Incarceration vs. Social Programs: What should be done?

Over the last two years we've seen deep financial cuts made in every social service here in Washington state. The only exception to this has been the department of correctional operations which got by without having anything slashed and has managed to do so for many years now.

When you've read the facts presented herein you may question whether this is justifiable. If so, we urge you to join with us in pushing for correctional reforms which would result in a cheaper better way of dealing with crime and produce a savings of millions that could be used by people for social programs.

Facts

There's a total of 17 prisons in Washington State. Fourteen of those were added since 1980 and we have 15, 000 prisoners presently
incarcerated. Along with that, we've seen a corresponding rise in the prison budget. Which is close to 1 billion dollars and one of the state's highest.

No purpose has been served by this because our approach to crime and punishment failed over 20 years to produce permanent decreases in the crime rate. A temporary drop here or there is the best we can point to in any given category. And evidence of this sort makes it necessary to consider new methods which address these problems without a waste of money.

Solution

To this end we need to shift the approach we've taken from long term incarceration to crime victim compensation. Reliance on the former has justified big budgets for corrections without producing any real solution. Our emphasis requires a stay in jail or prison until a debt is paid by the offender. Only non-violent drug or property related offenses would qualify under the program but this covers half the inmate population.

This of course makes it possible for you and others to recover your loses any time someone is convicted of those crimes. Once paid, the offender would be free to go because they were punished to the fullest under our laws.

Under our plan, prisoners don't simply sit in prison watching TV when they're locked up. They pay for their crime in a real way that helps both victims and taxpayers alike. By restoring a victims property and emptying cells once their debt's paid off, when a person's made
compensation no one benefits by having them in prisons using up money needed for programs hard hit by cuts in our budget.

We seek to pass legislation making this a law.

-- a prisoner in WA, August 2002

This article was submitted by a prisoner in Washington building a movement for schools not prisons. MIM has been fighting for similar reforms for years and we unite with this battle in Washington state. To get a copy of the MIM petition for this struggle, which is an adapted version of the one developed by this prisoner (reprinted below) you can visit MIM's web site at www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/prisons. If you would like more materials on the work this prisoner is doing you can contact him at: Mark LaRue 629174, Washington Correction Center, PO Box 900, Shelton, WA 98584

MIM replies:

We unite with this prisoner in harshly condemning the high state and federal prison budgets. And we agree that this outrageous spending on prisons has done nothing to deter crime. In fact, prison building works as a capacity driven system as the incarceration rate has gone up steadily over the past 30 years. As this prisoner points out, this should be no surprise with the concurrent budget cuts to social
services. With over half the prison population locked up for non- violent drug or property crimes, with the disproportionate imprisonment of Blacks and Latinos, and with most prisoners coming into the system with little money or resources, the correlation should be clear.

The change to the system of incarceration proposed by this prisoner would be progress for the criminal injustice system because it would reduce the sentences served in prison. MIM would add to this proposed solution that the Amerikan criminal injustice system is behind the problem, not just incorrect sentencing of non-violent offenders, or misplaced spending. This solution does not address the injustice of the entire system, from arrest, to the courts to sentencing to prisons where repression and national oppression are the norm. The same people currently being locked up would still be imprisoned, while the biggest property criminals, the imperialists who steal huge amounts of wealth from the Third World peoples, go free running the country. Prisons would still be used as a tool of social control by the imperialists, even if they couldn't lock people up for the same ridiculous sentences.

MIM envisions a system that would serve the people rather than serving the Amerikan imperialists. As a part of our fight for reforms that will improve the conditions of the oppressed, we need to make clear to the people that without revolutionary change the oppressive system will remain. We must frame our reformist battles in this context as a part of our work to build public opinion.

The concept of retribution also misses the bigger picture. Property crimes are fueled by poverty, and locking people up until they make retribution will not do anything to address the problem of poverty. MIM does not see a way to address this problem under imperialism and this is why we put our work to reform the criminal injustice system in the context of the battle to overthrow imperialism. We work to build a society run by the people for the people. This system, after capitalism is overthrown, is called socialism and is run by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism will still require prisons, but prisons will be used to re-educate those who commit crimes against the people. The goal won't be retribution, though certainly prisoners may be made to work while locked up. Rather the goal will be to create productive members of society who can go back out and make lasting contributions. As a model for this we look to revolutionary China under Mao. We recommend the book Prisoners of Liberation for a more detailed description of the use of prisons for real rehabilitation in China at that time.


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