Broken Bars: How Mandatory Minimums are Causing Maximum Damage
You’ve been pulled over for a traffic stop, and the cops ended up searching your car and found marijuana in your possession. In some states in America, you can receive a $20,000 fine, a minimum of 2 years, and a maximum of 10 years in prison. Mandatory minimums are minimum punishments that judges have to give out for certain crimes. When it comes to mandatory minimums, judges aren’t allowed to read between the lines or consider any other factors or special circumstances for their sentence. Having minimum sentencing results in overly harsh sentences, prison crowding, and high taxes. Now, of course, the answer seems simple, just don’t commit a crime, and you’ll never go to prison. However, the likelihood of being stopped and searched is heavily mediated by race, age, gender, and class. These external factors reflect biases built into our criminal justice system and prison industrial complex. Being sentenced to even just two years can change the trajectory of your life forever. Incarcerated people lose their right to vote, parental benefits, and government benefits. On top of all that, your record is tarnished, and you lose the trust of almost every employer you try to work for, in effect making it nearly impossible to find a high-paying and sustainable job. The prison and sentencing system is unfair and not serving its purpose to keep us safe, rehabilitate our citizens, and enforce equality. Instead, prison is being used as a mechanism to push people of color, predominantly black, to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and keep the generationally powerful rich at the top. One example is giving harsher sentences to minorities while giving white Americans overly lenient punishments for crimes.
Initially mandatory minimums were introduced as a way to fight drug related crimes during the “War on Drugs” time period. The goal was to prevent drug use by scaring them with harsh prison sentences. In 1988, congress passed a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine with no evidence of intent to sell. They also passed the three strikes law in which anyone with two prior convictions would be sentenced to life without parole. Unfortunately, laws like this didn’t really help drop the drug use or drug related crime rate in any significant way. These new laws simply gave more power to the government while not doing much to help the people they were “allegedly” trying to protect the most.
Now, of course, some people commit horrific crimes like murder or manslaughter, and, obviously, in those cases, they deserve to spend a significant amount of time in prison. On the other hand, there are a disproportionate amount of overly harsh sentences for petty and non-violent crimes committed by minorities. For example, according to Sam Ben-Meir, there was a case where “Bryant, a black man, was sentenced to life in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers from a Louisiana carport storage room in 1997.” (2020). Bryant did have a history of multiple non-violent crimes, so due to the nature of the sentencing system, the judge’s decision to give him a minimum of life without parole was automatic and mandatory. However, it is controversial to say that a man who still has a chance at redeeming himself in society deserves to live the rest of his life in jail for a crime that didn’t significantly negatively affect anyone else. Meanwhile, according to Ed Shanahan, there was a case where a white man, “Mr. Belter, 20, was sentenced in the assault on M.M. and in sexual attacks on three other teenage girls. Facing up to eight years in prison, he was instead given eight years’ probation by a judge who said he had “agonized” over the decision.” (2021) This young man, like many other white males, traumatized multiple individuals and changed the way they see life forever, yet he will not spend a single day in prison.
Ashley Nellis states, “Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.” (2021). This disproportion is mainly due to the unfair policing and lack of opportunity for black Americans. The police use racial profiling, which is the act of targeting a group of people based on their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. During a study by Ravi Shroff (2020), he found that once stopped, black drivers were searched about 1.5 to 2 times as often as white drivers, while they were less likely to be carrying drugs, guns, or other illegal contraband compared to their white peers. This unfair use of power allows more crime to slip through the system. In a study, Amy Hackney from Georgetown University (2013) found that white students were much more likely to cheat on a test if they were told that black students were being profiled during the testing period. When America is clearly targeting minorities within the criminal justice system, it opens up opportunities for the majority to get away with crimes since they know the attention is not on them. Institutional racism like this makes it easy for white Americans to grow in society while also keeping less privileged minorities from gaining influence and socioeconomic power at the same time.
Once you’ve spent so much time in prison, its culture can become a part of your personality. In an article by Christy Visher and John Eason, they state, “Interpersonal relationships in prison are difficult as there is often a culture of mistrust and suspicion coupled with a profound absence of empathy.” (2021). When there is a lord of the flies type of environment, it is really easy for people to accuse you of absolutely anything, which in turn, puts you in a life-threatening position. In 2020, Meghan Novisky and Robert Peralta interviewed recently incarcerated people about their experiences with violence behind bars. They found that prisons have become “exposure points” for the extreme violence that undermines rehabilitation, reentry, and mental and physical health.
Prisons are presented to the public as rehabilitation and correction facilities because they want people to believe that inmates come out of prison as people who’ve learned their lesson and are ready to contribute to society. In reality, most prisons do little to nothing to better the lives of inmates and their impact on society; the justice system only focuses on the punishment aspect of their sentence. They can do this by either giving them nothing to do during their incarceration except rot in their cells, feud amongst each other, and by forcing them to work real jobs for pennies an hour or, at times, nothing at all. After all, it is very easy to get away with the mistreatment of inmates when they were the ones who committed the crimes in the first place, so who is going to think twice about how they are being treated? As for today, Robin McDowell (2020) claims there are inmates in at least 40 states working to make masks and hand sanitizers for the coronavirus pandemic. Making inmates work in these conditions is just a way for America to justify and legitimize slavery without the direct trigger words that come with it. They are throwing a disproportionate amount of black males into prison and forcing them to work for pennies a day in harsh conditions and the bare minimum to survive.
Mass incarceration is fueled by greed, corruption, and the private, for-profit prisons that benefit from having more people in prison. For-profit prisons are private third-party prisons that are contracted by the government to be kept running. Michael Cohen claims, “The two largest for-profit prison companies in the United States — GEO and Corrections Corporation of America — and their associates have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts.” (2015) These companies are indirectly supporting policies that put more Americans and immigrants in prison because they profit on each and every inmate. The more successful they are at lobbying, the more they can influence politicians and promote their corrupt practices. When all the odds are stacked against you as a prisoner, it can seem hopeless to find a way back into living everyday life.
Keeping prisons running is extremely expensive and most of it comes from the taxes we pay. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2020), the U.S. spends $81 billion a year keeping people in prisons. On average, it costs Americans about $2 billion to keep non-violent offenders locked away for life. Meanwhile, there is little to no funding for helping former prisoners re-enter society. Most of the money spent towards reentry has to be funded by non-profit organizations and their donations. For example, Karen Lee (2021), CEO of Pioneer Human Services, spends countless hours figuring out how to raise money and help reincorporate these people back into the world. She states, “Reentry is a lot of things, it’s housing, it’s substance use disorder treatment, it’s education, it’s restitution and victim services and court costs.” When you consider the amount taxpayers have to pay to run the prison systems, why are we still focused on incarcerating so many people, especially if it keeps getting more expensive the more we add? Financially speaking, if the government spent that money to keep people out of prisons in the long term, millions of dollars could be saved on the operating cost of prison. The system imposes so many barriers to reentry as if it is trying to keep prisoners coming back so that they can be stuck there forever.
The prison system is built to keep inmates coming back time and time again once they’ve been imprisoned once. Liz Benecchi says, “Within three years of their release, two out of three former prisoners are rearrested, and more than 50% are incarcerated again.” (2021). Many employers searching for new workers don’t want people “who have done time” applying for their positions. Realizing it can be hard to find a job, countless former prisoners seek higher education to overshadow their unappealing record. Unsurprisingly, that isn’t an option for many because of the federal Higher Education Act of 1998, which makes students convicted of drug-related offenses ineligible for any grant, loan, or work-study assistance. Without employment, housing, and social opportunities for people with records, it is no surprise that these people end up back in a cell. There are even cases where people have no other choice but to commit specific non-violent crimes so that they can go back to prison and at the very least have a place to sleep.
The prison system has been in place for over 100 years now, and there has been a certain way things are done. A sense of complacency and the mindset of “this is how it’s always been done and doesn’t affect my life at all, so who cares” has allowed the prison system to operate with too much freedom. People committing minor crimes are being sent away for life, former prisoners are failing to receive the support they need to end their inevitable cycle of crime, America is allowing prisons to abuse the labor of inmates as if they were slaves, and the budget for prisons is being spent on keeping prisoners in a cell instead of addressing the underlying issues. We need to reform the criminal justice system by educating our police officers on topics of implicit biases, re-evaluating our arbitrary and discriminatory prison sentencing structure, and supporting the re-entry of former prisoners. The U.S. is supposed to be the land of the free and obligated to fulfill the promise that all Americans that were given a chance at a new life living the American dream.
References
Cohen, Michael. “How for-Profit Prisons Have Become the Biggest Lobby No One Is Talking About.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 6 Oct. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/.
Communications, NYU Web. “Research Shows Black Drivers More Likely to Be Stopped by Police.” NYU, 5 May 2020, https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/black-drivers-more-likely-to-be-stopped-by-police.html.
“Cracking the Code: Implicit Bias and Racial Profiling.” Cal Alumni Association, 12 Sept. 2016, https://alumni.berkeley.edu/events/california-live/cracking-the-code-jack-glaser.
“The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow.” American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/other/drug-war-new-jim-crow.
“End Life Sentences for Nonviolent Crimes — Opinion.” The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com, 12 Oct. 2020, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/end-life-sentences-for-nonviolent-crimes-opinion-645488.
Kuhn, Casey. “The U.S. Spends Billions to Lock People up, but Very Little to Help Them Once They’re Released.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 7 Apr. 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-u-s-spends-billions-to-lock-people-up-but-very-little-to-help-them-once-theyre-released.
McDowell, Robin, and Margie Mason. “Cheap Labor Means Prisons Still Turn a Profit, Even during a Pandemic.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 8 May 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/cheap-labor-means-prisons-still-turn-a-profit-even-during-a-pandemic.
Nellis, Ashley, et al. “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons.” The Sentencing Project, 1 Nov. 2021, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/.
“Racial Profiling: Definition.” American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/other/racial-profiling-definition.
Shanahan, Ed. “Judge Spares Man in Teen Rape Case: ‘Incarceration Isn’t Appropriate’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Nov. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/nyregion/christopher-belter-rape-sentence.html.
Visher, Christy, and John Eason. “A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice: Changing Prisons to Help People Change.” Brookings, Brookings, 30 Apr. 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-better-path-forward-for-criminal-justice-changing-prisons-to-help-people-change/.
