A jury found Lewis not guilty of the charges for which he was arrested, but only after Lewis spent 112 days in jail. His life was put on hold, as was his income due to missing work, because he could not post bail. He lost most of his possessions during a rapid eviction by a landlord who threw Lewis out because the arrest was all the proof the landlord needed to assert Lewis was a threat to the community. The landlord simply tacked a notice to Lewis’ apartment door. That’s right, the landlord knew Lewis was in jail, but expected Lewis to act on an eviction notice hung on an apartment door he could not access.
Lewis could have avoided the series of events that October night. His choices sent him down a miserable road. Justice demands the unfortunate actions Lewis took be investigated fully. But, the damage the process inflicted on Lewis is inexcusable and his story stands as yet another sad example of how America’s justice system is failing.
Breaking the Prison Cycle
Imagine, for a moment, what it must be like for one of the thousands of people who face a worse situation than did Jay Lewis – situations from which a path to a normal life, one more out from under the cloud of incarceration than under it, does not exist. There is no shortage of people in this group. Felons are part of America’s fastest growing fraternity.
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Some estimates indicate the United States spends $200 billion a year on its correctional system; this exceeds the gross domestic product of 25 U.S. states and 140 foreign countries. Yet, the cost of securing, feeding and tending to our bloated prison population is only part of the problem. The catch, incarcerate, release and repeat cycle that is the U.S. criminal justice system is bad for both those of us in front of and behind bars alike.
While a few convicts do their time and never reoffend, many become stuck in a brutal system. There is a growing lawless class of Americans who know little about life without crime and violence. They adapt the lawless behavior learned outside of prison to an often more vicious lawlessness suited for inside. This criminal class is so accustomed to crime, playing both the roles of victim and perpetrator; it is almost easy to understand why many of them cannot imagine life without it.
Creating a Criminal Class
One frightening statistic alone shows how our prison system reinforces illicit behavior, as opposed to reducing it. In January 2011, according to a New York Review of Books article, the U.S. Justice Department released a revised estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse inside penitentiaries. There were 216,000 victims of sexual abuse in prisons in 2008, that’s six hundred people a day—twenty-five an hour. Victims, not instances. Many of these victims are routinely and repeatedly abused. This estimate caused Glazek to suggest the U.S. may be the first country in history to count more rapes for men than women.
Guards are known to look the other way, while our growing criminal class becomes accustomed to life where the consequences of crime are commonplace and acceptable. The violence, isolation and crime inside prison are harming society by creating a new and tougher criminal mentality that seeps outside.
When one of these felons is released, he enters a world where the cards are stacked against him. Jobs are scarce, educational opportunities are few and society continues to punish. It’s easy to see why so many felons revert to an-all-too-often violent disregard for the law and land back in lock-up.
Seventy percent of released prisoners are rearrested. While many do not commit a new felony, but only violate parole, many do. Half of the 70% who are rearrested go back to prison.
Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, three-strike style repeat offender laws and many politically driven sentencing guidelines have resulted in our burgeoning prison population. But, are these tough-sounding penalties helping to curb crime? Crime is down in many categories. But, at what cost and are we creating a worse problem that will have to be faced later?
The current U.S. prison population is greater than every American city with the exception of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Again, the cost for sending men and women to prison at this rate is astronomical, but the greater threat to our nation’s security is that posed by an exploding criminal class so focused on personal survival it is nearly devoid of a moral code.
Has Rehabilitation become Unrealistic?
Jay Lewis spent nearly three months awaiting trial. He walked out an innocent man, albeit broke, if not broken. For the millions of prisoners who spend time surviving the brutal confines of prison, only to be released in a world where opportunities are scarcer than they are for Lewis, one has to wonder if rehabilitation is realistic for many felons.
A free country established on a foundation of laws and liberty is unlikely to sustain itself under our current model, not just because the financial cost of locking up those who offend and throwing away the key is financially untenable. At some point, the lawless class may grow to such numbers it will become more difficult to hold back the tide of crime. Perpetuating a cycle that consigns offenders to a lifetime of thuggery inside and outside of prison without providing a path to a law-abiding, productive way of life dooms them and threatens the rest of us.
Breaking the destructive and costly incarceration cycle starts with our agreeing it is unacceptable for a person in Jay Lewis’ position to suffer such loss and must lead to our finding a better way to balance punishment with rehabilitation for those convicted who are capable of the difficult task of improving their situation.
According to the latest Iowa Department of Corrections report, it costs about $90 per day to house and feed Iowa’s nearly 9,000 prison inmates. Add to that the nearly $70 a day it costs to house and feed the nearly 29,000 who are in less secure community based facilities and one can easily envision the mountains of dollars needed to maintain Iowa’s prison complex. All the while, little is done to break the insidious destructive cycle.
There are vast communities in our country where most every resident feels the never-ending pull of the vacuum of prison. Children grow-up accepting prison as inevitable for either themselves or a relative. In these neighborhoods, having a relative who is or has been in prison is so common it is less likely you will encounter a school age child living there who has not been exposed somehow to the ravages of prison than one who has. It is little wonder so many raised in these areas feel trapped. The chain must be broken here.
It is time for Americans to realize the rhetoric politicians use to appease our desire to feel safe, at best, creates laws that result in short-term dips in crime and, at worst, may be creating a growing criminal class that threatens our national future.
We are long overdue for prison and criminal justice reform in this country, but don’t ask Jay Lewis about that today, he will be busy checking into a homeless shelter because the politics of get-tough-on-crime stole 112 days of his life.
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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register guest essay.
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