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Felony immigration: A burden on the prison system
By Dortell Williams
-Guest Columnist-
Updated Nov 28, 2006, 04:14 pm



There is no greater criminal label in American society than to be marked a felon. Felons are stigmatized, profiled and discriminated against.

In many states felons cannot vote, are forbidden from certain licensed careers, prohibited from public housing or other assistance, and are generally feared. Feared because often when people think of felons the most heinous criminal acts come to mind: murder, rape and child molestation. However, many people fail to realize, as with California’s Three Strikes law, that a felon can simply be a repeat petty thief, an unrehabilitated drug addict or a man who merely got into a fistfight as a youth. In California, there is no statute of limitation for prior convictions, and it is common practice for the state to retract decades old misdemeanors and re-characterize them as felonies.

As such, it is no wonder millions of immigrants, human rights advocates and other humanitarians across the country have mobilized an impressive opposition to a bill that would make felons of undocumented immigrants and anyone caught assisting them.

The bill, H.R. 4437, introduced by Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), would make undocumented immigrants vulnerable to felony sentencing from 1 to 20 years. It would also make those who employ immigrant baby sitters, painters and farm workers, along with the good samaritans who help them, criminals.

Apparently not much forethought went into how such an influx of incarceration would affect the prison population. There are currently some 2.3 million prisoners confined in U.S. prisons, which is a massive incarceration rate that exceeds every other modern nation, and has well surpassed any previous domestic prison population.

If just one-third, or 3 million of the twelve million undocumented immigrants, employers and good samaritans were to suddenly find themselves behind bars, our current overcrowded prison population would more than double in a blink.

As it stands, our jails and prisons are already overflowing. A series of violent brawls earlier this year in the Los Angeles County Jails system, where two prisoners died and several others—including Sheriff’s deputies—were injured, is indicative of the consequences of reckless and dangerous overcrowding.

Scarce and inadequate resources lead to malicious melees over any and everything: from very limited library seats, to rationed meals, to strong-armed struggles for decent cells and bedding.

Despite a 1957 United Nation’s prohibition against double bunking, the U.S. has continued to circumvent Resolution 633 for nearly 30 years; claiming "emergency overcrowding," the loophole permitted as a "temporary" measure for such conditions.

A caldron of chaos has subsequently been created by consistently broadening the scope of felonies from offenses once considered mere misdemeanors.

In California, overcrowding has led to a crisis in prison medical care so horrific that an average of one inmate a week was dying. In early April, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson intervened by appointing a federal monitor to oversee the prison system’s grossly negligent health care department.

California knows firsthand the ills of prison overcrowding. Since the enactment of the Three Strikes law, deemed the most repressive in the nation, the overburdened prison system has added 43,000 primarily non-violent prisoners to its vast domain in just under 12 years. To adjust to the influx, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed constructing two more multi-million dollar prison sites. The two proposed penal institutions would add to the 33 prisons the state currently oversees.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal was initiated before the introduction of H.R. 4437. If this onerous bill were to pass, California, which holds one of the most concentrated immigrant populations in the nation, would have to build even more prisons than those previously proposed.

California’s prison system, the largest in the nation, supervises 173,000 adult and juvenile inmates and wards, and is responsible for another 115,000 parolees at large.

Around the nation, the fast-paced prison expansion has been a windfall for the business community. By 1999 at least 17 states were in contracts with 20 for-profit private prison companies that collected more than a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues from taxpayers. The proliferation, like antebellum slavery, is all about the body count. The more bodies, the more profit. Profits are indeed high and very few of the new facilities offer work training and education programs that have been shown to reduce recidivism.

Meanwhile, California taxpayers have seen the annual budget for its prisons increase to $8.6 billion, from an already obscene $6 billion the previous year. With close to 300,000 prisoners, the state’s prison budget dwarfs the annual budgets of many small countries, including some of our neighboring islands in the Caribbean. For instance: Antigua and Barbuda has a population of 68,320 and an annual budget of $145.9 million; the annual budget for Belize is $209 million, for a population of 272,945; and the annual budget for the Bahamas is $956 million for a population that exceeds California’s prison population at 299,697.

A more striking comparison is that of Bahrain, a small SW Asian state in the Persian Gulf that has more than double the populace of California’s prison population with 677,866 people, yet manages to maintain an annual budget of $2.2 billion—just a fraction of what it cost to run California’s wide-web of prisons.

Critics attribute the high cost to inflated prison guard salaries, brought about by one of the most rewarding contracts in their history, while their rate of overtime often leads to repeated cost overruns.

There are many reasons for the enormous cost of prisons, in California and the nation as a whole, yet the real cost would arise from the even greater moral and humanitarian betrayal of incarcerating millions of misdemeanor border-crossers whose presence we’ve not only greatly benefited from—with their hard work—but have also encouraged to support our financial and other systems for decades past, and then suddenly, over night, we’re ready to maliciously turn against them and lock them up.

There is no greater liability in American society than to needlessly mark others as felons.