The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS
by Alisa Solomon
Detainees Equal Dollars
The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom
August 14 - 20, 2002
Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center.
"It's a win-win," says Morgan. The INS is desperate for more beds for its ever expanding detainee population. And the state of Nebraska, collecting $65 per detainee per day from the INS, rakes in more than $1 million a year over and above the cost of running the place.
County jailers have long known that housing INS detainees pumps easy income into the coffers. Nearly 900 facilities around the country provide beds for the INS, and in interviews over the years, several county sheriffs and wardens have described such detainees as a "cash crop."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0233/solomon.phpA very l-o-n-g and detailed oldy moldy from '02. Sorry no link.
Empty Promises
Missouri has been pouring millions into prisons that aren't being used. But stay tuned: If politicians have their way, there will be plenty of inmates to go around.
BY BRUCE RUSHTON
For them, prison construction in Missouri is an automatic case of "if you build it, they will come." By 2004, corrections officials predict, the state will run out of cells.
Not everybody believes it.
Take Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist. Rosenfeld is convinced the state has gone overboard. "Absolutely," he says. "Barring policy changes that I just don't see on the horizon, what will happen in Missouri is what we're beginning to see in many other places, and that is smaller and smaller growth rates and then, finally, a flattening. I would think that by 2004 they'll be flat."
During the second half of 2000, the number of inmates confined in state prisons nationwide dropped by half a percentage point, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the first decline in the prison population since 1972. In Missouri, the numbers are rising, but not nearly so fast as in the early and mid-1990s, when annual percentage increases reached double digits. Prison growth peaked in 1995, when the number of inmates increased by 15 percent in one year. Since 1997, annual growth has been less than 5 percent. The numbers work out to 3.3 new inmates per day over the past three years. When work started on Bonne Terre, the state was welcoming eight new inmates per day.
An end may be in sight. With crime rates falling since the early 1990s, inmates sent to prison for parole or probation violations are fueling the growth -- in 2000, 59 percent of all prison admissions were the result of parole or probation revocations. In most cases, parole or probation is revoked for technical violations, such as failing a drug test, as opposed to new crimes. Inevitably, Rosenfeld says, the numbers of probation and parole violators will decrease as sentences run their courses. Banking on repeat offenders to fill new prisons isn't a wise bet in Missouri, which, at 19.2 percent, has the sixth-lowest recidivism rate in the nation.
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So why is Missouri spending so much on new prisons with so little justification?
The simple answer is politics.
With an average sentence of seven years for a violent offense, Missouri is the toughest state in the nation when it comes to punishing dangerous felons. It's also tough on criminals who haven't hurt anyone.
More than half of the state's prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. "That's a pretty high percentage," says Chase Riveland, former director of the Washington Department of Corrections and now a prison consultant. "Legislators need to start looking at it as if they're investment bankers: Who is it we really want to spend the money on to keep them away from the community? If it's a person who's dangerous to other people, yeah, it's worth the investment. In the '80s and early '90s, incarceration was the solution for anything we saw awry in our society. We just put enormous numbers of people in, some of whom could have been dealt with differently and safely in the community. I would say, as an investment banker, we're making some poor investments."
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Inevitably the prison will open. It's just a question of when. "I can't imagine -- I can't imagine -- the state walking away from a commitment like that," the mayor says. Beyond that, the future is uncertain.
riverfronttimes.com | originally published: February 20, 2002