Welcome to Dearborn County, Indiana – which sends more people to prison per capita than any other county in the United States.
(click image for interactive version)
As The New York Times reports, Dearborn County represents the new boom in American prisons: mostly white, rural and politically conservative.
A bipartisan campaign to reduce mass incarceration has led to enormous declines in new inmates from big cities, cutting America’s prison population for the first time since the 1970s. From 2006 to 2014, annual prison admissions dropped 36 percent in Indianapolis; 37 percent in Brooklyn; 69 percent in Los Angeles County; and 93 percent in San Francisco.
But large parts of rural and suburban America — overwhelmed by the heroin epidemic and concerned about the safety of diverting people from prison — have gone the opposite direction. Prison admissions in counties with fewer than 100,000 people have risen even as crime has fallen, according to a New York Times analysis, which offers a newly detailed look at the geography of American incarceration.
Just a decade ago, people in rural, suburban and urban areas were all about equally likely to go to prison. But now people in small counties are about 50 percent more likely to go to prison than people in populous counties.
The stark disparities in how counties punish crime show the limits of recent state and federal changes to reduce the number of inmates.
Far from Washington and state capitals, county prosecutors and judges continue to wield great power over who goes to prison and for how long. And many of them have no interest in reducing the prison population.
“I am proud of the fact that we send more people to jail than other counties,” Aaron Negangard, the elected prosecutor in Dearborn County, said last year. “That’s how we keep it safe here.”
He added in an interview: “My constituents are the people who decide whether I keep doing my job. The governor can’t make me. The legislature can’t make me.”
Rural, mostly white and politically conservative counties have continued to send more drug offenders to prison, reflecting the changing geography of addiction. While crack cocaine addiction was centered in cities, opioid and meth addiction are ravaging small communities like those in Dearborn County, where 97 percent of the population is white.
By 2014, Dearborn County sentenced more people to prison than San Francisco or Westchester County, N.Y., which each have at least 13 times as many people.
“It’s government run amok,” said Douglas A. Garner, a local criminal defense attorney.
Mr. Negangard said he wished the county could find more money for drug treatment. But he said about half of all addicts in prison had a criminal mind-set and would keep committing crimes whether they got clean or not.
“We can’t just let the bad guys go,” he said.
Which is ironic, since while Dearborn and other rural conservative counties are sending record numbers to prison, President Obama is on track to commute the most sentences by a president since 1929. But unlike his actions on immigration and healthcare, it's not whether he has the authority to reduce prison stays that's drawing criticism — it’s the type of inmates he's helping. As The Hill reports…
We’re very concerned,” said Steve Cook, president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. “What is happening is he’s undoing a lot of the work we’ve spent the last two-and-a-half to three decades doing.”
So far, Obama has commuted 673 sentences, with 325 coming in August alone. P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political scientist tracking the data, said Obama is likely to eclipse Calvin Coolidge, who commuted 773 sentences. Woodrow Wilson holds the record, with 1,366 commutations.
“There’s more coming before he leaves office,” Ruckman said. “It’s just a matter of how many.”
Only non-violent, low-level offenders, who have served at least 10 years of their federal sentence and demonstrated good behavior qualify for Obama’s clemency initiative. Inmates cannot have a significant criminal history or a history of violence prior to or during their imprisonment.
Cook argues those requirements aren’t being met.
In the last few rounds of commutations, Cook said one inmate was the leader of a drug ring that trafficked in over 10 tons of cocaine, six had previously been convicted of being drug kingpins and another had been convicted of possessing a sawed off shot gun.
Cook was referring to Ralph Casas, John Franklin Banks, Corey Lyndell Blount, Rudy Martinez, Danielle Bernard Metz, Dewayne L. Comer, Dawan Croskery and Alfonso Allen.
“The trend seems to be they get worse and worse,” Cook said. “To say we’re concerned would be an understatement.”
Responding to Cook's claims, an official with the White House said the President does not condone violence of any kind, but believes individuals who have truly paid their debt to society and demonstrated a commitment to not repeating past mistakes should be given a chance to earn their freedom.
In a statement to the News Virginian in August, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said the president’s actions were “not, as the Founders intended, an exercise of the power to provide for 'exceptions in favour of unfortunate guilt.'”
Instead, he said, Obama is using his power to commute sentences “to benefit an entire class of offenders who were duly convicted in a court of law — not to mention [his actions are] a blatant usurpation of the lawmaking authority of the legislative branch."
via http://ift.tt/2bUKUGw Tyler Durden