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As Governor Eliot Spitzer's proposed budget
indicates his effort to control the size and financial demands of
the business known as The Prison-Industrial Complex, we want to
introduce you to an influential national, non-profit organization
deeply involved in the entire criminal and juvenile justice system,
the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
We will be sharing a number of its
important policy and advocacy statements with you - especially those
on incarceration practices and prisoner reentry problems - that are
very current and clearly concern communities throughout the nation
as well as those in NY State. We begin with a little bit of history
and then move on to policies.
The National Council on Crime and Delinquency
This Oakland, California-based criminal and juvenile justice think-tank, research institute and policy advocate, is one hundred years old in June, 2007. It began quietly with 14 probation officers who thought it might be time to organize a professional association to advance the emerging field of probation.
In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt was President; America had 46 states in the union and the nation was still confronting unresolved issues from the Civil War. Legally sanctioned segregation was the norm; lynching of African Americans and other racial minorities had reached epidemic proportions; Congress passed laws denying citizenship to immigrants from Asia; women could vote in only four sparsely populated western states but not in federal elections and the average worker earned $13 for a 60 hour work week.
In 1907, the criminal justice field was in its infancy. Juvenile courts had just been created in 1899; many states and the federal government did not recognize probation as a legitimate penal sanction and in most states children were confined in adult correctional facilities. In time, the newly formed National Probation Association was asked by the courts to study the progress of juvenile courts and the use of psychiatric expertise in the criminal justice system; and drafted the first federal probation law in the US Congress. Within the next 40 years the NPA became a major influence in national criminal justice development, and had begun to publish a regular series of national justice journals.
Among its Board of Directors were US Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound.
In the 1970's NCCD was an integral part of a national coalition to pass the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, emerging as one of the leading national research centers on juvenile justice and delinquency.
Although its liberal approach to the needs of the criminal justice system were obvious, it has over the years been led by moderates and conservatives; Richard Nixon's Attorney-General John Mitchell was once its President. Some years ago, former New Jersey Governor Christie Tod Whitman, was on its Board of Directors.
After living through the financial difficulties of the regressive Reagan Administration in the 1980's where it needed the support of many progressive professionals in the criminal justice system and generous contributions from liberal foundations, corporations and a number of private individuals to survive, NCCD found itself in the 1990's. It enjoy the
very strong support and confidence of Attorney General Janet Reno as it rebuilt its base of federal funding, including a forty-community effort to help the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention implement its comprehensive strategy for violent juvenile offenders.
In 1993, NCCD undertook a major expansion of its work to reform the child welfare system by creating the Children's Research Center (CRC) which is now helping more than 15 states - including New Jersey and Connecticut - provide better care for maltreated young people as it conducts research on innovative educational approaches for disadvantaged youth.
Today, NCCD continues its research and policy agenda focusing on such crucial issues as race and justice, mental health services in the juvenile justice system, the needs of women and girls in the justice system and the very immediate concerns involving prisoner reentry. With the University of California in Berkeley, NCCD has launched a multi-year research project on immigration, culture, and youth violence prevention… building on it's previous work on youth violence prevention in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, as it reaches out to youth and families in Latino communities.
Throughout its 100 years NCCD has remained consistent in it beliefs and policies. It continues to work to maintain a separate justice system for children; to seek scientific alternatives to incarceration as it vigorously opposes the growth of policies favoring mass imprisonment. It continues to see the impact of child abuse and violence against women as major factors in crime rates and works to "break the cycle of violence"….as it emphasizes that social forces - such as racial division, gender inequalities and class prejudices - drives our crime rates.
Finally, in the liberal (and Liberal Party) tradition, it continues to oppose the use of capital punishment because it has been applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner; and the death penalty with its historically disproportionate application to racial minorities ….long advocating that state-sanctioned murder has no deterrent effect, and is antithetical to the core values of our civilization.
Martin Hassner
First Vice-Chairman,
Liberal Party of New York
Incarceration
The United States vs. The World
In November, 2006, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency published a fact sheet on the rate of incarceration in this nation and compared it to nations around the world. Here are some of the facts they reported and some numbers to back them up.
In the past 30 years, the United States has come to rely on imprisonment as its response to all types of crime. Even minor violations of parole or probation often lead to a return to prison. This has created a prison system holding 2,200,000 people - an unprecedented size in this country.
The US incarcerates the largest number of people in the world, with a rate four times the World average. The US has less than 5% of the world's population but over 23% of the world's incarcerated people. The 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in the US is 75% higher than China, 153% higher than Russia, 505% higher than Brazil, 550% higher than India. Our rate is 4 to 7% higher than other western nations such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Some individual US states imprison up to six times as many people as nations of comparable size. New York State has 92,769 people in prison, Australia has 25,353; Massachusetts has 22,778, Hong Kong 11,521; Illinois has 64,735, Ecuador has 12,261; Florida has 148,521, Sri Lanka 23,163; California has 246,317, Poland 86,820; Texas 223,195, Malaysia has 35, 644. If the rest of the world followed the US lead on incarceration policies and practices, the total number of people imprisoned worldwide would increase fivefold from the present 9.2 million to 47.6 million.
The nationwide bill for incarceration in the US today is $42 billion annually. Yet many federal prisons and state jail systems have been sued for failure to meet minimum health and safety requirements and prisoner rehabilitation and reentry services are seriously underfunded.
In the US today, African Americans are six times as likely to be incarcerated as whites; Latinos over twice as likely. If the US enacted the reforms necessary to reduce this disproportionate minority confinement by just 50%, the incarceration rate would drop to put the US fifth in the world instead of first.
While we may look to rates and types of crime as reasons for an increase in incarceration, the former President of NCCD, Milton Rector, wrote, "The rate of imprisonment in the US, which takes pride in its protection of liberty and freedom, is considerably higher than the rate of any other industrialized nation. To ignore it is to condone the flagrant waste of money and lives and the crime-producing effects of needless imprisonment; to allow it to continue would be irresponsible support of leaders who perpetuate the myth that more imprisonment means better protection of the public…."
He wrote these words twenty-five years ago.
Barry Krisberg, Ph.D., President,
National Council on Crime and Delinquency
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