Michigan’s prison system is broken and spiraling out of control, and nothing anyone is now proposing is going to do much to fix it. Now before I go any further, I want to emphasize that I am not an expert on criminal justice. My personal experience with prisons consists in interviewing a few convicts behind bars.
However, I am not a railroad engineer either, but I know a train wreck when I see one. And the more you learn about our prison system the more horrified you are bound to become.
We are talking about a system that is locking up four times as many people as it did a generation ago, and whose population of inmates does nothing but continue to rise, year after year, always faster than the corrections experts predict.
The system isn’t rehabilitating the prisoners. The recidivism rate is now 48 percent, which means half of all released inmates are back in jail within two to three years. You can’t assume the rest go straight; some of them die, or get killed, or fall through the cracks.
We are paying a terrific cost -- almost $2 billion a year -- to keep 51,000 of our fellow Michiganders locked up. But though we are spending a lot on warehousing them, we aren’t even doing a very good job of that. This has, in fact been a horrific year for Michigan prisons. For starters, the system accidentally let a homicidal maniac named Patrick Selepak out on parole.
He promptly tortured and murdered three people. Last month, 60 Minutes did a major piece on the plight of the mentally ill in Michigan prisons. It centered on a young man named Timothy Souders who, the program said, died of thirst after being tied up and forcibly restrained for up to eighteen hours at a time.
Other mentally ill inmates were also said to have died needlessly of hunger, thirst and torture here.
And this came less than two years after revelations of a continuing pattern of sexual abuse of women inmates by guards.
So Michigan’s out-of-control corrections system is clearly a mess. The easiest thing to do would be to call for the director’s firing. But whether justified or not, that would do nothing to address the system’s major long-term structural problems.
What we need to do is reinvent the corrections system and our corrections policy. Governor Granholm needs to appoint a high-powered bipartisan commission and charge them with coming up with an entirely new corrections policy for the state.
Then, the governor and the legislature need to do whatever they can and spend whatever it takes to make it happen.
This needs to be a policy designed to protect society at an affordable cost in a sensible way. If it takes billions up front to make it happen, it would well be worth it. What we have now is bankrupting the state, and failing everyone. There has to be a better way.
Comments