Jacob Prall
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When House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama both support a piece of legislation making its way through the House, take a picture with your camera. Yet here we are, with a fat, juicy piece of reformative legislation headed to the House floor.
What could possibly bring these opposing forces together? Well, it’s something that has been championed for years by activists and progressives. We’re talking about prison reform.
Perhaps it’s the success of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ platform emphasizing the “national tragedy” that is the privatized prison system in the U.S. Maybe it’s the statistics of mass incarceration for nonviolent crime in the US, a nation with the highest percentage of incarcerated men in the developed world. Or, maybe it’s the clear strain on society such systems create — feeding and housing aside, the quantity-over-quality technique of prison systems in the U.S. creates violent criminals just as often as it puts them away.
Here comes the Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Effective Justice Act to the rescue. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner,R-Wis., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., drafted the bill in a bipartisan effort to make real change happen to a system so thoroughly ineffective and expensive. As they’ve put it, “annual spending on the federal prison system rose 595 percent, from $970 million to more than $6.7 billion, after adjusting for inflation.”
The proposed act is not only impressive in that it exists, but also in its ambitions. The bill would aim to curtail over-criminalization, increase the use of evidence-based sentencing alternatives, concentrate prison space on violent and career criminals, reduce recidivism, and increase government transparency and accountability.
The bill also goes on to outline how new research-based policy will be implemented. We know the Republican Party as the one that typically isn’t onboard with scientific research (e.g., climate change), but it looks as though they might actually commit to reality. All of these reforms were dreams just a couple months ago, but both Obama and Boehner have come out in strong support of reform and the SAFE Act. Whether the bill will succeed, and in what form, is yet to be seen.
Corruption in the prison systems shouldn’t be surprising. Consider the amount of money there is to be earned by contracting corporations to build and maintain prisons for the federal and state governments. Whenever an entity like the federal government is pumping massive amounts of money into something taken over by the private sector in a nontransparent way, corruption and excessive waste is almost guaranteed.
As if that isn’t a big enough problem on its own, the nature of criminal justice means that economic corruption leads to real issues on the ground floor, with inmates that will leave prison more likely to commit crimes than when they entered, and non-violent offenders rubbing shoulders with dangerous felons. Add that to the difficulty one faces after incarceration and you’ve got a great system to keep locking citizens up, robbing them of their right to vote and right to pursue happiness.
One has to wonder whether the long-overdue overhaul is partly a result from grassroots movements, popular documentaries on the corrupt and harmful nature of U.S. prison systems, and recent strife and violence in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson. Regardless of the ultimate reason that Capitol Hill is finally taking action, it’s a major step in the right direction, and should be supported by any levelheaded American.
