Federal Prison Population Research Articles

Abstract P234: Prison Inmate Awareness of Heart Disease Status While Incarcerated in State and Federal Prisons, 2016

Background: Heart disease (HD) is the leading cause of death of inmates incarcerated in state prisons in the US, as it is in the general population. However, in 2001-2019 the mortality rate of HD in incarcerated populations was reported to increase, while it decreased in the US population. . This is despite constitutionally mandated access to healthcare. There are few studies assessing healthcare utilization in prison populations. The 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates is exceptional in that it explores utilization across both state and federal prisons, and allows us to explore factors that may contribute to decreased understanding of health status. Methods: This study is a secondary analysis of the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a cross sectional survey of the state and federal prison population across the United States. Data collection took place from January to October 2016. All participants were above 18 years of age, incarcerated across 1808 state and 193 federal institutions. All analysis was restricted to those with a reported history HD, which included heart attack, coronary heart disease, angina, congestive heart failure, or other heart problems. Awareness of their current heart disease status was operationalized by combining self-reported history and current heart disease status. Results: When asked, 27.9% of survey respondents reported a history of heart disease but denied currently having heart disease. Yet 89.3% of these unaware patients had seen a healthcare provider since incarceration. . Independent of age, those with difficulty walking/climbing stairs or doing activities alone, and older in age (all p<0.01) were more likely to be aware of HD status. Factors including veteran status (OR=0.7; CI: 0.5-0.9), homeless 30 days prior to incarceration (37.8% vs 27.7%; p=0.036) and those experiencing homelessness before 18 years of age (40.4% vs 25.8%; p<0.001) were associated with being unaware of heart disease status. Individuals with ADD/ADHD (prevalence=23.7%) had weaker (non-significant) association between awareness of their heart disease and healthcare utilizing behavior (Mantel-Haenszel test for heterogeneity; p=0.006). Meanwhile, those without ADD/ADHD had nearly 4 times the odds of correctly reporting their heart disease status if they had seen a provider (OR=3.90; CI: 2.32-6.59), compared to those who hadn’t seen one. Those with a history of ADD/ADHD were more likely to report experiencing homelessness prior to age 18 (p<<0.001), 30 days prior to arrest (p=0.002) and 12 months prior to arrest (p<0.001). Conclusions: Awareness was associated with utilizing healthcare since incarceration, but only 72.4% were clear that HD is a chronic condition. The associations between awareness and disability and other life experiences show an influence from socioeconomic status which could inform much-needed health promotion programming.

Canada's Aging Federal Prison Population: Health Disparity, Risk, and Compassionate Release for Persons Convicted of Sexual Offenses.

The Canadian federal prison population is increasingly aging within institutions that were never intended or designed to meet the complex medical and mental health needs of older incarcerated persons. Increasing numbers of incarcerated persons are "aging in place," and many are dying within federal correctional institutions. Persons convicted of sexual offenses comprise a large-and growing-proportion of this aging population. The Correctional Investigator Canada has recently called for an expansion of access to compassionate release for the aging federal prison population, yet little progress has been made. In this article, we explore the significant challenges faced by the aging population in federal institutions, including insufficient access to appropriate care, challenges in application for compassionate release, and how questions of risk may affect the potential for community transfer. Questions of risk overshadow decisions on early release of incarcerated persons, especially those convicted of sexual offenses. Nurses play a central role in the provision of care to aging incarcerated persons and in advocacy for better access to services when a patient's needs cannot be met within the institution. This article presents a call to action for forensic nurses in Canada (and beyond) to advocate for both improved services within federal correctional institutions and for expedited access to compassionate release of aging incarcerated persons, especially those nearing end of life. The significant disparity in access to health care for aging incarcerated persons compared with their nonincarcerated counterparts represents a significant concern.

The Door Is Still Open

As COVID-19 threatened the lives of those incarcerated, compassionate release motions emerged as a critical mechanism to seek the release of those individuals most vulnerable to severe illness or death. But today, as the urgency of the pandemic diminishes and the grounds justifying release is limited in some Circuits, some may fear that compassionate release has returned to its flawed roots of being available only to a very few. This Article argues that the historical categories related to an individual’s age and health need not, and should not, be so narrowly viewed. Rather, these existing categories for compassionate release can be approached more expansively, by grounding them in an understanding of how an elderly individual’s health deteriorates in prison, and by calling attention to the inability of an incarcerated individual to access specialized and necessary medical care. Framing these categories in this way ultimately encompasses many elderly individuals in prison and those younger individuals with serious medical conditions who are receiving inadequate medical care. Given the rapidly aging federal prison population and the thousands of prisoners who suffer from significant medical conditions, many of whom have already served many years in prison and demonstrate compelling rehabilitation, these categories remain viable—and even promising— avenues for release.

Advice to New Commissioners

As the Sentencing Commission revives after years without a quorum, a top priority should be to address a statutory duty that has been neglected since the Commission’s inception: the mandatory obligation under 28 U.S.C. § 994(g) to make recommendations regarding the Bureau of Prisons’ execution of Guidelines sentences. Since the effective date of the Sentencing Reform Act, the federal prison population has tripled, spurred on by Bureau of Prisons’ policies and practices that stint on or completely abandon ameliorative sentencing statutes. These administrative positions, implemented with no input from the Commission, effectively increase time individuals spend in prison serving Guidelines sentences, often generating unwarranted disparities among similarly situated defendants. With new Commissioners and a new Bureau of Prisons Director, now is the time for the Commission to make eleven recommendations to the BOP to use existing statutory authority to increase community corrections and reduce time in prison. The statutory bases for administrative action by the BOP cover prerelease custody (18 U.S.C. § 3624(c)), the residential drug abuse program (18 U.S.C. § 3621(e)), sentence calculations for pretrial custody credit (18 U.S.C. §§ 3585(b), 3584(a), and 3624(b)), compassionate release (18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A)(i)), the boot camp, or shock incarceration, program (18 U.S.C. § 4046(a) and 28 C.F.R. § 524.31(b)), and earned time credits under the First Step Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 3632(d) and 3624(g)). Each of the proposed statutorily-based recommendations will ameliorate the overuse of prison while promoting rehabilitation and saving taxpayer money.

Reducing the Federal Prison Population

Decades of research on the impact of pretrial detention demonstrates that pretrial detention has consistent negative impacts on case outcomes. In particular, in the federal system, detained defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison, and to receive longer sentences than comparable defendants released pending trial. Despite these negative impacts and despite an effective system of pretrial supervision, rates of pretrial detention in the federal system remain high, which impacts the overall federal prison population. This article explores the important role played by pretrial supervision in reducing prison populations by examining its impact on federal sentencing. Specifically, the article presents new research from the Central District of California, examining the mitigating role played by performance on pretrial supervision at sentencing. It concludes by highlighting the importance of judicial and legislative efforts to reduce federal pretrial detention rates.

Might Structural Changes Be the Next Step for Federal Sentencing Reform?

The landmark First Step Act was given a name intended to signal that additional criminal justice reforms should be a continued focus for federal policy makers. But more than three years later, Congress has yet to pass any new sentencing reform laws. The introduction to the April 2022 Issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter explores what could come next in the area of sentencing reform, with a particular focus on two new federal bills proposing notable structural changes to the federal sentencing system. The proposed Sentencing Commission Improvements Act and FIX Clemency Act are both commendable because they seek to alter key structures that have contributed to massive growth in the federal prison population.

The pattern of skin disorders in federal prison population

<h3>АКТУАЛЬНОСТЬ</h3> Случаи кожных заболеваний у заключенных обусловлены плохим доступом к медицинской помощи, поздним выявлением, ограничениями в изоляторах, а также недостаточным финансированием здравоохранения. <h3>ЦЕЛЬ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ</h3> Изучить профиль кожных заболеваний среди заключенных в региональном пенитенциарном учреждении. <h3>МАТЕРИАЛ И МЕТОДЫ</h3> Это перекрестное исследование проводилось в одном региональном пенитенциарном учреждении Южного Калимантана (Индонезия) с использованием социально-демографических и клинических данных. Зарегистрированные заключенные с дерматологическим заболеванием подавали запросы на консультацию. Затем врачи вносили в документацию описания, диагнозы и методы лечения. Все данные собирали из медицинских карт заключенных, которые заполняли шесть дерматологов во время врачебных консультаций. Анализ всех данных проводили описательно с использованием программного обеспечения SPSS 23. <h3>РЕЗУЛЬТАТЫ</h3> В исследовании приняли участие 243 заключенных. Основные диагнозы: чесотка (119 случаев, 49%), пиодермия (31 случай, 12,7%), паховая дерматофития (14 случаев, 5,8%), дерматофития гладкой кожи (14 случаев, 5,8%), дерматит и экзема (9 случаев, 3,7%), нейродермит (8 случаев, 3,3%), себорейный дерматит (5 случаев, 2,1%), аллергический контактный дерматит (5 случаев, 2,1%), другие диагнозы (38 случаев, 15,6%). <h3>ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЕ</h3> Обнаружены инфекционные заболевания кожи у 188 (77%) участников исследования, у 55 (23%) имелись неинфекционные заболевания кожи. Чесотка, пиодермия и дерматофития (промежности и гладкой кожи) были наиболее распространенными кожными заболеваниями среди заключенных в региональной пенитенциарной системе Южного Калимантана (Индонезия).

Navigating re-entry with older adults using ecosystems perspective and the eco-map

Currently, the population of older adults is growing at a rapid rate. The number of older adults in America is similarly represented in the justice system with the number of older adults aged 56 and older accounting for 11.8 percent of the total federal prison population. Older adults in the criminal justice system are at heightened risk for poor health, mental illness, and accelerated aging. For those exiting the carceral system, many older adults may not have community connections to aid in re-entry. Social service providers and community agencies that are tasked with advocating for marginalized populations, empowering clients, and addressing psychosocial problems of older adults, may be uniquely helpful in the re-entry process. Guided by ecological systems theory, this article presents the eco-map tool for social service professionals (e.g., social workers, probation officers) to use in tandem with eco-systems perspective. Using this tool in collaboration with older adult clients may assist with re-entry. Furthermore, social service providers can use this to navigate complex relationships within the community and society at large. Finally, the use of this tool may assist with facilitating comprehensive support and wrap-around services for older adults.

Sentencing Federal Drug Offenders

The Drug War ushered in harsh sentencing practices in the United States. The severity in penalties has been particularly salient in the federal criminal justice system. Increased statutory penalties and U.S. Sentencing Commission guidelines led to drug users and traffickers serving longer periods of incarceration. As a result, the federal correctional system is overburdened. A noticeable change in attitude is evident. Congress has offered leniency for certain first-time drug offenders in the form of a statutory safety valve. While a progressive step, the safety valve applies to relatively few individuals. Importantly, federal judges have some discretion to reject what they might consider to be overly lengthy sentencing mandates. This Article provides an empirical study of sentencing statistics for drug offences. The sample derives from the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s fiscal year 2019 dataset of over 20,000 cases sentenced for drug crimes. Results show that judges employed various mechanisms to reduce statutory- and guidelines-based penalties. Strategies by judges include avoiding mandatory minimums (using the safety valve and otherwise), giving greater point reductions than permitted, and rejecting Commission policies. Over 60% of sentences were below the guidelines’ minimum recommendations. The consequences are beneficial in alleviating strain on the federal prison population, but create inconsistency in sentencing practices. A qualitative component supplements the quantitative. Judges, when issuing their statement of reasons for the sentence, may include textual comments. These comments provide valuable contextual information in how judges articulate their concerns with sanctions for drug offenders. Overall results present important policy considerations.

Causes of Aging in the Federal Prison Population and a Comparison to States

The unremitting growth of older inmates in prison populations is one of the most pressing concerns in federal corrections today; however, empirical research on the topic says little about the causes of these changes. This article addresses this gap by applying an established methodology to analyze and quantify the contributions of key factors driving the growth of aging federal prison populations. Specifically, we use data from the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP) to determine how changes to prisoner age at entry, rate of entry, and rate of exit have shaped the prison population over recent decades. Overall, we find that from 1994 to 2004, rapid increases in the rate of prisoner admission explain the majority of growth in the elderly population, but that since 2004, age at admission has been much more important, with longer time served and rate of admission also playing a role. These influences appear to be quite different from those shaping state prison populations. Our results suggest optimal policy responses to aging populations will need to be tailored to their jurisdiction.

Relationship Between Prison Length of Stay and Recidivism: A Study Using Regression Discontinuity and Instrumental Variables With Multiple Break Points

Research SummaryIn this study, we use both a regression discontinuity design and an instrumental variable identification strategy to examine the relationship between prison length of stay and recidivism among a large sample of federal offenders. We capitalize on the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines structure to apply these strong inference, quasi‐experimental approaches. We find that average length of stay can be reduced by 7.5 months with a small impact on recidivism. We also examine whether there is treatment heterogeneity. We find that length‐of‐stay effects do not vary by criminal history, offense seriousness, sex, race, and education level.Policy ImplicationsWe show that reducing the average length of stay for the federal prison population by 7.5 months could save the Bureau of Prisons 33,203 beds once the inmate population reaches steady state. This back‐of‐the‐envelope estimate reveals how reductions in time served can have a much larger impact on prison reductions compared with diverting low‐level offenders from prison to probation. Prison length‐of‐stay reductions can impact the entire prison population, whereas diversion typically affects a small subset of offenders whose consumption of prison beds is a small fraction of the total number of beds. We also discuss the potential impact of reducing levels of imprisonment on other collateral consequences.

Critical Junctures and Conditions of Change: Exploring the Fall of Prison Populations in US States

State prison populations in the United States have been regularly declining since 2009, and, at the end of 2014, the combined federal and state prison population was at its lowest level since 2005. Criminologists were caught by surprise by this development in the country that epitomized contemporary ‘mass incarceration’. Their theoretical accounts were steeped in a ‘punitive worldview’ that left no space for the stabilization and eventual decline in mass incarceration in the United States. This article focuses on policy processes, rather than structural conditions, as drivers of penal change. The article begins with an overview of theories of punishment and their shortcomings. The framework that guides our study is based on the concept of ‘critical junctures’, which are seedbeds of long-term transformative change that present opportunities and constraints for actors in the penal field. The empirical research presented here analyses the adoption of legal reforms aimed at reducing mass incarceration by the 50 US states. We find that a trifecta of conflicting actors – legal, political and public – accounts for the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which states move towards penal reform.

Land of the Free: Prison Reform Following the War on Drugs

ince its beginnings in 1971, the war on drugs has been largely unsuccessful in reducing drug use. Instead, it has had many unintended consequences, one of which is a huge increase in the federal prison population over the past 40 years. Despite making up only five percent of the world population, the U.S. is home to 25 percent of its prisoners. Since the 1970s, the prison population in the U.S. has skyrocketed due to the implementation of War on Drugs policies. The main reason for the failure of the War on Drugs can be attributed in part to mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Implemented as a part of the Anti- Drug Abuse Act of 1986, these one-size-fits-all policies require a certain punishment based on the amount and type of drug in possession without allowing for flexibility based on context.

Patterns of skin disease in a sample of the federal prison population: a retrospective chart review.

Dermatology in vulnerable populations is under-researched. Our objective was to analyze the most commonly referred skin diseases affecting the Correctional Service Canada inmates in Ontario. An observational, cross-sectional, retrospective chart review of inmate patients seen from 2008 until 2013 was performed. Two groups of patients were included in the analysis: those assessed in-person, and those evaluated by e-consult. In the in-person patient group, the 3 most common diagnoses were acne, psoriasis and other superficial mycoses. For the e-consult group, the 3 most frequent diagnoses were acne, psoriasis and rosacea. There was a clear bias toward more inmates being seen in-person where the service was provided (Collins Bay Institution) than from other correctional institutions in Eastern Ontario. Most of the skin diseases that affected the incarcerated population studied were common afflictions, similar to those affecting the general population, which is in agreement with other studies. Future studies investigating skin diseases in male and female inmates across Canada would bestow more generalizable data.

Clean Slate: Expanding Expungements and Pardons for Non-Violent Federal Offenders

Over the past forty years, the United States Congress has passed legislation expanding the federal criminal code intruding into an area typically reserved to the states. The “tough on crime” rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s brought with it the enactment of various legislative initiatives: harsh mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent federal offenders, “truth in sentencing” laws that restricted or abolished parole and early release, and strict liability disqualifications from employment and federal benefits based solely on the fact of conviction. The effect of this legislation was the creation of a new criminal class: a federal prison population. However, unlike the states the federal government does not have a legal mechanism in place adequately reintegrating federal offenders back into the American polity. This has contributed to soaring federal incarceration rates, rising government costs for corrections, and a historically high rate of criminal recidivism. This is a price tag the United States can no longer afford to pay. This Article argues that individuals who have served their sentences and abided by the law for some period afterward should be given the opportunity to rid their slates of their criminal histories. Such expungement of criminal convictions for individuals who demonstrate that they will abide by the law are likely to reduce the costs of the criminal justice system and improve the lives of ex-offenders. First, this Article examines post-conviction penalties and contemporary recidivism trends. Second, this Article investigates the law governing federal pardons and judicial expungements, finding that the doctrines and their applications lack consistency, making it difficult for nonviolent offenders to re-enter mainstream society. This Article argues that simply eliminating post-conviction disabilities would be extremely complex and perhaps not practically or politically feasible. Moreover, the two existing federal post-conviction remedies — pardons and judicial expungements — are not designed to, and cannot as a practical matter, provide systematic relief from post-conviction disabilities. Using state post-conviction mechanisms as examples, this Article argues that congressionally sanctioned expungements are an attractive alternative to relieve non-violent offenders of the effects of post-conviction disabilities. I propose that the United States Sentencing Commission (U.S.S.C.) create a Second Chance Advisory Group to determine how best to ameliorate the collateral consequences of federal convictions. With a Second Chance Advisory group, the U.S.S.C. could be used as a vehicle for researching and recommending legislative policy initiatives that will effectively slash incarceration, recidivism, and opportunity costs.

Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State

The United States holds the world’s largest prison population, caging more humans than any other nation on earth. In a situation that is not only internationally unparalleled but also historically unprecedented, every day more than 2 million people are barred somewhere within this nation’s vast archipelago of prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Another 7.2 million are on probation, on parole, or under a deportation order. This is not just any population. The majority of those confined in a U.S. correctional facility are black or brown, and poor. Indeed blacks and Latinos make up 72 percent of the federal prison population and the majority of the state prison populations. By the end of this year, one in three young African American males and one in six young Latino males will be locked away from society. The numbers for women of color versus white women are also stark: 133 of 100,000 African American women and 77 of 100,000 Latinas are locked up as compared with only 47 of 100,000 white women.1 The racial demographics of immigrant detention are equally dire. More than 80 percent of immigration detainees are Latinos, namely Mexicans or Central Americans. The policing apparatus that fills the nation’s carceral facilities is even more capacious. Having been subject to arrest, an estimated 65 million people in the United States have criminal records.2 Scores more have been stopped and interrogated but not arrested. For example, the nation’s largest police force, the New York Police Department (nypd), has conducted nearly 5 million “stop and frisk” investigations from 2003 to 2012. Less than 12 percent of such street interrogations have resulted in arrest, but close to 90 percent of those stopped and frisked in the city are young black and Latino men. Throughout urban

Prison Literature, Then and Now

Prison Literature, Then and Now H. Bruce Franklin (bio) If the literature and other cultural creations by American convicts were the only remains of American society, imagine the history of the United States that future archaeologists might construct. Of course it would lack any overviews of American society from the top, but it would sure have deep visions of American realities from the bottom. Those future historians would have startling revelations of the roles of slavery, wealth, and war in an expanding nation that created the modern prison system as part of its God-given mission to reform the world. And when it came to trying to understand how the nation that claimed to be the world’s leading democracy transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration and surveillance, what better sources than the voices coming from the many millions of Americans imprisoned between the 1960s and the early decades of the twenty-first century? I was not as far removed from the actual history as those imaginary archaeologists when I began my work on the literature of the American prison in the early and mid-1970s. In fact, prison literature, my involvement with prison activism, and my own arrests with threatened long-term incarceration were all having a profound influence on my thinking and life. This was hardly a unique experience. Prison literature spoke to millions as our consciousness and lives were being transformed by the interrelated matrices of the prison, the “long hot summers” of 1964–1968, and Vietnam. For obvious examples, think of what the works of Malcolm X and George Jackson meant to the mass movements of what we call “the Sixties,” an era that actually began around 1963 and ended in the mid-1970s. This era of progressive upheaval seemed at the time to many of its participants, including myself, as a possibly pre-revolutionary period. Unfortunately, many of those sitting in the most powerful positions shared that view. Thus, it is not mere coincidence that in 1971 President Richard Nixon officially declared the “War on Drugs” that has provided the ideological and legal basis for the mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement of millions of people, drawn mainly from the black and brown populations who were rising up to demand the progressive if not downright revolutionary changes that our rulers feared. For the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century, the official count of the US State and Federal Prison Population (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics) never significantly went above 200,000. But by the time the first edition of The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison appeared in 1978, there were already close to 300,000 people incarcerated in America’s prisons and jails. The tumor of mass incarceration was just beginning its cancerous invasion. When the second edition came out in 1982 (retitled as Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist), there were almost 400,000. When the third edition arrived in 1989, there were almost 800,000. As I write this essay, seven million Americans are under the jurisdiction of the “correctional” system, including 4.8 million on parole or probation and 2.3 million actually locked up in prisons and jails. Almost six million citizens have been permanently stripped of their right to vote by felony disenfranchisement, thus shifting political power decisively into the hands of the right wing. For example, felony disenfranchisement in 2000 undeniably gave the White House to George W. Bush, who “won” Florida by 527 votes because more than 600,000 Florida citizens, overwhelmingly African American, had thereby been denied the right to vote. At first, mass incarceration only accelerated the explosive growth and influence of prison literature. Waves of words poured out from prisons into the American public in mass-market paperbacks, newspapers, literary journals, general magazines, and major motion pictures. But these waves were soon overwhelmed by a tsunami of repression in the late 1970s. New York’s 1977 “Son of Sam” law made it illegal for convict authors to earn money from their writing. Other states swiftly enacted copycat laws. The US Government adopted Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Section...

Five Theses on Mass Incarceration

According to the latest data published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS),in 2014 the prison population of the United States stood at 1361,500 (BJS 2015a, 1), If prisoners held in local jails are added to the count, the population confined behind bars reaches 2,306,100 (for an incarceration rate of 725/100,000), to which one should add the more than 4,7 million individuals currently on parole or probation. In total, more than 7 million people are currently under some form of penal control--almost 3% of the US population, the equivalent of what would be the second-largest city in the United States after New York (BJS 2014a, 2015a, 2015b). However, the sheer extension of the correctional population in the United States does not convey the race and class dimensions of the US penal state--the result of a four-decade-long carceral experiment devised from the outset as a political strategy to restructure racial and class domination in the aftermath of the radical social movements of the 1960s (cf. Alexander 2010; Tonry 2011; Wacquant 2009). As of 2014, 59% of the male prison population was either African American (37%) or Latino (22%). The largest overrepresentation of black prisoners is among males aged 18 to 19: With an incarceration rate of 1,072/100,000, young black men are 10 times more likely to be in a state or federal prison than whites (102/100,000). In 2014, 6% of black men aged 30 to 39 were in prison, compared to 2% of Latinos and 1% of whites of the same age (BJS 2015, I). According to recent estimates, African American children born in 1990 of a high-school dropout black father had a 50.5% chance of having their male parent in prison by age 14, whereas for those born of a non-college-educated black father the probability was 30% (Wildeman 2009, 273). Black male high-school dropouts born between 1975 and 1979 had a 70% chance of spending some time in prison before reaching age 35 (Western and Wildeman 2009, 231). In 2014, resuming a recent downward trend that had been momentarily reversed in 2013, the nation's prison population registered a modest 1% decline--15,400 fewer prisoners since the previous year. Approximately one third of this decline was due to a decrease in the federal prison population; once that number is subtracted from the count, the decline at the state level (where the vast majority of prisoners are held) goes down to a meager average of 200 fewer inmates for each US state in the period 2013-2014 (BJS 2015a, 2). Despite the ongoing national debate on the prison crisis and the recent wave of bipartisan initiatives to tackle the burgeoning costs of mass incarceration, in 2014 prison admissions actually rose in 18 states. Over the same period, California--whose 2011 Public Safety Realignment plan has been hailed by some as a blueprint for nationwide decarceration efforts--has witnessed a slight increase in the state prison population (+0.1%), largely due to the ongoing rise in the number of women behind bars (+1.3% in 2013-2014; ibid., 3). Indeed, since 2010 women have been the fastest-growing fraction of the US prison population, rising by an average of 3.4% annually, even as the number of incarcerated men was undergoing a modest decline (BJS 2014b, 6). These tendencies become even more evident if one observes the fluctuating population of local jails, which are increasingly transformed into modern-day poorhouses in charge of the low-cost warehousing of petty offenders now deemed unworthy of expensive stays in state prisons: In 2014 the total US jail population rose by 1.8% since the previous year, with the female jail population increasing by a notable 18% between 2000 and 2014 (BJS 2015b. 3). Do these contradictory signals emerging from the penal field herald a turning point in the history of the American carceral state? Is it plausible, as Jonathan Simon (2014, 1) argues in his recent book, that like a biblical flood, the age of mass incarceration is finally ebbing? …

Prison, Money, and Drugs

America is currently facing a major crisis with prison overcrowding and operating costs that exceed the annual budget. In the 1980s, the federal government began a “war on drugs” and Congress passed a number of drug statutes that carried mandatory minimum penalties for offenders. Since then, the federal prison population began to grow exponentially and has now reached a practically unsustainable level. The marginal changes made thus far are simply not enough to address the problem. Since 1984, the federal sentencing system has struggled to efficiently and effectively balance mandatory minimum sentences with the sentencing guidelines. Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished, and all authority transferred to the Sentencing Commission. The Commission needs to comprehensively reevaluate and reformulate all sentencing guidelines free from the control of the mandatory sentences. Nevertheless, a complete reform of the sentencing system will take quite some time and more immediate relief is necessary. In the interest of alleviating the strain of the prison population and its costs, the Commission and Congress need to first eliminate the mandatory sentences for drug offenses and begin developing alternatives to incarceration for those whose offenses do not warrant imprisonment or who are in need of treatment. The Comment discusses the federal sentencing system and how mandatory minimum sentences spurred by the “war on drugs” have created a culture of incarceration that cannot be sustained by prison facilities or budgets. The sentencing system needs comprehensive reform that eradicates mandatory minimums and values treatment as well as punishment.

The Case For the Smarter Sentencing Act

Beginning in the 1980’s, Congress passed a series of “tough on crime” mandatory minimum sentences. While increased periods of incarceration contributed to reduced crime rates, the pendulum has swung too far. Mandatory minimum sentences designed for “kingpins” are often meted out to low level drug offenders, who occupy a significant percentage of the federal prison population. The Smarter Sentencing Act would, among other things, reduce the level of minimum sentences for some drug offenders without eliminating them, enabling judges to impose harsher sentences when warranted and freeing up prison space for offenders who pose a greater risk to public safety.