Panelists Consider Prison Reform

Panelists argued that the targeting of specific minority groups has infused the American criminal justice system with racial and socioeconomic bias at an event Thursday night.

“You can’t think of incarceration in the United States without thinking of racial disparity,” said Jessica T. Simes, a doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The event, entitled "Criminal (In)justice System," took place at Boylston Hall’s Ticknor Lounge and featured Simes, Boston Workers Alliance Director Phillip Reason, Kennedy School research assistant Catherine M. Sirois ’10, and Diana Li ’14, who tutors prisoners.

“Even after controlling for crime, neighborhoods with high minority populations have a much higher incarceration rate. This isn’t something we’re just seeing in Boston; we’re seeing this all over the state,” said Simes. “Race is an integral part of incarceration in the United States.”

During the discussion, the panel highlighted startling facts about the American penal system. Prisoners in the United States account for 25 percent of the world’s total prison population while U.S. citizens only account for five percent of the world’s total population. One in three black men between the ages of 18-30 are in prison, on probation, or on parole, and 70 percent of all people who enter the prison system will be incarcerated again.

“Black men are being arrested and sentenced at alarming rates,” said Reason.

The panel continued to discuss how a privatized prison system has created a conflict of interest between profits and personal rights. Legislation focuses more on satisfying those who are building prisons than those who are investing in them, Reason said. Lawmakers are more concerned with how to fill prison cells than how to keep people out of them.

“Through our policies we created ghettos. We chose mass incarceration as a response to social instability; we didn’t have to. We could have focused on building up education or building up families. We just didn’t,” said Sirois.

Reason also mentioned that the BWA has submitted a request that money that was allocated for prison expansion be redirected towards job development.

“Jobs not jails,” said Reason. “It costs an average of $40,000 for the government to incarcerate someone. That’s enough to send them to college; maybe even Harvard.”