As soon as I saw the heading for this week’s presidential address to the nation, “Working for Meaningful Criminal Justice Reform,” I thought, oh boy, here we go. Obama should have some doozies in this one. He wasted no time throwing out numbers.
Hi, everybody. Thirty years ago, there were 500,000 people behind bars in America. Today, there are 2.2 million. The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Every year, we spend $80 billion to keep people locked up.
According to 1985 figures, the number of inmates in state and federal prisons was 487,593, which makes Obama’s first figure seem accurate. But if you want to include everyone who was “behind bars,” you have to include those who had been taken to local jails, too.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that 256,615 prisoners were held in local jails in 1985. That brought the reported number of people in local, state, and federal custody in 1985 up to 744,208. Right off the bat, Obama’s numbers are off.
Regarding the most recent numbers, BJS reported that local jails had 744,592 inmates in 2014, while the combined state and federal prisoner count was 1,508,636. Combining the amount in local jails with those in state and federal facilities, the number comes to 2,253,228. In this case, Obama’s count was slightly under. Close enough.
However, these numbers don’t tell the whole story.
These figures are a snapshot from two different days taken annually. The local jail counts are tallies taken on June 30th every year. Most inmates spend less than a year in local jails. The state and federal counts are the amount of prisoners they have on December 31st. Most prisoners in state and federal facilities spend a year or more there. The tallies aren’t completely accurate, either. They’re surveys, which means they are estimations. The last full count was conducted by BJS and the U.S. Census in 2005.
To get a better idea of the true count of the people who were “behind bars” for a given year, another number to consider is admissions, at least in the case of local jails. People may not usually serve for more than a year in jail, but they still count as having been behind bars.
In the annual 1985 BJS survey ending June 30th of that year, local American jails admitted 8.4 million inmates. This number excluded those who were locked up for less than 48 hours, which would have brought the “behind bars” tally higher. For the 2014 survey, BJS reported that local jails admitted 11.4 million people. BJS came to that number by taking the amount of admissions for the last week in June, 2014 (218,924), and multiplying by 52.
While these numbers still don’t give an accurate total of the number of people behind bars then and now (due to variables such as repeat offenders, transfers from one jurisdiction or facility to another, not counting those who were already incarcerated at the time the surveys were started, among other factors), we can safely say that even back in 1985, the number of women and men behind bars was well into the millions, not half a million as the president stated.
The same inaccuracy applies to how other countries gather their data. They also take one-day snapshots or use averages to arrive at total “behind bars” counts, and who knows how accurate many of them are in taking full records, especially ones that are non-Westernized second- or third-world countries. If even the U.S. with all the technology at its disposal can’t do something as simple as get a precise count of every person who goes in and out of jail and prison each year, having to rely instead on surveys, we can’t expect other countries to be all that great at giving accurate and honest incarceration numbers, either.
About the $80 billion figure Obama brought up, it looks like he got it from a 2012 study by the Vera Institute of Justice. I couldn’t find anyone who took the time to scrutinize or debunk it, so I’ll leave that alone for now.
As for that whole “five percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners” line that Obama swiped from the official “Prog Pamphlet of Overwrought Statistics”…okay, so? We’re a nation of over 300 million people, and a great deal of the people in it break our laws. Compared to other countries, our law enforcement and justice system seem to be doing a pretty good job of keeping society in order by putting the bad people away. We are a free society, which means people think they are free to do whatever they want. But they can’t when they act in a way that affects the freedoms of others. A free and civil society demands that those who would defy civility and the rule of law should face the appropriate consequences. The people demanding Kim Davis’ head on a pike for refusing to grant marriage licenses in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision would surely agree. The law is the law.
Obama seems to agree…at first.
Now, many of the folks in prison absolutely belong there – our streets are safer thanks to the brave police officers and dedicated prosecutors who put violent criminals behind bars. But over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more non-violent offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before. That’s one of the real reasons our prison population is so high.
Here Obama repeats the far-left’s oft-repeated declaration that our prison system is stuffed with harmless non-violent offenders, mainly pot-smokers and perpetrators of “victimless” crimes. Liberals think–and want you to think–that a non-violent crime means nobody got hurt, so it’s no big deal.
It’s a myth, America.
What counts as a non-violent crime, besides possession of drugs?
There’s drug trafficking. Oftentimes, drug trafficking and violence go hand in hand. And all it takes is that one bad dose of meth or heroin for someone to wind up dead.
There’s “harmless” property offenses such as burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and fraud. As someone who’s had his property damaged and stolen before, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t classify those as victimless crimes. While no one is physically hurt, victims feel the pain in other ways.
There’s also public order offenses like weapons offenses and driving under the influence. While a great deal of these types of incidents do not end in violence, they very well could have.
So shove off with that “non-violent” offender crap.
How many of those pot smokers are filling up our prison system? The answer is “a miniscule amount.”
Only 3.6% of prisoners under state jurisdictions were incarcerated for drug possession in 2013. That’s less than 50,000 out of 1.3 million state prisoners. According to 2004 BJS statistics, only 0.1 percent of state prisoners were there for marijuana possession with no prior sentences on the offender’s record. And only 1.4 percent of state prisoners were locked up for crimes that only involved marijuana.
The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) states that 51 percent of the 210,567 offenders incarcerated in federal prisons at the end of 2014 were there for drug offenses. That’s about 107,400 people. But only 10.4 percent of them were there for marijuana distribution. That’s just over 11,000 people–for distribution.
For marijuana possession, a piddly 75 offenders were sentenced in a federal court under drug guidelines. (In all, 187 people were sentenced for simple possession of any drugs under federal drug guidelines in 2014. Daniel Horowitz of the Conservative Review says the number is 305, but either way, the percentage of the entire federal prison population is practically microscopic.)
People aren’t going to federal prison for simple possession of pot. They’re going because they messed up…big time. The same goes for those in state prisons. Bear in mind that offenders often do less time than they should because they’re able to bargain down their offenses so that their worse crimes are dropped in favor of lesser “non-violent” crimes.
So forget the assertion that prisons are filled with people who were caught with simple little baggies of dope in their pockets. That’s not the case at all.
Moving on…
Obama used this topic of crime and punishment to bring up schools again, saying how “our criminal justice system is a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails.”
With his “pipeline,” he created a crude diagram of the poor childrens in the heads of his listeners that looks something like this:
Education sucks because $183 billion isn’t enough——-cruel, unjust courts——-locking up too many good people who are just trying to get ahead!
Obama managed to slip in the phrase “investing in our schools.” For the eleventieth time.
Obama touted Obama’s Justice Department’s “Smart on Crime” initiative. Because tough is mean.
Obama bragged how Obama commuted the sentences of dozens of people who were convicted of “unfair” drug laws. And yet his dozens of commutations are not enough for some people.
Obama crowed about Obama signing the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine to 18:1, leaving out the part where Joe Biden was the one who proposed the 100:1 ratio in the first place and cosponsored the 1986 law.
Obama repeated the word “unfair” in describing the criminal justice system. Obama didn’t say that Obama will emit more toxic greenhouse gases when Obama said Obama planned to travel the nation in the weeks ahead to speech in people’s ears about fixing justice, which is Obama’s way of saying injustice needs to be rectified, just as any good community organizer would say.
We can stop pretending that Obama’s a moderate now, yes?
Obama spoke about working with both parties of Congress to reform the criminal justice system. Obama spoke about bipartisan efforts that are in the works to “reduce mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders.”
Last year, less than 11,000 federal prisoners received mandatory minimum sentences of 5 years or more for drug crimes. A whole lot of those prisoners were illegal immigrants. Americans should be wondering why the President of the United States as well as Congressional Democrats and Republicans are so interested in relaxing the sentences of illegal immigrant drug traffickers. Americans might wonder–if they knew about it.
What do Obama and the Legislative Branch expect to accomplish? The bulk of American prisoners aren’t under federal jurisdiction. They’re under state and local jurisdictions. It’s simply more showboating to make it look as though they’re doing something compassionate for the underdogs of American society.
Obama tried to butter up the more conservative of Obama’s audience with a bit of patriotic talk that will displease angry lefty anti-deists, saying, “From the halls of Congress to the classrooms in our schools, we pledge allegiance to one nation under God with liberty, and justice, for all.”
Obama ended with “justice means” this and “justice means” that, everywhere a justice justice, just for us. And he’ll keep fighting for it, he assured us.
Just what us wants. More of the Ojustice. Ojustice has been served. Let my choomers go!
Okay, that’s enough of that. Have a good week, America.
