You don't have to be a fan of HBO's The Wire to know that our prison system is pretty messed up. According to a report from the Pew Charitable Trust, one out of every 100 adults are behind bars. Locally, the city's prison system is holding more people than ever before-- more than 9,000. Last year, the city spent more than $200 million on locking people up.
Let's put that number in perspective. The city spends roughly $22,000 per year on each person behind bars. That's more than double the cost of tuition to attend Temple University. Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture?
Increasingly, the answer seems to be "Yes." Today's Inquirer has an article about the newly created post of Deputy Mayor of Public Safety. Nutter's pick for the office, Everett Gillison, seems ready to push for reform. He addressed the question of how Our Money is being spent:
With an eye toward efficiency, Gillison said his position gives him the perspective to reconsider longstanding practices and question piecemeal programs that might not have lived up to their claims.
A primary focus will be the prison system, which holds 9,100 convicts and defendants awaiting trial. Gillison thinks the public might benefit more by spending the nearly $100 a day it costs to keep nonviolent offenders in jail to improve treatment for mental illness or drug abuse, often the source of criminal behavior.
"We can't incarcerate ourselves, as a city, out of the problem of crime," he said.
"If we just let them go, they're coming back, and what have we really done? We haven't accomplished anything except spending more of the city's money trying to do the same thing, over and over and over again."
Amen!
Comments (9)
Of those 10,000 inmates in the city prisons, a large number undergo detox and mental health treatment in a locked setting. They are usually not able to go the unlocked detox/MH treatment route, even if court ordered, so they end up in locked setting.
Smaller systems such as locked units interwoven throughout the city are likely going to cost about as much.
Put into perspective, 10,000 prisoners in the county system out of a city of 1.4 million is not really a large number. So what if the rest of the nation has a higher percentage of incarcerated? Our percentage is much lower, 10/1,400 or 1 in 140.
If we want to get a handle on crime, a significant part of the equation is to get more in line with what the rest of the country is doing -- offering significant MH/detox in the county prison system, not simply letting people walk.
It's a fallacy to compare incarceration costs to tuition -- if the average prisoner could go to college, they would. But typically, they are a long way from that level of functionality.
The press seems like it wants to be in a hardheaded position on how to best care for prisoners. Remember that many prisoners get their first HIV diagnosis inside, first successful detox, and first effective baseline mental health care that can allow them to live on the outside.
Romanticizing Philly prisons as draconian doesn't represent what they accomplish, nor does it comprehend how they can accomplish even more.
Posted by Anonymous | March 26, 2008 10:22 AM
I'd recommend touring the PPS before condemning it. Getting most of your journalistic ideas from TV is not fair to inmates or to PPS employees.
Philly is not a city with frivolously incarcerated inmates. The average inmate has critical health, behavioral health, social service, and addiction treatment needs. Those variables are so severe that a whole team struggles to re-integrate the person into a parole/probation discharge plan.
What the PPS is, given its capacity, is crowded. There is no way we are going to avoid building more buildings on State Road that are newer, safer, and more conducive to prisoner health and wellness.
Many of the buildings on State Road are ready to be renovated with more stories built on top of them, such as HOC, PICC, and the Detention Center. Holmesburg should also be renovated and made taller, if only for administration offices.'
There's not getting around the poor education, the multigenerational addiction and dysfunction, and also the strong anti-intellectualism that bred the average PPS resident. They're reluctant to join the regular world at first. That's how they got to prison.
But for those inmates who are ready for life on the outside, often they are overwhelmed and come back. Drugs are a top reason, then alcohol, then also just loneliness. Some inmates even in the 2 year max sentence Philly Prison System come back to prison to get the support and care they got on the inside once again.
Halfway "houses" often don't have the staff of trained social workers, psych nurses, and on staff psychiatrists/therapists -- just a skeleton crew of 2 year LPN nurses who do basic stuff and refer the resident to support on the outside.
That's not really "halfway." A stepped down wrap around system that is well funded by the city is not going to be cheaper. For every CO's salary and benefit that you forego, you need support staff doing re-integration.
What the city has to do is stop underfunding schools such that they are breeding grounds for unemployables. Even if that means collecting the $500 million in overdue, billed property taxes using foreclosure, you can't keep the school system at such a low performing level so that it's a PPS/DOC feeder.
The city is going to have to spend more money on PPS, and yes, more money on schools. That means the owners of city property must pay their property taxes on time.
The press seems to have little idea what is involved in running PPS, and little idea of how much the city already spends on doing health care, detox, and mental health/social services for inmates. The press has no idea what Philly's recidivism rate is, nor that of the surrounding counties.
The press also has no idea of how low the clearance rate is by the DA and courts of criminal cases. To argue for a "let the prisoners out" response given the realities is immature, and badly informed.
What the press could do is advocate for treatment inside, and superlative wrap around staff inside and out. Right now, the whole behavioral health system in Philly is completely stuffed. Pouring inmates into that capacity is not going to result in good care. We have to build more capacity inside and out.
To build more treatment and social services capacity inside and out means hiring people. To build more capacity means that Philly is going to have to collect property taxes, a subject that the press has seemingly already made up its mind about, i.e. foreclosure = bad.
Thing is, foreclosures pay for prisons, schools, and city services.
You can't have it both ways.
Posted by Anonymous | March 26, 2008 10:41 AM
More prisons do solve crime, and there are numerous studies that show the relationship between effective incarceration levels per level of crime committed.
What you don't have in Philly is a climate of over-incarceration of the mild offender. Most offenders in Philly are repeats. Of those offenders who are lower level, they need huge social support for MR/MH functioning. They are really people who would have been in a Byberry.
If you start letting out the drug offenders in Philly, you'll have a drug problem of the scale of the "crack 90s." The folks who are selling drugs in the urban black communities are the ones who are ending those communities.
Are you really going to simply put them back out in the community with low cost come and go spend the night options?
There are offenders who are ready to work but need a place to sleep that has on site D&A programming, with a medical component. But they are the exception.
The average inmate needs time locked units where their behavior can get re-acclimated. Prisons in Philly do methadone, anger management, and really responsive health care given the overfilling.
Overfilled prisons have a solution, but it's not to let them back out in the very neighborhoods that bred them. Every Council District needs a large (300+) capacity locked unit to serve as a half way point, while allowing judges to move inmates who are ready into work by day arrangements that are locked at night.
Right now, that is simply expanding the prison system off of State Road, so to advocate for shrinking the prison system doesn't see that building off site units away from the main complex in Philly is simply updating the prison system.
Will it reduce the numbers of "inmates" -- yes. Will it reduce the numbers of adjudicated placements needed -- no, it's going to increase those numbers drastically.
The press isn't really grasping how the system works. That shows me you don't talk to COs, to docs, to MSWs, BSNs, or to the contractors on these sites. Just sit outside state road and talk see for yourself the people coming and going. Talk to them, both employees, visitors, and those getting discharged.
What you'll see, hear, and feel is a city that lives in a criminal culture where prison is normal, and "county life" is just part of the cost of doing business.
Is it really surprising, since the drug trade rose all they way to the top of the political heap, infiltrating the highest levels of Philly politics?
The drug trade is real. I get the sense that journalists think that any drug dealer would go to college if they had the chance and go legit.
Thing is, there are drug dealers who do go to college. They don't have to work the drug trade. There are drug dealers who think that going to school is for people who don't want to get paid. All of the opportunity, scholarships, access, is available to the average Philly resident, more so than a rural resident. But the drug trade catches people's imaginations, and for a lot of them, it's all they ever want to do.
They don't WANT to go to university, do an internship, run their own legit business. Drugs just pays better. Once people taste that money, they're willing to hurt their families, themselves, their communities, and to justify it.
If someone is going to be a sh*thead, you are going to have to accept them on that level. They're not going to work on your level, to satisfy your liberal ideals. They're going to work on their level to satisfy themselves and you have to accept it.
Sorry to bust ya bubble. If you writers want to be reformers, come on board. Come teach inside, bring library books, conduct job search seminars. Get an MSW, a nursing degree. Bring it inside. Get to know these people and where the average Philly inmate's head is. Your vision of life for them is not shared, and it's a hard sell.
But I encourage you to try.
Posted by Anonymous | March 26, 2008 11:13 AM
the answer is:
first of all, once an individual proves to society and him/herself that he/she is a loser and a liability, he/she should be executed.
leniency will destroy any society, 22,000 dollars at a time. but, in america, crime means jobs and money, lots of it. crime in america is a business.
i feel for the police who have to round these critters up day after day. the law of averages are against the police. the judicial system in america is an insult to the police, the victims and the working people out there.
the way to eliminate overcrowding in the prisons is to execute the bastards that are laughing at the system, the victims and most of all the taxpayers..... the system reminds me of a merry-go-round...... it has to stop, now !!!!!
Posted by sarducci | March 26, 2008 2:01 PM
I would put it to you that until this city finally faces up to the fact that it has a serious white collar problem that needs to addressed and resolved, it's pointless to lament about Philadelphia's high level of blue-collar crime. We have people in this city in government, IN GOVERNMENT, that have no business being where they are, who are criminals of the worst order. And they remain where they are because we have no sort of system in place to bring them down as they need to be brought down. Talk about a "revolving door," THERE'S your revolving door.
Take how it is with the mayor of Philadelphia, for instance. Due to the way the city is set-up, we seem to have no way of removing a mayor from office when he or she messes up in a criminal way other than hoping the next mayor after the present one has served his or her term (or two) will be better.
Everybody was complaining about the outgoing John Street, for example, while wishfully thinking the incoming Michael Nutter would represent the reform this city needs. But as we can now all see, that didn't happen. For those who haven't been following Nutter closely, he was put to the test of what kind of mayor he would be back in February (2008) when called upon to decide on the Fox Chase Cancer Center's quest to expand onto neighboring Burholme Park -- a proposal for those of you who don't know is 100% illegal. And when faced with that, what did Nutter do? In true white-collar crime fashion he said yes to it. He didn't even bother to investigate and look at the facts of the matter, which after four years now are fully established. For simply put, white-collar criminals don't do that. Rather, they just say "yes" to whatever has "wrong" written all over it.
I mean, I laugh when people balk about blue-collar criminals in this city when we have people like that sitting up in City Hall. Or people like Brian O'Neill, Jack Kelly, Joan Krajewski, etc., etc., etc., sitting on City Council. For in this city of ours at this late stage you won't find any criminals worse than that. But what system do we have in place to remove them, to incarcerate them? Yet THERE'S the problem, if you really want to know. Solve that problem, and we won't have the high level of blue-collar crime we're seeing now.
But no, watch and see, we're just going to go on another merry-go-round of saying that's not where the problem lies, it's those damn blue-collar criminals instead.
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