Charen on prisons. Oct 14^th

Mona Charen has decided that releasing all these drug offenders is a very bad idea. She claims that many of them are repeat offenders who have previously committed violent crimes and are surely a menace to society if they get loose. She provides a generous flow of statistics to bolster her positions. The bottom line is that we lead the world in the percentage of our population we keep in prison.

We have about 700 people per hundred thousand of our population in prison compared to Germany, France and England with less than 150 per hundred thousand of population. Moreover, the sentences here are often very long ones. A second offense marijuana possession can get you life in prison with no prospects for parole. The result of this drive to incarcerate is that here in Michigan we have about 44 thousand prisoners housed, fed, clothed and provided with health care at the taxpayer’s expense. The cost of all that comes to about 2 billion dollars a year. The state spends only about 1.5 billion a year on higher education. (Of course that includes 8 million a year for the new U. of M. football coach. Priorities, priorities!)

What’s happened here? Has the incarceration rate always been this high in Michigan? No, it hasn’t. In 1984 we had a prison population of just 14.6 thousand; then by 2002 it had jumped to 30 thousand. This change was, in large part, due to the efforts of John Engler, a very conservative Michigan governor and his conservative administration. Governor Engler closed three quarters of Michigan’s psychiatric hospitals. This resulted in a considerable saving of state money. His view was that the psychotic patients had been adequately controlled by the variety of new anti-psychotic medications then available. He decided that there was no reason, given the effectiveness of these medications, to have the State of Michigan pay to maintain these patients. So the patients were released and, I presume, told to keep taking their medications.

I doubt that the Governor had much knowledge about the care and feeding of severely psychotic people. The problem in many psychiatric hospitals is to be sure that the patient has, indeed, swallowed his, or her, pills. The aide provides the pill and a glass of water. The patient puts the pill in his mouth and swallows the water but the pill is hidden under his tongue to be spit out as soon as the aide is gone. This is because anti-psychotic medications often have unpleasant side effects which make the patient prefer the psychotic symptoms to the medication’s side effects. So when the patients are released into the community and told to be “sure to take their meds,” they don’t! The final result is that they may become aggressive, succumb to drugs or otherwise run afoul of what we view as civilized society. The outcome is a very predictable increase in the prison population. Most authorities estimate that about 20 percent of our prison population is incarcerated because of mental illness.

Engler wasn’t through; the state parole board managed to release a man who had previously committed four horrendous murders. The result was that Engler abolished the parole board and replaced it with a board populated by reliable conservative politicians. Then he introduced a “Truth in Sentencing Law.” This law required a prisoner to serve the full length of his minimum sentence. If the felon was sentenced to four to six years in prison the prisoner had to serve four years no matter what good behavior he might have shown in prison; no early parole was possible. Guess what that did for the prison population. In addition to swelling their ranks it made prisoners harder to control; early parole could no longer be offered for good behavior.

On balance it seems that the conservatives have done everything they could do to keep a large population under lock and key. And now they scream if someone wants to change the rules and let some of the pot smokers out before they die. Horrors!