Survey Says: Independent Prison Oversight has Strong Bipartisan Support!

By Molly Gill

For the last several years, FAMM has been supporting and advocating efforts to establish independent oversight of our state and federal prison systems. Oversight includes regular inspections of prisons and investigations of serious problems in them. FAMM believes that oversight should be truly independent — that is, provided by people that are not on the prison’s payroll.

FAMM supports independent oversight, but does the general public? We didn’t know, so we asked.

From July 29 to August 3, FAMM issued the first-ever national poll on independent prison oversight. The results were clear: 82 percent of Americans believe states and the federal government should have a system of independent prison oversight. That support is also deeply bipartisan: 80% of Republicans, 79% of independents, and 85% of Democrats expressed their support.

Americans of all parties seem to understand a fundamental truth about government: It doesn’t police itself very well. Almost 70 percent of those polled said they don’t trust government agencies to investigate their own problems and honestly report on them to the public and lawmakers. That holds true for prison systems, too. Nearly 80 percent of poll respondents agreed that prison oversight is only independent if prison “inspections are performed by people who do not work in the prison system.” And 73 percent of those we polled think that independent oversight should be performed by professional inspectors rather than impacted people, nonprofit organizations, or people working for the prison system.

In our poll, we also asked people to identify the most convincing reasons to create independent prison oversight. The top four answers had wide bipartisan support:

- Rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption in prison systems;

- Increasing prison safety for those who live and work in prisons;

- The cost is reasonable — oversight costs as little as one percent of our massive prison budgets;

- Oversight reveals problems to taxpayers and policymakers, so they know what needs to be fixed.

Put simply, oversight is about transparency, accountability, and good government — and Americans get it. If you want independent oversight of prisons in your state, tell your lawmakers now that you support it.

Our poll also found that 89 percent of Americans think it is important for lawmakers to visit prisons. FAMM agrees, and that’s why we’ve asked every lawmaker in the country to #VisitAPrison. We won’t get independent prison oversight set up in every state tomorrow. Until we do, more lawmakers need to visit prisons and judge for themselves whether they are working as they should. You can ask your lawmakers to visit your state or federal prisons here.

At a time when crime is rising, getting lawmakers to pass sentencing reforms may become much more difficult. But the people have spoken, and independent prison oversight is not a controversial issue. As one prison scandal after another shows up in the news, we’ll be redoubling our efforts to get lawmakers talking about — and creating — independent prison oversight for every prison system.

Molly Gill is FAMM’s Vice President of Policy.