America should spend more on prison management

Safer, more humane, less gang-ridden incarceration

To keep myself honest, I like to occasionally write about ideas that I think make sense on the merits but that everyone will hate politically. It’s good to try to avoid going into full Pundit’s Fallacy mode and also, who knows? If the idea really is good, maybe I can persuade elite actors and turn things around.

So here it goes: American states should consider spending substantially more money on their prison systems (the left will hate it) in order to make conditions more humane (the right will hate it), both as a question of abstract justice and to reduce the crime rate over the longer term.

Contemporary American incarceration suffers from a bunch of different problems related to prison being, on some level, excessively harsh. Most of these are rooted in the fact that violent and reasonably well-organized prison gangs exert significant influence over the penal system. Back on April 18, for example, the Justice Department proudly announced the sentencing of the 37th defendant in a massive RICO prosecution of members of the Simon City Royals prison gang. This operation was “a violent prison gang operating primarily in the Mississippi Department of Corrections, but with members and associates acting on their behalf outside of prison throughout Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and elsewhere.” They smuggled crystal meth into many jails and prisons, they laundered money, and they murdered people both inside and outside of the prison system.

Naturally, the prosecutors and federal agents involved have a lot of big talk about the benefits of this enforcement action, with the head of the DEA’s New Orleans office saying “we will dismantle these violent gangs, bringing the full force of the federal government to bear, and ensure they no longer terrorize our communities.”

The truth, though, is that while enforcement operations are obviously an important part of combatting organized crime, the underlying issue with prison gangs is happening inside of prisons. Organizations like the Black Guerilla Family, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, and Nuestra Familia have been operating for decades, and their power stems from the management of the prison system itself. Law enforcement can (and should) arrest and punish people committing crimes on the outside at the behest of these gangs. But because most people who enter prison leave, and many of those people go back into prison, as long as the hard-core gang members have power in the prison, they will have power in the streets. This is not inevitable, but solving the problem does require confronting the reality that many (though not all) American prisons are effectively run by racially segregated gangs. And fixing that is going to require putting more resources into the carceral system, an investment that would hopefully set off a beneficial cycle, where more resources lead to better-run prisons, which leads to less crime, which allows for further improvements in prison management.

But it requires us to take incarceration seriously as an important government function that ought to be done properly.