This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 16, 2011 - The photo on the front page of last Friday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch - of 18 inmates sleeping on the floor of the Jefferson County Jail's library - tells two stories. The first is a narrowly financial one; the second a human one.
The first story is important, but depressingly familiar. The state of Missouri is running out of money to pay for things, and is being forced to make do with less. The second story is more tragic, and shows the terrible human cost we are paying by housing so many in prisons and jails.
Begin with the financial story. The reason there's crowding in prisons and jails is in one respect very simple: money. We either can't afford to build more buildings to house inmates, or we can't afford to hire enough guards to watch over them. As the article accompanying the photo explains, the irony is that there was enough room in the Jefferson County Jail so that the jail didn't have to fit 18 people in the library. The real problem was that there weren't enough guards to watch over them anywhere else in the jail. As a result, sometimes the jail has had to pack up to 63 inmates in the library, so that inmates wouldn't go unsupervised.
We don't normally think of spending on prisons and jails as a luxury item. We consider it a necessity. But difficult economic times are forcing state and local governments to reconsider their punishment policies. Every time we criminalize something new, or pass new mandatory minimums, we are giving state and local governments something like an unfunded mandate: Find a way to get the money to house the people who will newly be in jail, or in for longer stretches of time. But the money isn't there anymore.
The default option for punishment is prison, and prison is very expensive. It is, of course, hard to take the long view when we consider people who commit crimes; we think we should spare no expense when meting out justice. Lock them up and throw away the key. But it turns out that sparing no expense is, unsurprisingly, pretty expensive.
And it is expensive not merely in dollars and cents. This brings us to the second story told by the photograph in the Post-Dispatch. One can hardly be faulted for thinking that herding dozens of inmates to sleep in a "library" -- one sees no books in the photo, certainly -- is to treat them not much better than animals. Our opinion of the photo should not change too much if we recall that the ones on the floor are criminals. For criminals are human beings, too. They are also our fellow citizens, however much they have betrayed our trust by breaking the law.
There is a cost here, but it is not so easily measured in narrow financial terms. It is the cost that comes with basically giving up on a segment of the population, which is the message such treatment unmistakably conveys. It says that we have stopped caring about rehabilitating inmates, or treating them with any measure of dignity. These things cost money, too, but maybe not as much as we think. It may end up costing more not to attempt to reform criminals, to give them no hope of making a better life for themselves.
It is a sad commentary on us that what will eventually change the way we deal with criminals will not be the human cost of so many lives lost in our prisons and jails, but the sheer financial bottom line. It has gotten to the point where courts are ordering states like California to do something about prison conditions. When the money isn't there to improve them, they are forced simply to release prisoners. Consequently, states are scrambling to find cheaper ways to deal with offenders that still keep us safe: rethinking the lengths of punishments, putting drug offenders into treatment rather than jail, granting early release for elderly offenders.
I suppose one shouldn't complain too much about why we go about reforming our criminal justice system. Any change away from the horrible and unsustainable status quo - the one starkly depicted in the photo of the Jefferson County Jail - is one we should welcome.
Chad Flanders teaches at Saint Louis University School of Law.