The following piece by Kathleen Temple is the second of what will be a series of monthly columns by the Valley Justice Coalition that will appear in the Daily News-Record on the fourth Friday of each month:
State Exceeds Nation's Incarceration Rate
Our General Assembly is about to approve another $1.5 billion of our tax dollars to fund the Virginia Department of Corrections. This is the single most costly institution in the Commonwealth’s budget, and doesn’t include the staggering costs of all of the city and county jails in our communities.
There may be some accused persons who need to be locked away for the sake of public safety, but the numbers of people we incarcerate in the US and in the Commonwealth far exceed our population growth and the incarceration rates of other developed countries. And the rate of violent crimes in our country has actually been in decline.
And that $1,500,000,000 doesn’t even come close to matching the cost of lost wages, increased social services and other consequences that negatively affect all of us taxpayers. Nor does it take into account the emotional cost to children who through no fault of their own grow up without one or more of their parents. Nor does it account for the many other costs to our community when non-violent offenders are warehoused in our jails and prisons, including large numbers of our jail inmates are being confined while awaiting their court hearings, presumably innocent until tried and proven guilty.
So given the extremely high criminal-legal costs here in Virginia—in dollars and in the lives of children and others—we should consider every possible alternative to incarceration, keeping non-dangerous persons out of this expensive system whenever possible. We should also recognize that a large portion of those in our carceral facilities have demonstrated changed behaviors, have taken classes while in prison to gain valuable work skills, and could thus be safely returned to their families and communities. In addition, many have aged out of crime and also require increasingly costly healthcare that adds to the strain on our state budget.
The primary purpose of our criminal justice system, according to the DOC’s mission statement, is public safety. For those we do retain, may we ask, Whose safety? The child who has no parent to sing her to sleep, and no parent to provide for her is certainly not safer in this system.
And if, according to the DOC’s name, one of its primary purposes is correction, we should ask whether an understaffed Department of Corrections is effectively “correcting” (rehabilitating) the 40,000 people in its charge? Of the many who do actually experience transformations during incarceration, is it more often due to their individual heroism or to the carceral system itself?. We would like to be able to say both.
Meanwhile, the current Parole Board released only 16 incarcerated persons in 2024, a pathetically small percentage of the over 3000 men and women who are still eligible for parole, that is, those who were incarcerated before Virginia abolished parole in 1995, and more recently including “Fishback” cases and those incarcerated as minors. So with only a few more than one individual released per month, it appears that either the DOC is not “correcting” or the Parole Board is not carrying out its mission to “grant parole or conditional release to inmates whose release is compatible with public safety.”
We can do better than that.
Kathleen Temple
No comments:
Post a Comment