Bureau of Prisons thumbs its nose at Congress, taxpayers
Add ‘smart on crime’ to political mantra of ‘tough on crime’
The failure of the Bureau of Prisons to implement two major federal laws mandating sentence reductions for nonviolent and first-time offenders costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually even as it increases recidivism risk and the crime rate — never mind the human misery such malign neglect entails. This is the most pressing of the many problems I’ve observed as a prisoner of conscience from inside the walls of a federal prison.
In any fair and efficient criminal justice system, a prison sentence must be long enough to match the crime while sufficient to deter future criminal behavior. Based on my conversations with nearly a hundred fellow inmates and supplementary research, the United States justice system wildly over-sentences and significantly delays releases and thereby misses this mark.
Here’s Prisonomics 101: We must be as “smart on crime” as we are “tough on crime.” Every inmate costs taxpayers $60,000 a year, and the costs of over-sentencing and the Bureau of Prisons‘ failure to release inmates in a timely manner run well into the billions.
America’s over-sentencing for first-time and nonviolent offenders begins with a large roster of “hanging judges” fearful of a political backlash from a citizenry rightly angry with the breakdown of law and order in our society. However, far too many of these black-robed czars have little concept of what it means to be behind bars, and it means nothing to impose sentences twice or more as long as might be needed to adequately punish and deter.
Here, the significant variance across judges in sentences for the same crimes is both well known and troubling. In my own dorm, one inmate got a soul-crushing 150 months for embezzlement while his co-defendant got a mere 30 months for a much larger role in the scam.
Second, over-sentencing has been institutionalized through outdated “mandatory minimums,” which regularly put first-time, nonviolent offenders in prison for 10 to 15 years or more. Mostly, these are young men, often with wives and young children. They will go from youth to middle age in our prison system at a per capita cost to U.S. taxpayers approaching $1 million. In prison, their skills and employability will deteriorate. Tragically, their children will go from babies to teens without a male parent.
Third, there is the “RICO wing” of the Department of Justice, now exploiting and often abusing the broad powers of federal racketeering laws. Indeed, DOJ prosecutors routinely use overly broad “conspiracy” charges to threaten defendants and their family members with ridiculously long sentences if the defendants refuse to plea bargain and instead go to trial. When the inevitable plea comes, coerced defendants are often still saddled with eight-, 10- or 15-year sentences for white-collar crimes that, absent the RICO gambit, would be settled through civil rather than criminal prosecutions.
