We compare the incarceration records of the different candidates
By O.R. | NEW YORK
AMERICA'S criminal-justice system is riddled with flaws. For a stark illustration of its problems, look no further than the country’s crowded prisons. The stats are now uncomfortably familiar: America has 5% of the world’s population but a quarter of its prisoners—more per capita than any developed country. Incarceration rates have quintupled since 1970, ensuring around one in three black men can expect to spend time behind bars. And it ain’t cheap: the annual bill comes to about $80 billion, or roughly the yearly budget of the Department of Education.
In this uniquely polarised moment in American politics, politicians of all stripes recognise the problem: we incarcerate too many people, likely for too long, certainly at too great an expense. Some real bipartisan federal reform is even brewing. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, and Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, for example, have introduced legislation meant to address waste and injustice in the federal corrections system. Two even unlikelier bedfellows, the American Civil Liberties Union and Koch Industries, recently expressed their support for the bill in Politico. President Barack Obama addressed America’s criminal-justice woes in a big speech at the NAACP’s national conference in Philadelphia earlier today.
The specific role mass incarceration will play in the 2016 presidential election remains unclear. Candidates on the trail have been fairly quiet on the issue thus far. In their announcement speeches, Lincoln Chafee made a broad reference to racial injustice, George Pataki cited the importance of judicial fairness and Rand Paul saw “an America where criminal justice is applied equally.” Otherwise the issue hasn’t yet entered the realm of talking points. However, Hillary Clinton, Chris Christie, Scott Walker and a handful of other candidates penned essays for a volume on criminal-justice policy, published by the Brennan Centre for Justice in late April. Concerns over racial biases in the criminal-justice system and the sheer scope of the incarceration phenomenon suggest the issue could at last have its moment with voters. So it is useful to consider how the current crop of candidates managed the issue of incarceration in their states.
The bulk of America’s incarceration is done by the states, not the feds. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, by the end of 2013 (when the latest statistics are available) there were about 215,000 federal prisoners and 1.35m state prisoners. Of the passel of politicians running or likely running for president, ten are or were governors. Their experiences with incarceration as chief executives of their respective states vary dramatically.
The chart below shows the time series of incarceration rates during the tenure of governors now running for president. The lines begin with the rate inherited by the candidate when they became governor, and end with their last full year in office. (The last available year of data, from BJS, is 2013.)
Some candidates plainly have a better record than others. Rick Perry, for example, oversaw a significant and lengthy decline in his state’s prison population as governor of Texas from 2000 through 2014. It bears noting that Mr Perry began his tenure facing one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation, and Texas still beats the national average in throwing people behind bars. But the state’s experience is still, rightly, heralded as a success. Fiscal pressures compelled Texas to reduce its prison population by 20% since 2000—primarily by rerouting parole violators away from prison, funding substance-abuse treatment and mental-health programmes and reducing the sentences of those prisoners completing education programmes. This shift has been accompanied by a more than 25% fall in both violent and property crime.
Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, has seen an over 13% fall in the state’s incarceration rate since taking office in 2010, due in part to treatment programmes for certain low-level offenders. Like Texas, the state has also seen significant concurrent reductions in crime, suggesting that incarceration may not be the best tool for keeping crime rates down.
George Pataki also saw a slow but extended decline of about 10% during his three-term tenure as governor of New York from 1995 through 2006. Significantly, Mr Pataki signed legislation softening the state’s notoriously harsh penalties for non-violent drug offenses, though some advocates still criticise the reform for not going far enough.
Not all Republican candidates presided over reductions, or even plateaus, in their prison populations. Bobby Jindal saw Louisiana’s incarceration rate remain steady at around 850 people per 100,000 residents—or over 1.1% of the state’s adult population, the highest rate in the country. Jeb Bush in Florida and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas saw parallel spikes in incarceration rates during their tenures, on the order of about 18% and 39%, respectively. For others such as John Kasich in Ohio and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, no meaningful trend has emerged.
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The two Democratic former governors in the race—Mr Chafee of Rhode Island and Martin O’Malley of Maryland—served in states with lower-than-average incarceration rates. Mr Chafee saw little movement during his brief tenure, from 2011 to 2015, whereas Mr O’Malley oversaw a decline of nearly 12% between 2007 and 2015. Maryland has not seen any sweeping criminal-justice reforms, yet Mr O’Malley made some nods, such as decriminalising possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Notably absent from these data, of course, is Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who has never served as a governor. But it bears noting that her husband Bill Clinton’s policies as president, such as his 1994 crime bill, may have had a role in fuelling America’s mass-incarceration problem.
Of course each governor faced a particular set of criminal-justice circumstances in his particular state and during the years he served. Some have served for over a decade, others for but a few years. Crime has dropped precipitously since the early 1990s as well, further complicating incarceration-rate data. But these trends still tell a story.
