Illinois has packed away the prisoners. So has the rest of the nation.
Since 1978, this state has almost quadrupled the rate at which criminal offenders are incarcerated. But that's consistent with other states for the time period, one in which crime rates boomed and legislators responded with tougher penalties for criminals.
Yet almost 10 years after violent crime peaked and started to drop, the nation’s incarceration rates were still climbing —though not as much as in previous years. In fact, some experts believe the country's 20-year prison boom may be slowing, that prison populations may even be leveling off as decreasing crime rates offset the stiff sanctions.
"What really drove the growth [in prison population] was those sentencing reforms focused on enhanced punishment for violent offenders," says Allen Beck, chief of corrections statistics at the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. "We see increasing lengths of stay in prison as a consequence of those sentencing reforms. Those reforms are playing their way out throughout the system, and so you get growth in the system independent of the underlying crime."
In this state, a crackdown on drugs also played a significant role. According to David Olson, senior scientist at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, drug law violators were the biggest single factor causing the state's prison population to swell in the last two decades. "If you look at the types of offenses that inmates go into prison for, relatively low-level drug offenses account for the largest category of those admissions,"he says.
There are consequences of mass incarceration. While nonviolent drug offenders in Illinois often serve less than a year in prison because they get credit for good behavior and for taking part in treatment programs, they nonetheless tie up beds for the duration. The state Department of Corrections estimates there are about 7,000 people incarcerated over the course of a year for possession or delivery of a controlled substance. Their presence in the system, however brief, is one legacy of the move to get tough on crime.
The rising prison population nationwide can be traced to the 1970s, when criminal justice policy shifted from an emphasis on rehabilitation to punishment. Lawmakers in this state and others began restricting the discretion of judges and parole boards to decide how long prisoners would remain incarcerated. They approved ?determinate? sentencing schemes with set penalties for various offenses.
Previously, judges established a minimum and maximum sentence for an offender, and the parole board had leeway to decide when the offender could be released. The system was attacked in the 1960s by liberals, who feared defendants could be discriminated against, and conservatives, who believed sentences were too light, according to Marc Mauer, assistant director at The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C.
The nation's incarcerated population is approaching 2 million people. According to the Justice Department's latest report, 1.93 million people were being held in state prisons and local jails at the end of 2000.
Determinate sentencing laws, like the one Illinois implemented in 1978, were hailed as a way to standardize sentencing. Under this system, offenders receive and serve a fixed prison sentence within a range set by statute. They can get credit for good conduct and participate in certain treatment or vocational activities.
But determinate sentencing laws also came under attack. Critics argued that releasing violent prisoners after they had completed only half their sentences led to an erosion of public confidence in the criminal justice system. As a result, this state responded in 1995 with a ?truth-in-sentencing? law, under which the most serious offenders must serve 85 percent to 100 percent of their sentences. The Illinois Supreme Court struck that law down, but not before lawmakers passed a modified version; the 1998 law still stands.
But lawmakers haven't been merely reforming sentencing procedures over the past couple of decades. Crime rates went up in the 1980s, and legislators here and in other states responded by creating new criminal offenses and enhancing the sentences for those already on the books. In addition, states followed the lead of former President Ronald Reagan's so-called ?war? on drugs by implementing stiff sentences for drug offenders.
"Penalties have been drastically increased practically every legislative session since, I?d say, the late 1980s, for all sorts of crimes," says David Bergschneider, legal director at the state appellate defender's office.
Largely as a result of those efforts, the nation's incarcerated population is approaching 2 million. According to the Justice Department's latest report on prisons in America, 1.93 million people were being held in state prisons and local jails at the end of 2000. That's 1.3 million who are in the custody of state and federal prison authorities and about 621,000 who are being held by local authorities.
That report, which was released in August, concludes that during 2000, nine years after the violent crime rate peaked in 1991, the nation's prison population rose 1.3 percent. But that growth is significantly lower than the 3.4 percent increase recorded during 1999 and is the smallest annual increase since 1972. The average annual growth since 1990 was 6 percent.
Still, there are those who argue that incarceration rates should not be rising at all almost a decade after crime rates started to fall. "No other Western democratic country has ever imprisoned this proportion of its population," says Norval Morris, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School. He calls the number of prisoners held in America "appalling."
Crime rates don't tell the whole story, though. To some extent, experts say, those rates are driven by policy and enforcement. As more police officers hit the streets, there are more arrests and more crimes get reported. Under that reasoning, violent crime may be the fairest measure of crime in general, as it is most consistently reported. Arrests for drug crimes, on the other hand, depend more on a given state's policies and enforcement. The experts also contend that some crime victims, such as victims of sexual assault, are more likely to report crime now than they were 20 years ago.
What's more, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation use different criteria in assessing crime rates. The department uses data taken from surveys of crime victims. The bureau crunches data provided by local law enforcement agencies. Their conclusions do not vary widely ? the department says crime peaked in 1991, while the bureau says it peaked in 1992. They do agree crime is going down.
The prison population is not.
According to Justice Department data, 96 Illinoisans out of every 100,000, or 0.1 percent of this state's population, were serving a sentence of more than one year in 1978. During the 1980s, as crime rates and arrests shot up, that ratio jumped from 94 out of every 100,000 Illinoisans in 1980 to 211 per 100,000 in 1989. And in the 1990s, when criminal offenders were more likely to face mandatory minimum sentencing, the ratio jumped from 234 per 100,000 in 1990 to 368 per 100,000 in 1999. By 2000, this state was incarcerating 371 out of every 100,000 Illinoisans.
"We were arresting more people and locking them up for longer [during the 1980s and 1990s]," concludes Rep. Thomas Johnson, a West Chicago Republican and co-chair of the House Prison Reform and Management Committee.
Illinois is just about average for the nation, though. According to the Justice Department report, this state held 1.4 percent more prisoners in 2000 than in 1999. The system now holds about 44,668 prisoners, according to the state Department of Corrections. And the department says 41.7 percent of new adult admissions during fiscal year 2001, which ended June 30, were for drug offenses, 29.6 were for property offenses, 20.3 percent were for ?crimes against a person? and 4.6 percent were for sex offenses. The remaining admissions are listed as "other."
There are concerns associated with housing so many prisoners. According to the corrections department, the total population puts the state's penal system at 162 percent of "ideal capacity." That's when maximum security inmates all have their own cells. Even when the department puts more than one inmate in a cell, the system is still at 138 percent of capacity.
"The amount of double-celling in our maximum security prisons is much higher than you will see in other states, and it's just traditionally been that way," says department spokesman Brian Fairchild.
Pairing maximum security inmates, he says, can be a safety risk.
That brings us back to nonviolent drug offenders. Corrections department Director Donald Snyder has expressed concern about the number of those offenders crowding the state's prisons and has asked the legislature to consider diverting them to community-based treatment programs. "Is it better to spend that $8,000 to $10,000 to put somebody in prison for six months, when in fact what they have is a substance abuse problem that needs to be dealt with?"spokesman Fairchild asks. "Those problems could cost half of what it costs us to put them in a prison bed."
In the near future, the Federal Bureau of Investigation expects crime rates to start leveling out. And Beck, the Justice Department statistician, predicts a period of relative stability in incarcer-ation rates over the next couple of years. However, he cautions that "some of the effects of sentencing reforms, such as enhanced sentences, are not yet fully felt."
As for Illinois, the next big, and likely expensive, challenge may be caring for a growing geriatric inmate population, as the most serious offenders stay in prison for 85 percent to 100 percent of their sentences under truth-in-sentencing. Prior to that law, convicted murderers served an average of 12 years after day-for-day credit, according to Olson, the statistician at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. So about 2010, or 12 years from the time that law was implemented, those prisoners doing time for murder will start serving the second half of their sentences.
That means older inmates for corrections to take care of and, when those inmates are released, for parole officers to coach. "We used to have guys getting out that were 50,"he says. "Now, they will get out when they're 70."
Illinois Issues, November 2001
