Packed Prisons
The how and why of overcrowding
By CARA BAYLES
The US prison population grew eight-fold since 1970; more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated nationally. The rising numbers aren't proportional to population growth; the Pew Institute recently reported that for the first time in history, more than one in every 100 Americans is incarcerated. Don't like those odds? One in 30 men aged 20 to 34 is locked up, and that jumps to one in nine for black men. People of color make up 70 percent of the prison population, the reverse of the US race ratio outside prison walls.
The Massachusetts prison population grew by 3 percent since 2006, and overcrowding is pandemic. Two years ago, Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities were at 134 percent capacity. Now they've reached 143 percent. But that's merely a median ... MCI Framingham, the state's largest women's prison, is at 323 percent capacity. Only two of Massachusetts' 22 facilities are not spilling over capacity.
"Overcrowding means the facility population is greater than the design capacity," says DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin. "We turn single cells into doubles, provide more beds in a dormitory."
Hakim Cunningham was recently incarcerated in Massachusetts. "They were putting two or three people to a cell together," he says. "In Concord CI, they have people sleeping on the gym and rec areas in cots."
Such solutions are dangerous, says Joel Pentlarge, acting executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates reforming the state's justice system. "Those cells are very small—typically under 80 square-feet. They're designed to hold only one prisoner," he says. "Those conditions escalate prisoner-on-prisoner violence."
Why is the prison population climbing, and why are people of color disproportionately incarcerated?
The relationship with Massachusetts' crime rate is tenuous; the prison population has climbed steeply since the late 1970s, but crime has wavered up and down, with peaks in the mid '70s and early '80s, and a steady decline since 1990.
Thomas Nolan, a professor of criminal justice at Boston University and retired Boston Police officer, says the rise in imprisonment corresponds with the war on drugs. "What we're seeing nationally, as well as in Massachusetts, is an incremental, long-term trend to incarcerate people, particularly for drugs," he says.
Nolan joined the Boston Police Department (BPD) in 1978, and saw the shift in national priorities play out locally. "In the mid '80s, police departments in urban areas devoted more time and attention to drug enforcement than ever before. Historically, a department goes where the federal funding goes. In the 80s it was the war on drugs, in the '90s it was community policing," he says. "In the 70s we had a small, centralized city drug department of half a dozen officers. Now, every district has its own drug unit. Roxbury even has two of them, a day shift and a night shift. And there's still a city-wide unit. So you've got 100 officers whose sole purpose is enforcement in the war on drugs."
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Phillip, who asked that his real name not be used, has been shooting heroin since he was 16. He grew up in Cambridge public housing. Both his parents were junkies; his mother died of AIDS in 1997, his 65-year-old father is still in a methadone clinic. His father's face is scarred from "an incident when he fell asleep on a radiator because he was so high."
"There were a couple of times when my father would come into school inebriated and tell the teacher, 'Phillip has to go, he has a doctor's appointment,'" he says. "We'd walk out, and I'd say, 'Do I really have a doctor's appointment, Daddy?' and he'd say, 'No, I just thought you'd like to get out of there.' And I'd say, 'School's what I look forward to. It's the best part of my day.'"
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While the percentage of people of color in Massachusetts prisons doesn't reach the national figures, they're still overrepresented. Hispanics make up 21 percent of prisoners in a state where they comprise 7.9 percent of the population. Nationally, Latinos make up 20.5 percent of prisoners, and 14.8 percent of the general population.
"It's not that these people are more likely to commit an offense," says Nolan. "They're just more likely to get caught and subsequently incarcerated."
National figures from 2000 indicate whites make up 72 percent of all drug users, yet blacks are five times as likely to get arrested on drug charges.
Their neighborhoods are policed more, according to Nolan. "Law enforcement is concentrating its efforts in communities of color," he says. "Historically, that's where law enforcement has devoted its resources. Law enforcement is going to tell you they go where the crime is, and it would be fruitless to focus elsewhere."
The BPD failed to respond to questions about their policies.
Katrina Christensen, a coordinator with the Cambridge Needle Exchange, says economic prejudices exist as well. "There's a stigma on a person sleeping on the street," she says. "There are many professionals out there who use, and people say, 'Oh, that's OK. They're doing well.' Well, what does that mean? That someone who's struggling to get by is useless?"
Pentlarge says the mentally ill are also more susceptible to getting mixed up in the criminal justice system. "When we closed down mental institutions in the '80s, prisons became the place of last resort for the seriously mentally ill," he says. With 15 suicides in the last three years, Massachusetts has the highest prisoner suicide rate in the country. Last year, the DOC hired suicide prevention specialist Lindsay Hayes to do an independent review of the phenomenon. Diane Wiffin says the DOC has implemented most of Hayes' recommendations.
Pentlarge insists prisons aren't designed to deal with mental illness. "A person might be seriously delusional," he says. "The prison's first response is to put them in solitary, which is where the majority of our prisoner suicides occurred."
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Phillip started using because everyone around him was. But he couldn't afford it. "A lot of drug addicts resort to stealing to support their habit," he says. "The effect of the heroin will wear off, and it's a serious drag. When heroin addicts withdraw, they become ill."
In 1979, Phillip was convicted of armed robbery. He walked into a store, and the clerk welcomed him perkily. "I thought, 'I can't believe I'm about to do this. This isn't me.' I pulled out the gun, and she freaked," he says, dragging his fingers down his cheek. "It's hard for me to live with the fact that I traumatized this woman. I wasn't going to hurt her, but she didn't know that." He squats on the floor, placing his hand by his face. "She was just like this. It stays with me."
He went to prison when he was 17, and grew up inside those walls.
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In 1994, the Gun-Free Schools Act mandated that states adopt legislation requiring the one-year expulsion of students who brought drugs or weapons to school. Massachusetts' statute allows for permanent expulsion and doesn't require any alternative education for expelled students.
Amy Reichbach, an advocate with the Massachusetts ACLU, says such measures are used mostly at schools with few alternatives. "Schools are under-resourced, and may not be able to offer counseling and the extra costs of different educational needs," she says.
Since the busing riots in the 1970s, Boston public schools have Boston School Police in their halls. Today, they employ 84 such officers, who don't carry weapons but have full arrest powers on school property.
Reichbach says transgressions the school traditionally dealt with are now met with harsher penalties or given to law enforcement. "There's a perception out there that this just affects kids bringing weapons," she says. "But they can get expelled for other misbehavior, like disorderly conduct. They can get arrested for disturbing a school assembly." Any student facing criminal charges (including offenses that occurred off school grounds) can also be suspended.
Tami Wilson studies this "school-to-prison pipeline" at Harvard's Charles Hamilton Institute. "This is happening more often than we think, though it varies by school district," Wilson says. "Five urban school districts in Massachusetts with a large population of children of color, immigrants and children eligible to receive free lunch were responsible for 103, or over half, of all school exclusions." Students of color make up approximately 20 percent of the state's student population, but represent over 55 percent of school exclusions. The state's dropout rate has also risen, reaching 3.8 percent.
In Massachusetts, 70.4 percent of prisoners never completed high school.
Aaron Tanaka, of the Boston Workers' Alliance (BWA), a nonprofit for underemployed workers, sees crime as a product of poverty. "About 12,000 Boston youth aren't in school," he says. "They don't have options in the mainstream economy, so they get involved in illicit activity, like drug trade or sex work."
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Phillip's done several stints since his initial sentence; mostly petty thefts and drug charges. "You always come out worse than you came in," he says. "You come out with so much anger, your self-esteem plummets because you're used to being treated like you're worthless, like you have no value. People talk like I'm an evil, vile human being."
Now he's homeless. He can't get public housing or a job with his record. "Idle time for a drug addict is very dangerous," he says. "You can imagine."
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Pentlarge says the state must find alternatives to incarceration. "Part of the reason we've so overcrowded is we're treating a disease as a crime," he says. "If we treated it like alcoholism, we'd ultimately save some money."
Nolan thinks there's been a shift in societal conception. "People lose their sense of relativity. We panic when we see the number of homicides reach 60, but forget that in the '80s, it hit triple digits," he says. "We have a harsh and punitive attitude toward those who violate laws. I think we should be targeting addiction and everything that goes along with it. Prisons serve no purpose other than warehousing people and taking them off the streets for a period of time."
Approximately 97 percent of prisoners face eventual release. A 2006 report from Brandeis University estimates at least 39,700 people in the state are in critical need of drug treatment, but aren't receiving it. The Pew Center recently found that in the last 20 years, Massachusetts' spending on corrections grew 127 percent, compared to a 21 percent increase for public higher education. For every dollar spent on a state college, 98 cents is spent on prisons.
The governor's extensive bond bill plan for infrastructure repairs includes $2.5 billion for prison repairs and expansions. It's in committee right now, but results are due in June. Rep. Carl Sciortino Jr., D-Medford, backed a bill placing a moratorium on prison construction for the next five years, and creating a committee to investigate incarceration trends. The bill's essentially dead for the session.
Wilson says that her final report on Massachusetts' school-to-prison pipeline will offer alternatives to punitive measures. "We're looking into restorative justice and peer mediation programs," she says. "Say a student commits some type of offense. Instead of shipping them off, they'd have to own up to what they did. An apology is made, and students work together to find ways to rectify the situation. It's more of a healing process, it's inclusive and the offense itself is addressed."
Such approaches to criminal justice exist in many court systems worldwide, and are being explored in some US states. Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, Delaware, Florida and Tennessee have passed legislation allowing for out-of-court reparation programs, particularly for juvenile offenders. No such legislation exists in Massachusetts.
For now, Wilson is focusing on the statistical landscape of the problem. "But as we look at data, it's important we make the connection that these are actual people with real potential," she says.
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Phillip is still using. Over the course of the interview at the Cambridge Needle Exchange, he verged from tangential diatribes, to holding his eyelids open with his fingers, to scratching his arms, looking around the corner.
He says he'd like to get clean and councel other junkies. But it's not so easy.
"It's a mess of a life," he says. "You're defeated without hope. But I have hope."
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