40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and
Poor People
By Bill Quigley
June 02, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - The US
Department of
Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and
prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US,
totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away
the
world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people
inside are poor and Black. Here are 40 reasons why.
One. It is not just about crime. Our jails and prisons have
grown from holding about
500,000
people in 1980 to 2.2 million today. The fact is that
crime rates have risen and fallen independently of our growing incarceration
rates.
Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting
people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the
very beginning Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police
departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who
are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for
decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to
their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional
Rights during which
police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the
people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About
80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28
percent of NYC’s total population.
Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a
racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people
even though the city is 32 percent Black.
Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people
in cars.
Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white
drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled
over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an
April 2015 report,
reported on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial
profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was
more visible.
Four. Once stopped,
Black and Hispanic motorists are more likely to be given tickets than
white drivers stopped for the same offenses.
Five. Once stopped, Blacks and Latinos are also more
likely to be searched.
DOJ reports Black drivers at traffic stops were searched by police three
times more often and Hispanic drivers two times more often than white
drivers. A
large research study in Kansas City found when police decided to pull
over cars for investigatory stops, where officers look into the car’s
interior, ask probing questions and even search the car, the race of the
driver was a clear indicator of who was going to be stopped: 28 percent of
young Black males twenty five or younger were stopped in a year’s time,
versus white men who had 12 percent chance and white women only a 7 percent
chance. In fact,
not until Black men reach 50 years old do their rate of police stops for
this kind of treatment dip below those of white men twenty five and under.
Six. Traffic tickets are big business. And even if most
people do not go directly to jail for traffic tickets, poor people are hit
the worst by these ticket systems. As we saw with Ferguson where
some of the towns in St. Louis receive 40 percent or more of their city
revenues from traffic tickets, tickets are money makers for towns.
Seven. The consequences of traffic tickets are much more
severe among poor people. People with means will just pay the fines. But
for poor and working people fines are a real hardship. For example,
over 4 million people in California do not have valid driver’s licenses
because they have unpaid fines and fees for traffic tickets. And we know
unpaid tickets can lead to jail.
Eight. In schools, African American kids are much more
likely to be referred to the police than other kids.
African American students are 16 percent of those enrolled in schools but 27
percent of those referred to the police.
Kids with disabilities are discriminated against at about the same rate
because they are 14 percent of those enrolled in school and 26 of those
referred to the police.
Nine. Though Black people make up about 12 percent of the
US population,
Black children are 28 percent of juvenile arrests. DOJ reports that
there are over 57,000 people
under the age of 21 in juvenile detention. The US even has
10,000 children in adult jails
and prisons any given day.
Ten. The War on Drugs targets Black people. Drug arrests
are a big source of bodies and business for the criminal legal system.
Half the arrests these days are for drugs and half of those are for
marijuana. Despite the fact that Black and white people use marijuana
at the same rates,
a Black person is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession of
marijuana than a white person. The ACLU found that in some states
Black people were six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than
whites. For
all drug arrests between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. Black drug arrest rate
rose dramatically from 6.5 to 29.1 per 1,000 persons; during the same
period, the white drug arrest rate barely increased from 3.5 to 4.6 per
1,000 persons.
Eleven. Many people in jail and prison because
the US has much tougher drug laws and much longer sentences for drug
offenses than most other countries. Drug offenders receive an
average sentence of 7 months in France, twelve months in England and 23
months in the US.
Twelve. The bail system penalizes poor people. Every day
there are about 500,000 people are in jails, who are still presumed innocent
and awaiting trial, just because they are too poor to pay money to get
out on bail. Not too long ago,
judges used to allow most people, even poor people to be free while they
were awaiting trial but no more. In a
2013 study of New York City courts, over 50% of the people held in jail
awaiting trial for misdemeanor or felony charges were unable to pay bail
amounts of $2500 or less.
Thirteen. This system creates a lot of jobs. Jails and
prisons provide a lot of jobs to local, state and federal officials. To
understand how this system works it is good to know the difference between
jails and prisons. Jails are local, usually for people recently arrested or
awaiting trial. Prisons are state and federal and are for people who have
already been convicted. There are more than
3000 local jails across the US, according to the Vera Institute, and
together usually hold about 500,000 people awaiting trial and an additional
200,000 or so convicted on minor charges. Over the course of a year,
these local jails process over 11.7 million people. Prisons are state
and federal lockups which usually hold about twice the number of people as
local jails or just
over 1.5 million prisoners.
Fourteen. The people in local jails are not there because
they are a threat to the rest of us.
Nearly 75 percent of the hundreds of thousands of people in local jails are
there for nonviolent offenses such as traffic, property, drug or public
order offenses.
Fifteen. Criminal bonds are big business. Nationwide,
over 60 percent of people arrested are forced to post a financial bond to be
released pending trial usually by posting cash or a house or paying a
bond company. There are
about 15,000 bail bond
agents working in the bail bond industry which takes in about $14 billion
every year.
Sixteen. A very high percentage of people in local jails
are people with diagnosed mental illnesses. The rate of
mental illness inside jails is four to six times higher than on the
outside. Over 14
percent of the men and over 30 percent of the women entering jails and
prisons were found to have serious mental illness in a study of over 1000
prisoners. A
recent study in New York City’s Rikers Island jail found 4,000
prisoners, 40 percent of their inmates, were suffering from mental illness.
In many of our cities, the local jail is the primary place where people with
severe mental problems end up. Yet
treatment for mental illness in jails is nearly non-existent.
Seventeen. Lots of people in jail need treatment.
Nearly 70 percent of people prison meet the medical criteria for drug abuse
or dependence yet only 7 to 17 percent ever receive drug abuse treatment
inside prison.
Eighteen. Those who are too poor, too mentally ill or too
chemically dependent, though still presumed innocent, are kept in cages
until their trial dates. No wonder it is fair to say, as the
New York Times reported, our jails “have become vast warehouses made up
primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or
drug problems to adequately care for themselves.”
Nineteen. Poor people have to rely on public defenders.
Though anyone threatened with even a day in jail is
entitled to a lawyer, the
reality is much different. Many poor people facing misdemeanor charges
never see a lawyer at all. For example, in
Delaware more than 75 percent of the people in its Court of Common Pleas
never speak to a lawyer. A
study of Jackson County Michigan found 95 percent of people facing
misdemeanors waived their right to an attorney and have plead guilty rather
than pay a $240 charge for a public defender.
Thirteen states have no state structure at all to make sure people have
access to public defenders in misdemeanor courts.
Twenty. When poor people face
felony charges they often find the public defenders overworked and
underfunded and thus not fully available to provide adequate help in
their case. In recent years public defenders in
Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania were so overwhelmed with
cases they refused to represent any new clients. Most other states also
have public defender offices that have been crushed by overwork, inadequate
finances and
do not measure up to the basic principles for public defenders outlined by
the American Bar Association. It is not uncommon for public defenders
to have
more than 100 cases going at the same time, sometimes several hundred.
Famous trial lawyer Gerry Spence, who never lost a criminal case because of
his extensive preparation for each one, said that if
he was a public defender and represented a hundred clients he would never
have won a case.
Twenty One. Lots of poor people plead guilty. Lack of
adequate public defense leads many people in prison to plead guilty. The
American Bar Association reviewed the US public defender system and
concluded it lacked fundamental fairness and put poor people at constant
risk of wrongful conviction. “All too often, defendants plead guilty,
even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights
or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes
applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct
effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”
Twenty Two. Many are forced to plead guilty. Consider
all the exonerations of people who were forced by police to confess even
when they did not do the crime who were later proven innocent: some
criminologists estimate 2 to 8 percent of the people in prison are innocent
but pled guilty. One longtime federal judge estimates that there is so
much pressure on people to plead guilty that there
may easily be 20,000 people in prison for crimes they did not commit.
Twenty Three. Almost nobody in prison ever had a trial.
Trials are rare in the criminal injustice system.
Over 95 percent of criminal cases are finished by plea bargains. In
1980, nearly 20 percent of criminal cases were tried but that number is
reduced to less than 3 percent because sentences are now so much higher
for those who lose trials, there are more punishing drug laws, mandatory
minimum sentences, and more power has been given to prosecutors.
Twenty Four. Poor people get jail and jail makes people
worse off. The
poorest people, those who had to remain in jail since their arrest, were 4
times more likely to receive a prison sentence than those who got out on
bail. There are
tens of
thousands of rapes inside jails and prisons each year. DOJ reports
over 4,000
inmates are murdered each year inside each year. As
US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy told Congress recently “This idea of
total incarceration just isn’t working. And it’s not humane. We [society
and Congress and the legal profession] have no interest in corrections,
nobody looks at it.”
Twenty Five. Average prison sentences are much longer
than they used to be, especially for people of color. Since
1990, the average time for property crimes has gone up 24 percent and time
for drug crimes has gone up 36 percent. In the US federal system,
nearly 75 percent of the people sent to prison for drug offenses are Black
or Latino.
Twenty Six. There is about a
70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma
will be imprisoned by the time he reaches his mid-thirties; the rate for
white males without a high school diploma is 53 percent lower.
In the 1980, there was only an 8 percent difference. In New York City,
for example,
Blacks are jailed at nearly 12 times the rate of whites and Latinos more
than five times the rate of whites.
Twenty Seven.
Almost 1 of 12 Black men ages 25 to 54 are in jail or prison, compared to 1
in 60 nonblack men. That is
600,000 African American men, an imprisonment rate of five times that of
white men.
Twenty Eight. Prison has become a very big private
business.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) owns and runs 67 for-profit jails
in 20 states with over 90,000 beds. Along with GEO (formerly
Wackenhut), these two private prison companies have donated more than $10
million to candidates and spent another $25 million lobbying
according to the Washington Post. They
lobby for more incarceration and have doubled the number of prisoners
they hold over the past ten years.
Twenty Nine.
The Sentencing Project reports that over 159,000 people are serving life
sentences in the US. Nearly half are African American and 1 in 6 are
Latino. The number of people serving life in prison has gone up by more
than 400% since 1984. Nearly 250,000 prisoners in the US are over age 50.
Thirty. Inside prisons, the
poorest people are taken advantage of again as most items such as
telephone calls to families are priced exorbitantly high, some as high as
$12.95 for a 15 minute call, further separating families.
Thirty One. The
DOJ reports another
3.9 million people are on probation. Probation is when a court puts a
person under supervision instead of sending them to prison. Probation is
also becoming a big business for private companies which get governments to
contract with them to collect outstanding debts and supervise people on
probation.
Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that over a thousand courts assign
hundreds of thousands of people to be under the supervision of private
companies who then require those on probation to pay the company for the
supervision and collect fines, fees and costs or else go to jail. For
example,
one man in Georgia who was fined $200 for stealing a can of beer from a
convenience store was ultimately jailed after the private probation company
ran up over a thousand dollars in in fees.
Thirty Two.
The DOJ reports an
additional 850,000 people are on parole. Parole is when a person who
has been in prison is released to serve the rest of their sentence under
supervision.
Thirty Three.
The DOJ
reported in 2012 that as many as 100 million people have a criminal record,
and over 94 million of those records are online.
Thirty Four. Everyone can find out people have a record.
Because it is so easy to access to arrest and court records,
people who have been arrested and convicted face very serious problems
getting a job, renting an apartment, public assistance, and education.
Eighty-seven percent of employers conduct background checks. Employment
losses for people with criminal records have been estimated at as much as
$65 billion every year.
Thirty Five. Race is a multiplier of disadvantage in
unemployment for people who get out of prison. A
study
by Professor Devah Pager demonstrated that employers who were unlikely
to even check on the criminal history of white male applicants, seriously
discriminated against all Black applicants and even more so against Black
applicants with criminal records.
Thirty Six. Families are hurt by this. The Sentencing
Project reports
180,000 women are subject to lifetime bans from Temporary Assistance to
Needy Families because of felony drug convictions.
Thirty Seven. Convicted people cannot get jobs after they
get out.
More than 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year
after being released. Is it a surprise that within three years of
release from prison, about
two-thirds of
the state prisoners were rearrested?
Thirty Eight. The
US spends $80 billion on this big business of corrections every year.
As a retired criminal court judge I know says, “the high costs of this
system would be worth it if the system was actually working and making us
safer, but we are not safer, the system is not working, so the actual
dollars we are spending are another indication of our failure.”
The cost of being number one in incarceration is four times higher than
it was in 1982. Anyone feeling four times safer than they used to?
Thirty Nine. Putting more people in jail creates more
poverty. The overall poverty rate in our country is undoubtedly higher
because of the dramatic increase in incarceration over the past 35 years
with one
research project estimating poverty would have decreased by 20 percent
if we had not put all these extra people in prison.
This makes sense given the fact that most all the people brought into
the system are poor to begin with, it is now much harder for them to find a
job because of the barriers to employment and good jobs erected by a
criminal record to those who get out of prison, the increased number of one
parent families because of a parent being in jail, and the bans on receiving
food stamps and housing assistance.
Forty. Putting all these problems together and you can
see why the
Center for American Progress rightly concludes “Today, a criminal record
serves as both a direct cause and consequence of poverty.”
What does it say about our society that it uses its jails
and prisons as the primary detention facilities for poor and black and brown
people who have been racially targeted and jail them with the mentally ill
and chemically dependent? The current criminal system has dozens of moving
parts from the legislators who create the laws, to the police who enforce
them, to the courts which apply them, to the jails and prison which house
the people caught up in the system, to the public and business community who
decides whom to hire, to all of us who either do something or turn our heads
away. These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our
coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the
problems and the solutions are go to places like
The Sentencing
Project, the Vera Institute, or the
Center for American Progress. Because it’s the right thing to do, and
because about
95
percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our
communities.