The real solution to Delaware's dangerous, understaffed prisons: End mass incarceration

Chris Johnson | The News Journal

Chris Johnson is a candidate for Delaware attorney general. He is an attorney who has worked in both the public and private sectors, a board member of the Delaware Center for Justice and a vice chair of the Wilmington Democratic Party.

The tragic death of Sgt. Steven Floyd at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center last winter was an all-but-guaranteed outcome. Officials knew for years that chronic overcrowding and insufficient wages for overworked, short-staffed, and under-resourced correctional officers would eventually reach a breaking point; still, Delaware’s prison population rose, while budgets devoted to corrections remained neglected.

The response from the Department of Corrections was, understandably, a request to the state for 235 new correctional officers. Best practices indicate that there should be a ratio of no more than 5 inmates per 1 officer; yet at the time of the hostage situation, officers were understaffed and outnumbered 75:1.

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It is critical that we guarantee the safety of people — both working and living — behind bars, which starts by having an appropriate ratio of correctional staff to inmates. Rather than putting more officers into dangerous working conditions, however, I propose that we manipulate the other side of this equation: We must rapidly and dramatically reduce our prison population.

For many reasons, Delaware has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country. First, we have an ineffective system of parole, due to a law called Truth in Sentencing, which requires prisoners to serve the majority of their sentence, despite any evidence of good behavior, remorse, or recovery from substance abuse.

Or, take a look at how our prosecutors often stack charges in an attempt to secure a plea bargain, ensuring that a person accused of a crime will serve some amount of time. Our system of cash bail traps low-income individuals — many of whom are innocent — behind bars while awaiting trial.

It is clear that our criminal justice system is broken, and fails to appropriately rehabilitate prisoners or set them up to succeed on the outside. Instead, we have a rate of recidivism that ensures that over 70 percent of those re-entering society will return to prison.

Doubling down on investing in mass incarceration will only further enable and entrench draconian policies that disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities.

Mass incarceration is bankrupting Delaware, in both a moral and fiscal sense. Research shows that one of the major static costs of mass incarceration is correctional facility overhead and staff resources. Then, consider this math: There are more than 7,000 people incarcerated, costing on average more than $40,000 per inmate.

Our state spends almost $300 million, or 16 percent of its state budget, on the Department of Corrections.

When it comes to prison populations, there is plenty of evidence to show that reducing the associated costs of mass incarceration by ending cash bail, stopping the War on Drugs, and declining to prosecute certain kinds of nonviolent cases, would both save money and solve the problem of prison overpopulation that generates so much risk to correctional officers.

Adding new officers will not eliminate the risk of future tragedies — it will only expose more officers to the systemic problems that resulted in the death of a correctional officer. There is no safe number of officers when the number of incarcerated people is so high and morale is so low.

Instead, we have to be smart on correctional policy — and reduce the well-known drivers of dangerous situations. Conversely, cutting our prison population by just 10 percent could allow us to make sure current officers have the resources they need to do the job, and that we are not simply asking more people to accomplish something impossible.

These new officer salaries alone will amount to around $9 million-$11 million annually. We could instead hire 235 new teachers, or spend that money on classrooms and programs for students to succeed in the modern economy. The fundamental goal of our criminal justice legislative agenda should focus on keeping people out of prison, not imprisoned.

State budgets are zero-sum games — each line item has an impact on every other aspect of government. As a former member of Gov. John Carney’s legal team, and as a candidate for attorney general, I am keenly aware that every state budget expenditure either exacerbates or ameliorates the problem of mass incarceration.

Instead of adding to the prison-industrial complex, ending mass incarceration is the single most effective and fiscally-responsible intervention we can apply when it comes to resolving correctional overcrowding and staving off future riots. Safer prisons benefit everyone, from staff, to inmates, to taxpayers.

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