwhelmingly passed with both Republican and Democratic support.
The legislation marked one of the most sweeping pieces of criminal justice reform in decades by cutting unnecessarily long federal sentences. More specifically, it gives nonviolent drug offenders the chance to earn between 10 and 15 days of time credits for every 30 days that they participate in prison programs, ranging from anger management to drug treatment and social skills classes. And just this past January, thousands of inmates were set to be released by the Justice Department under these programs.
On top of reducing mass incarceration, the law takes steps in improving prison conditions, including banning the shackling of pregnant women (a practice that has been roundly condemned as harmful to the mother and baby by major medical groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists).
“The First Step Act was the high water mark of bipartisan criminal justice reform,” says Keller. “Every other bit of political goodwill has kind of muted the campaign for criminal justice reform and that’s why I wanted to write this book: to remind people that there’s a case for doing this.”
While the key parts of the law are working as they should, Keller and advocates believe there’s still more work to be done. After all, as Keller points out, the First Step Act only covers federal prison, which he says only “holds roughly 10 percent of the incarcerated population.”
“The First Step Act was named for a reason,” says Keller. “It was meant by its sponsors to be a modest beginning.”
