A QUESTION OF (PUBLIC) INTEREST

By William M. DiMascio
   Executive Director

What kind of society do we want? That seems to be a reasonable question to raise in a democracy, especially in an election year.

So, I'm asking: Are we satisfied that our elected leaders are functioning with the best interest of the public in mind? Or, do we sense they might be pandering to the base inclinations of an uninformed majority?

Are we concerned about issues of fairness and equity in the way our bureaucracies operate? Or, do we take solace in their inscrutability?

These questions relate to governance generally, of course, and have specific and important implications in the criminal justice arena which impacts people's lives directly. Many of these issues have been around for a while but seem to endlessly defy ethical resolutions. Here are a few:

· Inmate telephone service: In a nutshell, the state permits the phone company to charge so much for these calls that the company is able to rebate to the Commonwealth between $6 million and $7 million each year. The lion's share of the cost is being borne by inmates' families who are rarely in financial positions to afford such exorbitant charges.

The rebate money is split: half goes into the state's General Fund to pay operational expenses of government, and the remainder goes into the Inmate General Welfare Fund to subsidize prisoners' activities such as athletics and family visitations. When questions are raised about this income, responses typically come with the suggestions that inmates might lose their weight lifting gear or the subsidy for buses that haul family visitors.

But the question remains one of fairness. If the Commonwealth incarcerates people, it bears responsibility for the cost of keeping them safely and humanely. Are Pennsylvania legislators shirking this responsibility by accepting these rebates? Lawmakers in Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah and Washington have elected to forego this income.

· Felon/community disenfranchisement: We do not permit felons in Pennsylvania to vote while they are incarcerated (Maine and Vermont do), but we do allow them to register and vote when they are released or on probation or parole. But voting is just part of the story.

Census figures count inmates as residents of the communities where they are imprisoned. That data is used to redraw legislative and congressional districts and to apportion various revenue sharing allocations. In smaller counties, like Greene or Huntingdon, large state prisons add 6 to 8 percent to the overall population. That means elected legislators from those areas represent fewer voting citizens but have as much say as lawmakers from other areas.

The state currently is building a 2,000-bed prison in Forest County, which in the year 2000 had a population of 4,946. Two counties that gained population in the Nineties - Somerset and Delaware - actually would have declined in the census if prisoners were not counted.

· Unduly long sentences: Corrections Yearbook says Pennsylvania keeps prisoners longer than any other state. In fact, the 2002 edition, which carries the average length of stay for all inmates released in 2001, shows the Commonwealth's average at 69 months, surpassing the second highest, Texas, which averaged 55.2 months. The national average was 29.2 months.

What does it say about a state that holds its prisoners more than a year longer than its closest rival and more than three years longer than the national average? Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told the American Bar Association last year, "Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

No elected officials want to appear soft on crime. So, we have a Sentencing Commission and a legislature that invariably respond in the same intractable way - by heaping longer sentences atop an overburdened system that relies too heavily on incarceration to address problems of socially and economically disadvantaged citizens.

· Warehousing prisoners: Since 90 percent of all prisoners eventually return to free society, the public's best interest is served if these individuals are prepared to resume their lives as law-abiding citizens. One way to improve their reintegration prospects is to involve them in positive, educational programming while they are incarcerated. But vocal opponents of such programming intimidate prison administrators and elected officials into eliminating all but the most fundamental activities. This apparently is what led to the injudicious decision to cutback the music programs at state prisons. Staggering recidivism rates testify to the prison system's ineffectiveness in "correcting" the behavior of former inmates.

The anger of crime victims is natural and understandable. Society has responded to those justifiable concerns with increasingly punitive strategies through our penal system. There are limits, however, and the voting public should be taking a close look at the effectiveness of what we are doing.

The bottom line comes down to this: Do we really want to live in a culture where individual self-interest trumps the public good?