Jeff Sessions is very possibly our next attorney general (have you called your senators yet?) which means federal criminal justice reform is very unlikely. Sessions is a disciple of Trump's law-and-order doctrine, an ideology that is directly responsible for America's mass incarceration problem. This lock-’em-up approach to crime and punishment is what got us to our bloated, expensive, unworkable criminal justice system.
Expensive is an understatement, to say the least. A new report outlines just how much money this whole system has cost us over the years. The report, entitled "The 3.4 Trillion Mistake," by Communities United, Make the Road New York, Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, and the Right on Justice Alliance, asks us to consider where all the money we've spent on our mass incarceration system since 1982 could have gone instead. From the report:
Over the 30-year period from 1983 to 2012, we spent $3.4 trillion more on the justice system than we would have if it had stayed the same size as it was in 1982. This “surplus justice spending” turned our already-huge justice system into the one we have today, in which there are nearly eight million adults and youth behind bars or within the probation and parole systems in the U.S. In other words, 1 in 40 U.S. residents is either in prison, in jail, on probation or parole, or otherwise under control of the justice system. […] However, despite the massive investment in the expansion of our justice system, it is not at all clear that this approach has been effective at promoting public safety. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that it has been far less effective than other public safety strategies available to us. Moreover, there is an enormous amount of research demonstrating that the harms caused by this approach far exceeded whatever benefits have been realized, particularly with regard to the low-income communities of color that have been suffocating under extreme versions of these mass incarceration and criminalization approaches.
Trump and his buddies like to talk about government bloat and overspending, but their dedication to cost-cutting is surface at best. If they really cared about cost-cutting, they would fight for reform as other Republicans have. And if they really cared about Americans, they would invest that money elsewhere.
The report highlights some of the ways that $3.4 trillion could have been spent over the past thirty years, including:
- Create over one million new living-wage jobs: $114 billion
- Increase spending by 25% at every K-12 public school in the country: $159 billion
- Create a universal pre-K system for all 3- and 4-year-olds that would be free for low-income families and affordable for middleclass families: $20 billion
- Provide every household living in poverty with an additional $10,000 per year in income or tax credits: $87 billion
- Provide healthcare to five million uninsured persons: $30 billion
- Fund one million new social workers, psychologists, conflict mediators, mental health counselors, and drug treatment counselors to address public health and safety issues: $67 billion
- Eliminate tuition at every public college and university in the country: $82 billion
In other words, the issue with our mass incarceration system is not only that we've destroyed lives, families, and communities by using incarceration as the solution to all perceived problems. The tragedy is also the opportunity cost—how much better off could our country be had we invested that money elsewhere.