By Denise Welch and Sonny Lerma, Contributing Columnists
This year, Oregon’s Legislature will examine whether to pass
reforms that reduce our reliance on incarceration as the primary public safety
strategy. There is growing support to pass comprehensive corrections reforms
that flatline prison growth, which has been skyrocketing in the past 20 years.
A small number of tough-on-crime advocates are trying to
keep Oregon from entering the 21st century with our current public safety
policy. They argue that our mandatory minimum laws are the reason for Oregon’s
crime rate going down and any changes to those laws will doom Oregon to
increases in crime.
So two important questions worth exploring in this debate
are: What actually reduces crime, and will growing our prison system make us
safer?
In the U.S., many people assume that putting people in
prison is the only way to achieve public safety. But crime is complicated, and
there are many factors that influence whether crime rates go up or down.
Although incarceration rates can have some impact, there are
other factors that have much more influence, like the state of the economy,
trends in drug use, trends in policing strategies, and levels of state and
local funding for addiction treatment and mental health services.
If incarceration was the panacea to problems of crime, it
seems logical that the higher a state’s incarceration rate, the higher the drop
in crime. To debunk this myth, let’s compare the incarceration and crime rates
of Oregon with a few other states. Oregon implemented Measure 11, our harsh
mandatory minimum law, in 1995. As you can see from the chart (top), from 1995
to 2002, our incarceration rate skyrocketed. Oregon was locking people up at a
much more intense rate than California, Washington or New York. But those
states experienced about the same reduction in crime. New York even reduced its
incarceration levels altogether and experienced even lower crime rates than
Oregon.
So this comparison begs the question: What exactly did
Oregon gain from that skyrocketing growth in incarceration that those other
states didn’t? Sadly, we gained hundreds of millions of dollars of debt from
building new prisons.
We simply can’t incarcerate our way out of crime. We need to
start looking past the tough-on-crime rhetoric and start looking at the
research. Oregon spends the majority of its limited public safety dollars on
the Department of Corrections, and as our prison system has taken up a larger
and larger amount of funding, we have seen less money go to the types of
programs that actually break the cycle of crime, like addiction treatment and
mental health services.
Other states have been getting smart on crime and recognize
that the answer to safer communities is not a focus on bigger prisons. In fact,
of the 17 states that have lowered their incarceration rates since 2000, all
have experienced drops in crime. This chart (lower) shows three examples.
Oregon is on a trajectory to build another 2,300 prison beds
in the next decade at a cost of at least $600 million. Modest corrections and
sentencing reforms can flatline prison growth, creating savings that can be
invested into what works to reduce crime.
Despite the research that shows we can reduce incarceration
rates and crime rates, a handful of tough on crime advocates reject even modest
reforms. Let’s hope legislators are more sensible.
This article appears in 2013-03-15.