Articles & News
January 30th, 2008
Iowa’s Prison Population
For most Iowans, crime is an
emotional issue. For victims, there is a sense of their personal
space being violated and often the reality of violations against
their bodies. For the families of criminals, there frequently is a
feeling they are being shamed by the criminal justice system and by
the general public. For criminals, emotions can lead to committing a
crime, or a series of crimes, and how they are treated as
ex-offender can make them angry and frustrated enough to commit new
crimes.
For those Iowans who work in the criminal justice system, crime is a
complex interaction of governmental agencies, private businesses,
and social-services organizations. These people work with the tools
and rules assigned to them by the state legislature, by the U.S.
Congress, and by society. They deal with individuals but converse in
numbers. One number that has drawn broader attention is that of the
ratio between Black and White Iowans who are in the state’s prisons.
Iowa has the worst disparity of any state in the nation.
A joint meeting of the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees was
held at the state capitol on January 29, 2008. Rep. Wayne Ford
(D-Des Moines) had invited Garland R. Hunt, chairman of Georgia’s
Parole Board, and Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing
Project, to testify on the racial imbalance. Mauer said a person who
is Black and in Iowa is 13 times more likely to be incarcerated than
a person who is White. Mauer’s book, Race to Incarcerate, a
semi-finalist for the 1999 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, explores
how sentencing policies led to the expansion of the nation’s prison
population. Ford commented during the meeting that he ran for office
to do something about the racial disparity, noting the sentencing
differences for possession of crack versus powdered cocaine.
Jobs, housing, and education were presented as barriers to and as
solutions for eliminating the difference. Hunt offered an example of
how access to money once arrested can create a positive initial
impression. He said that a person who cannot make bail goes to court
already in jail. (This would include appearing for an arraignment
hearing in handcuffs and wearing a jail-issued jumpsuit.) In
contrast, a person who made bail can walk into the courtroom as a
free person. In terms of jobs, Hunt said in rural Georgia employers
would hire an ex-offender on the recommendation of a parole officer
because of earned trust. However, that is not the case in cities. In
addition, reduced funding increases the work load of probation
officers so they only have time to supervise, not to help guide
individuals. Mauer reported that the Washington Institute for Public
Policy looked at all the programs that had been funded to help
reduce crime. There were three areas that consistently worked. These
were, Head Start, high school graduation, and programs for alcohol
and drug abuse.
Ford asked Mauer about certificates of rehabilitation. The
certificates allow ex-offenders whose records have stayed clean for
a set number of years to have their records cleared. Thus, one crime
twenty years earlier will not interfere with finding a job or
housing in the future, with possible certain restrictions, such as
for pedophiles.
Re-entry programs are another relatively new approach to reducing
recidivism. These programs are intended to help build life skills as
well as job skills. Hunt opined that such programs are considerably
better than merely giving a person $25 upon release from prison, as
is done in Georgia.
M.R. Field is editor of Leading Voices: Iowa.
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