Yahoo Finance ‘The criminal justice system is a big waste of money,’ says REFORM CEO Van Jones
Fiscal concerns are causing many Democrats and Republicans to reach across the aisle on criminal justice reform, because of how wasteful the system is, says criminal justice activist and CEO of REFORM Alliance Van Jones.
“The criminal justice system is a big waste of money,” he explained. “And as a result, there are conservatives — Republicans — who agree that some changes are needed. So this can be a bipartisan issue.”
He added that both former Presidents Obama and Trump have signed a criminal justice reform bill, signaling that this “has become a bipartisan issue.”
According to the center-right economic think tank the American Action Forum, the U.S. spends $300 billion annually to police and incarcerate 2.2 million people. The indirect costs, it found, are as high as $1.2 trillion when accounting for the knock-on effects like lost earnings.
This means that on average, roughly $140,000 is spent to incarcerate each of the 2.2 million individuals in jail or prison. In California, it costs approximately $120,000 to incarcerate one person, according to Jones. “Would you spend that money putting them in a cage and brutalizing them and having them hanging around other kids who are also being brutalized?,” he said. “Would you be shocked that that $120,000 turned out to be a bad investment? No.”
Jones suggested that instead, funds could be invested into a “community safety super fund” where community groups and organizations could “compete” for the money that is used to jail Americans.
“You could let a Black grandmama compete for those dollars. Give one kid to a Black grandmama. And give that Black grandmama $120,000. That kid's gonna go to Harvard,” he said.
Considering the high rates of recidivism, Jones said the billions spent on incarceration with such a low “success rate” was a poor investment. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, recidivism rates vary, depending on incarceration length and nature of offense.
“The commission found that offenders sentenced to relatively short terms of imprisonment — less than six months — had a lower recidivism rate than offenders serving longer sentences,” the report found. “Offenders sentenced to less than six months had a recidivism rate of 37.5% while offenders serving longer sentences had relatively stable recidivism rates ranging from 50.8% to 55.5%.”
Jones explained that everyone wants “peaceful streets” and “safe communities,” adding “there's nobody who agrees on that more, frankly, than people who live in communities where you have a problem with crime.”
But spending so much money on a system that doesn’t work doesn’t make sense, he argued. “I think the urgency of not wasting money, not ruining lives for no reason, and not just adding to the sense of unfairness should push the issue to the front.”
REFORM Alliance has made some progress, recently in Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed prison reform bills into law. The new laws would reduce adult felony probation sentences, prevent probation extensions and limit incarceration for technical probation violations.
Probation and parole reform are areas for further compromise, Jones said, adding that many people are sent to jail for an extra year due to technical violations like being late to a probation meeting.
“There must be other ways to impose consequences on people when they're under supervision than sending so many people back to prison for technical violations,” he said.
Re-entry is also a point of compromise for Democrats and Republicans.
“If we can have people come home more successfully, that stops the revolving door of people going back in,” Jones said, adding that people need to have the ability to vote, rent housing and get an education so that felony convictions from decades ago don’t impact their ability to participate in society later in life.
“You know, any system that had this kind of failure rate — would have been rethought a long time ago,” he said.
Kristin Myers is a reporter and anchor for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.
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