DENISE JOHNSON

Prisons: wrong growth industry

Quick, what's 'one of the new growth industries in America?
If a substantial increase in customers means anything, then surely prisons must be on the list.

During the past year, the U.S. prison population grew by 90,000 -- the largest annual increase ever, bringing the total number of adults behind bars to 1.1 million. For the last two years, America has been No. 1 worldwide in locking up its citizens.
Some proponents of this imprisonment growth say it works, citing lower crime rates in some large cities. They argue that get-tough laws have taken many of the most vicious criminals off the streets.
I'm all for putting violent criminals away, but we need to question how those guilty of lesser offenses are handled. Do we really want to be a society that sends more people to jail (in certain groups) than to college? And national image questions aside, can America really afford to keep putting people behind bars at this rate?
State Corrections Commissioner Frank Wood has argued for many years against the prison building binge. In 1975, there were 1,200 adults in Minnesota prisons. Now there are 4,700 and the number will reach 6,000 by the year 2000 if sentencing laws remain the same.
"The public must differentiate between people we're truly afraid of and those we're mad at," he said. "If we use all our resources for after-the-fact solutions, there won't be anything left."
California, he pointed out, has more than 130,000 people in prison. As more state dollars are spent on penal institutions, a lesser percentage of public dollars go to education, health and other human services.
"Places like Los Angeles and San Francisco are not safer because here are more prisons," he added. "My analogy is this: You don't get rid of AIDS by building more hospitals and you don't stop crime by putting up more prisons. Doing a better job of raising children, reducing the violence they live with and improving parenting is a more realistic solution, he says.
Dr. Samuel Myers, of the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the Humphrey Institute, agrees. He believes that some crime rates are going down, not because of more prisons, but because of age distribution (the youth bulge peaked). More drug arrests and charges, he said, are the major reason for skyrocketing prison populations.
"More and more prison space is taken up by petty drug offenders... When they get out, they are likely to be very violent. They have just attended one of the most violent schools in the world. They are in an abnormal society; there are no women and they learn not respect and caring, but violence and abuse."
Myers, author of the book "The Black Underclass: Critical Essays on Race and Unwantedness," said the war on drugs has been waged as if street drugs are the problem. But the more important problem is jobs, since the biggest deterrent to drug sales is increased wages. And because blacks are jailed at much higher rates than others, Myers says
there is a historically racial element to imprisonment patterns driven by managing surplus (or superfluous) black labor. After the Civil War, black males were jailed for minor offenses, then put to work in convict lease systems to make up for the loss of slave labor. Now, Myers argues, the jobs rk force is unwanted.uneducated black male work force is unwanted.
"Why is it that people who demand cuts in welfare and education expenditures nevertheless are anxious to fund more prisons? I think the answer is fear of the black male. We know the economy is shrinking and we need to control tiffs pool of labor that is no longer needed. "This is policy-induced, self-fulfilling prophesy: we believe blacks are more violent, more criminal; arrest them mote frequently, convict them more frequently, incarcerate them more frequently."
Myers' conclusions are supported by racial bias studies conducted by several states' court systems, including Minnesota. The studies revealed that the justice system treats people of color differently and that they are more likely to get stronger sentences for similar criminals than whites.
America is known for growing businesses and for being first at many things. But being No. 1 in prison population is nothing to be proud of. For the long-term health and sake of the nation, more must be invested education, Head Start, parenting, family intervention, better employment -- all the options that keep people off the road to prison in the first place.

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