Democrats in the U.S. Senate surrendered to Republican demagoguery on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and denied the Obama administration the funds to shut it down. The vote was 90-6. Maryland's senators were among those who voted with the majority. "We have to make sure that streets and neighborhoods don't think that they're going to be the repository of Guantanamo prisoners," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, sound-biting like one of the Republicans who raised the possibility of terrorists being moved to the U.S. and set free or escaping.
Apparently, these politicians don't have much faith in our federal prisons. We have some of the best on Earth, with one in Colorado already housing 33 terrorists, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui. Haven't heard much from those guys lately, and I doubt we ever will.
Which gets me to two points about prisons today:
1. They are necessary; they make life safer for the rest of us.
2. We have too many of them; we ought to stop building them and shut some down.
There's great symbolism in President Barack Obama's promise about Gitmo, and not only because the prison there represents a "misguided experiment" of the Bush administration's war on terror. What we have here is a government leader calling for the contraction of a government function and smarter thinking about the use of taxpayer-funded resources. We could use some of that when it comes to prisons in this country.
Most of the nation's governors are struggling with billions in budget shortfalls and the funding of services. A nationally declared moratorium on new prisons would save a lot of money, increase the volume and quality of human capital across the country and, in the long run, make Americans even safer.
You might have heard the adage, "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." I have one of my own: "Prisoner population expands to fill the space available for it." Basically, if we build it, we fill it. That's what we've been doing in this country, particularly during the last quarter-century.
The Pew Center on the States looked at U.S. incarceration through 2007 and found that prison populations had doubled since 1982, to 2.3 million, giving us the highest incarceration rate on the planet. The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) recently estimated annual state, federal and local spending on incarceration at $68 billion. State spending is 60 percent of that - and growing at a pace of 3 percent a year.
