NEWSBYMICHAEL SANTOS

As a long-term prisoner my perceptions on imprisonment differ from those of many taxpayers. Lobbyists who represent the prison-industrial complex control the message on this subject, influencing millions. That’s the reason taxpayers buy into this ridiculous notion that we need ever-increasing budgets to fund America’s prison system. I feel a duty to provide taxpayers with a window into how this system operates and to show reasons why they are so costly. I strive to change perceptions, to show the need for progressive prison reforms more befitting of our enlightened society.

According the Pew Charitable Trust, in 1987 (the year my incarceration began), states across our nation spent $11 billion to operate prison systems. In 2007, those same states spent $49 billion to maintain prison systems. Such massive expenditures do not include the billions necessary to confine the ever-increasing number of federal prisoners.

All prison expenditures, of course, originate from the public purse. It is the same public purse that must fund education systems, health care, all social services and other public costs. When lobbyists succeed in persuading legislators to raise budgets to fund the growing prison system, those costs result in less funding being available for students, for health care, for any kind of social services.

The front page of the USA Today on June 14th featured an article on solitary confinement by Kevin Johnson. The article describes how studies have shown that an increased use of solitary confinement fails to make society safer, despite much higher costs.

It's no surprise that a mouthpiece for the American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network, an association of correctional officers, disputes the finding and makes the dire prediction that less reliance on solitary confinement is a threat to public safety.  What threatens society's safety, I think, is a corrections system that conditions people for perpetuating failure.

Solitary confinement is a costly system for taxpayers to support. Correctional officers and the lobbyists who represent the prison system love solitary confinement because of the increased public expenditure. Locking a prisoner in solitary confinement requires significantly more man hours by prison guards because the guards must chain prisoners up anytime they leave the cell. More man hours translates into more staff overtime expenditures. Those who lobby for prison guards will object to any change that threatens to diminish expenditures on staff, regardless of the overwhelming costs to society as a whole.

On May 10, 2010 the New York Times published an editorial suggesting that prison reform legislation may move forward. News comes slowly to those of us in federal prison, and this editorial was the first I've read about efforts in the House of Representatives to track a bill that Senator Webb sponsored in the U.S. Senate. The bill doesn't call for prison reform itself, but rather a "blue-ribbon commission" that would include criminal justice experts. The commission would study the criminal justice system and propose "an action blueprint" to fix it.

It's been more than one year since Senator Webb first proposed a commission. Since then his bill passed the Judiciary Committee, but the full Senate has yet to put the bill to a vote. There is no telling how long the House bill will languish before it votes. The bill has bipartisan support and will likely pass both the House and the Senate, but even after President Obama signs it into law, the commission will require 18 months to study the problems in our criminal justice system. Accordingly, I don't expect to see meaningful prison reform until late 2011 or possibly early 2012.

On May 17, in a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court voted to limit life sentences for juvenile offenders, citing the practice as cruel and unusual punishment. According to the majority, any imposition of life sentences on offenders who were under 18 must also include the possibility of parole if the offender did not commit a homicide. The majority decision made sentences of life without parole unconstitutional, and a violation of the Eighth Amendment, when the offense didn't include the death of a victim.

Their decision surprised me. I'll be interested to see how legislative bodies from across the nation respond to the ruling from our highest court. States will have to implement a mechanism that will allow authorities to review the appropriateness of long-term imprisonment after a reasonable period of time. The ruling doesn't necessarily mean that the parole boards must release any juvenile offenders, but at some point they will have to consider whether continued incarceration is warranted in each individual case.

I read an article in Time by William Lee Adams describing a new prison in Halden, Norway. I've been intrigued with Scandinavian and Nordic prison systems ever since I read about their different approach (from America) to responding to offenders. Rather than obliterating an offender's sense of hope, a practice that is both perpetuated and perfected in American prisons, the Norwegian prison system aspires to boost the chances of reforming offenders so that they will reintegrate with society as law-abiding citizens — and they're succeeding. According to Adams' article, in Norway, where 80%of the people who serve time succeed upon release, those who choose to work in prisons have the noble goals of encouraging prisoners to lead meaningful lives while they serve time.

In the United States more than 60% of those who serve time return to confinement after their release. Why? Experience and my work (that includes interviewing thousands of prisoners over the past 23 years) convince me that one significant reason so many American prisoners revert to crime upon release is that our repressive prison system fosters continuing cycles of failure. To triumph over the nefarious conditions of America's prison system requires conscious personal discipline and commitment — behavior that relatively few prisoners here can either muster or sustain over the numerous years that they must serve.

Taft Prison Camp marked the Cinco de Mayo holiday this month with a public speech from Dolores Huerta, a labor leader who built a career by organizing farm workers in the Cesar Chavez organization and has since gone on to distinction by speaking about the need for fair labor laws to government organizations, academia and other groups.

I listened with interest as Ms. Huerta spoke confidently to a group of about 70 prisoners, describing how she began her activism and some of her significant accomplishments influencing legislation. She went on to explain how the work of organizing people in pursuit of a common course can lead to social improvements, and concluded her speech with the familiar chant, "si se puede," meaning "yes we can." I was surprised administrators invited her to speak, as she seemed to be advocating strikes, boycotts and other types of formal protest strategies to launch reform.

The federal prison system seems well protected against the types of tactics Ms. Huerta advocated in her speech to us. Prisoners at Taft Camp serve relatively short sentences in a calm environment that makes them comfortably numb to the need for prison reform. Those prisoners who want to rebel or organize protests don't serve their sentences in minimum-security.

Amir Efrati wrote a blurb of an article for the Wall Street Journal that indicated the U.S. Sentencing Commission passed new rules on April 30 that will allow federal judges to consider military service, age, mental conditions, and emotional conditions of offenders before the judge imposes sentences. If the judge finds the individual conditions of a defendant warrant leniency at sentencing, the new rules provide judges with discretion to impose a less stringent sentence. The new rule will not take effect until after November 1st of this year. In his article, Mr. Efrati wrote that some judges and defense attorneys cheered the move, however I find the new rules grossly inadequate and an appallingly feeble step toward the type of sweeping, purposeful reform needed within the federal criminal justice system.

The obvious first weakness of the rule change is that it only applies to defendants who will face sentencing after November 1, 2010. Yet our federal prison system currently confines more than 200,000 prisoners, many of whom have been incarcerated for many, many years. The rule changes do not provide even a modicum of relief for them, thus continuing one of the fatal flaws of our federal criminal justice system: its finality.

When imposing a sentence of five years, ten years, or longer on a defendant, the judge only evaluated the offender's criminal conduct. Yet society has a vested interest in how the offender will emerge from prison. Our bloated prison system will continue to churn out repeating cycles of failure until leaders emerge in America with enough courage to introduce meaningful prison reform. The types of tepid changes proposed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission fail to give judges or administrators any opportunity to evaluate the steps an offender who is already incarcerated may have taken to reconcile with society or earn freedom. In fact, the federal prison system neither measures nor rewards efforts federal prisoners make to prepare for law-abiding lives upon release — parole was abolished in 1984 for all federal prisoners convicted of a crime, whether violent or not.

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has recently changed regulations that used to prohibit inmates from writing for the news media under a byline. A section from the Code of Federal Regulations still holds that inmates cannot "act as a reporter" but it no longer says an inmate cannot publish under a by-line.

I don't know what it means to act as a reporter, and I've never much cared. As a long-term prisoner I consider it my duty to write about the experiences of imprisonment. I've been writing about my journey for 23 years. The first article I published was in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution back in 1992 or 1993, and the newspaper published under my byline. The article described a positive program for at-risk youth that other prisoners and I contributed to. Since then I've written scores of articles, book chapters, and books that all featured a byline. I suppose the prison officials left me alone because my writing encouraged other prisoners to act responsibly and prepare themselves to overcome the challenges they would face upon release.

But I also write to describe the prison experience. Family members want to know the conditions under which their loved ones live. I write to give people hope, to show them that despite the pains of long-term confinement, people can find or create projects that bring meaning to their lives. Thousands of people read my work, but the BOP has never charged me with the disciplinary infraction of acting as a reporter. I don't know what sanction I would face if I ever received such a charge, but it would not deter me from writing about my experience as a prisoner.

An article in the New York Times on March 5 reported that many states began releasing prisoners early in order to relieve budgetary woes and financial pressures. Since then, the prison lobbying machine succeeded in its work of frightening the public, convincing taxpayers that by letting prisoners out before a sufficient number of calendar pages have turned threatens the fabric of society and the lives of every citizen.

This premise that a prisoner who served 10 years is somehow more prepared to return to society than a prisoner who served eight years has never made sense to me. Some prisoners may indeed pose significant threats to society and belong inside locked boundaries. But our prison system confines tens of thousands of minimum-security prisoners at a huge cost to taxpayers. In Taft Prison Camp, Lompoc Prison Camp, and Florence Prison Camp -- the three camps where I've served the past seven years of my sentence --1,400 men sleep in confinement, but every day hundreds of them interact with society through regular jobs. Fences do not confine any of those camp prisoners. Shouldn't they be serving their sanctions in some type of community-based program, where their own labor could cover the costs, rather than requiring $20,000 per year, per prisoner, in taxpayer expenditures?

I've become discouraged about the prospect for meaningful prison reform. In March of 2008, Senator Jim Webb introduced a Senate bill to form a commission that would study our criminal justice system from top to bottom. Slamming America's prison system as a national disgrace, the Virginia senator urged reform. But after extensive media coverage when Senator Webb announced his bill, we haven't heard much about it. Despite bi-partisan support in the Senate, the House of Representatives has yet to introduce a companion bill. Now we've begun a new congressional election year and, judging by the Republican legislature to health care reform, it doesn't look like legislation for prison reform will make it through this Congress.

How long will Congress ignore the need for meaningful prison reform? Our prison system confines more than 2.2 million people, costing taxpayers $60 billion every year to operate. What do Americans receive in return for this massive public expenditure? When we consider recidivism rates of 70%, it's clear that rather than making communities safer, prisons breed continuing cycles of failure. That's why we need to reform the prison system from one that extracts vengeance to one that operates with a more intelligent design.

The biggest problem with our federal prison system is that it extinguishes hope. Each federal institution ought to hang the sign Danté wrote about at the entrance to his home: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.