The Value of Hawaii: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future

Prisons

prisons meda chesney-lind and kat brady ending hawai‘i’s imprisonment boom: let’s be smart on crime, not simply tough The last decades of the twentieth century saw the United States embark on an unparalleled increase in the use of incarceration. As a result, the number of inmates in state and federal prisons increased nearly seven-fold. We incarcerated less than 200,000 people in 1970, but by 2008, we were incarcerating over a million and a half prisoners (1,518,559). An additional 785,556 are held in local jails, for a total of 2.3 million of our citizens under lock and key.1 As the Pew Center on the States noted in 2008, we now imprison one out of every hundred of our citizens, giving us the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest incarcerator.2 With less than 5 percent of the world population, the United States houses nearly a quarter of its prisoners.3 Commenting on this trend recently, Senator Jim Webb noted that “With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different—and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.”4 Most criminologists reject the notion that this increase in imprisonment has much to do with the crime rate, particularly in recent decades. They note that from 1971 to 2000, the overall crime rate remained virtually the same, while the national incarceration rate went up by almost 500 percent (494 percent ). A recent study by the University of Texas found that while the number of inmates has grown by over 300 percent since the late 1970s, growth in prisoner numbers is responsible for no more than 27 percent of the recent drop in crime. In fact, in states with the fastest growing prison populations, crime rates did not show the marked decreases one would expect if imprisonment “worked” to reduce crime. In West Virginia, for example, incarceration increased by 131 percent, but crime in that state dropped only 4 percent; in Virginia, incarceration rose just 28 percent, but crime dropped 21 percent.5 110 The Value of Hawai‘i What accounts for most of the increase in prison population? Many believe that a number of legal and policy changes explain the phenomenon. The passage of mandatory sentences, particularly for drug offenses; the adoption of “truth in sentencing” provisions that require prisoners to serve most of their sentences in prison; reductions in the amount of good time a prisoner can receive while imprisoned; and more conservative parole boards have significantly impacted the length of stay. In a special study by the U.S. Department of Justice on truth in sentencing, between 1990 and 1997, prison admissions increased by only 17 percent (from 460,739 to 540,748), while the prison population increased by 60 percent (from 689,577 to 1,100,850).6 Finally, many admissions to prison are actually re-admissions, because individuals have violated a condition of parole, like failing a random drug test. There has been a sevenfold increase in the number of parole violators returned to prison between 1980 and 2000. In states like California, an astonishing 67 percent of prison admissions are actually parole violators.7 This essay documents Hawai‘i’s involvement in mass incarceration over the past few decades, and how these choices continue to impact other aspects of our state’s economy, including the provision of other much needed government services, especially vital social services and education. We hope that the data presented here stimulate an important and overdue debate about Hawai‘i’s response to crime—one that focuses on best practices and proven results, rather than mindlessly tough and costly incarceration. lock ‘em up, danno: hawai‘i’s imprisonment boom Like the rest of the country, Hawai‘i has dramatically increased its reliance on incarceration in the last four decades. Hawai‘i now imprisons roughly 6,000 of our citizens (5,955 in 2008).8 That is up from 5,053 in 2000—an 18 percent increase (see Table One). Ironically, this increase occurred despite the fact that Hawai‘i has seen its crime rate decline to the lowest level in decades.9 Hawai‘i’s prison population has also increased at a faster pace than the nation as a whole, increasing since the turn of the century by 2.4 percent a...