Eric Holder Condemns Mass Incarceration (Again)

Yesterday Attorney
General Eric Holder reiterated the concerns about mass
incarceration that he
expressed when he unveiled his “Smart on Crime” initiative last
August. Speaking at a conference of public security officials in
Medellin, Colombia, Holder
reflected on America’s dubious achievements in the field of
locking people in cages:

The path we are currently on is far from sustainable.  As
we speak, roughly one out of every 100 American adults is behind
bars.  Although the United States comprises just five percent
of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the
world’s prisoners.  While few would dispute the fact that
incarceration has a role to play in any comprehensive public safety
strategy, it’s become evident that such widespread incarceration is
both inadvisable and unsustainable. It requires that we routinely
spend billions of dollars on prison construction—and tens of
billions more, on an annual basis, to house those who are convicted
of crimes.  It carries both human and moral costs that are too
much to bear.  And it results in far too many Americans
serving too much time in too many prisons—and beyond the point of
serving any good law enforcement reason.

Drug Policy Foundation Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann
comments:

I have to admit it’s a strange feeling, at once wonderful and
wary, when the attorney general of the United States tells an
audience of security ministers—at a conference in a foreign
country—that there’s something fundamentally wrong with
incarcerating so many people in his own country. The Obama
administration’s rhetorical shift can be criticized as too little
and too late, but its historic significance cannot be denied. 
Let’s just hope that this new rhetoric truly translates into new
policies.

I expressed similar sentiments in a column
last summer.

Today the
Brennan Center for Justice released a
report that suggests one way of curbing the over-incarceration
that Holder deplores: by reforming the Edward Byrne Memorial
Justice Assistance Grant Program, the biggest source of federal aid
to local law enforcement agencies, so that it does not encourage
cops to measure their success by arrests:

Current measures inadvertently incentivize unwise policy
choices. Federal officials ask states to report the number of
arrests, but not whether the crime rate dropped. They measure
the amount of cocaine seized, but not whether arrestees were
screened for drug addiction. They tally the number of cases
prosecuted, but not whether prosecutors reduced the number of
petty crime offenders sent to prison. In short, today’s JAG
performance measures fail to show whether the programs it
funds have achieved “success:” improving public safety without
needless social costs. These measures send a signal to states
and localities that the federal government desires more
arrests, more cocaine busts, and more prosecutions at the
expense of other more effective activities.

The report says the Obama administration could make meaningful
changes without new legislation by revising the criteria for
assessing grant recipents’ performance. It does not mention that
Barack Obama, who as a presidential candidate worried about the
size of our prison system and the racially disproportionate impact
of the war on drugs, nevertheless has been a big
booster of the Byrne grant program, which has fueled the
incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders and funded the regional
task forces behind racially tinged law enforcement scandals in
places such as Tulia, Texas.