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| Study: South Leads Nation in Locking People Up |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 04/14/2003 |
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Principal Sheila Young says the family portrait drawn by one of her brightest third-graders was disturbing: There, next to the smiling faces of the girl and her eight siblings was a frowning woman, their mother, with vertical bars over her face. 'I ran to get the social worker, because it's such an exaggerated frown,' said Young, whose Craig Elementary School is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Orleans. Young learned the girl's crack-addicted mother was serving a year for a parole violation. And when she asked the girl's classmates how many of them had a family member or neighbor in prison, more than half the hands shot up. When it comes to locking people up, Louisiana leads the South. And the South leads the nation. Since 1980, the country's prison population has quadrupled to 2.1 million, with the South accounting for 45 percent of that increase, according to a report released April 5 by the grass-roots group Critical Resistance South. Citizen activists from around the region were meeting in New Orleans recently to brainstorm about how to change the situation. At a time when nearly every state is facing crushing deficits, Rose Braz believes prison beds are a good place to start cutting. 'I do think this is a unique opportunity for states to re-examine their spending priorities,' said Braz, national director for Critical Resistance. 'We have a limited amount of money that is getting smaller by the minute. Do we want to invest in prisons, prisons and more prisons?' Louisiana's incarceration rate is 800 per 100,000 residents. The rate for the South is 526 per 100,000 -- higher than that of 63 percent of countries in the world, according to the report generated for the group by the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The West is a distant second at 408 per 100,000. Thirteen of the 20 states with the highest incarceration rates are in the South. And while the rate of incarceration for women has grown nationally, the South outpaced the nation by 17 percent. Why are the region's numbers so high? Some argue that Southern states have spent less money for the kinds of social programs that tend to keep people out of prison. 'The South historically has had either less money available or less political interest in making those investments,' said Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project. 'And so, by default, prison is an option that becomes more widely used because of that.' A recent national survey conducted by Florida State University researchers found that Southerners were more politically conservative, racially prejudiced and more punitive than people in other regions. 'What we find ... is the more people define crime as a black issue, the more punitive they're willing to be,' said criminologist and study co-author Ted Chiricos. Prison populations soared through the past two decades as states got tough on crime, with so-called 'three strikes' and 'truth in sentencing' measures that guaranteed repeat offenders long stays. But as crime rates have fallen, many states in the South and elsewhere have attempted to cut their prison populations. In the past two years, Louisiana and Mississippi -- which has the second-highest lockup rate -- have backed away from mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenders. Georgia, which ranks sixth in its lockup rate, is considering moving toward sentencing guidelines, which seek to divert nonviolent offenders into community-based programs. Partly as a result of these measures, the South's incarceration rate has grown slower than the other regions' over the past 20 years -- 180 percent. The West saw the highest growth, 289 percent, according to the JPI report. |
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