Do Not Go Directly to Jail

By PETER H. SCHUCK
NYT

PRISON crowding has reached crisis proportions: California’s prisons, the largest state system in the country, operate at almost double their maximum capacity. The conditions there — the legacy of the war on drugs and long, mandatory sentences — are so bad that a federal court has found that they deny inmates constitutional rights to adequate health care and other basic services; the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case last week.

The lower court’s decision requires California to reduce its prison population to about 110,000 inmates from 144,000 by next December. Risks to public safety from releasing that many prisoners will make this almost impossible. But the federal government can take one important step to help states comply: deport many immigrant criminals before they enter prison, not after.

Non-citizen criminals represent a significant percentage of American prisoners: in 2009, some 25 percent of federal prisoners and a smaller fraction of state prisoners were non-citizens; in California, 18,705 inmates were non-citizens. Although the federal government can deport many of them as soon as their criminal convictions become final, a century-old law provides that immigrants can be deported only after they have served their sentences here.

This provision, intended to ensure that the criminals are punished, was enacted in 1917, long before severely crowded prisons were deemed unconstitutional. This was also before legal and budgetary pressures forced prison officials to prematurely release inmates, even those with a significant recidivism risk (in California, as many as 58 percent commit new crimes within three years). Deporting criminal immigrants would make it easier to keep these potential recidivists behind bars.

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