The controversy of prison reform in American came in at full force Thursday night with a lecture from Marc Mauer, a leader in the development of alternative sentencing programs.
In the lecture, sponsored by the Central Programming Council’s Issues Committee, Mauer said the issues of crime and prison are part of a larger problem consisting of how American families make choices.
According to Mauer, the U.S. prison system is different than others because it uses prison as a method of controlling crime.
Mauer called the system that holds 2 million Americans in jail today another Cold War, saying the U.S. recently surpassed Russia in the numbers of people imprisoned.
In the 1970s, nobody would have predicted this growth, Mauer said.
There has been a recent move around the country to privatize prisons, a wave in which Mauer said Tennessee is actively participating. He connected the crime rate with changes in the criminal justice system and the social norms of this day.
The prison population has tripled since 1980, but only 20 percent of that is due to more crimes, Mauer said. Eighty percent is due to changes is sentencing policy, with every state having some type of mandatory sentencing.
Mauer told the audience a story about a man who was given six years in prison for stealing a Snickers candy bar.
Why did we choose getting tough’ as a crime policy? Mauer asked. It seems that crime has become a national political issue.
Mauer said in this day candidates have to be tough on crime to get elected. He said Americans tend to divide themselves by race, income and by any means that makes it easier for them to make decisions about crime. People exclude themselves from the groups they think commit crime, Mauer said, and that makes them tougher than they usually would be.
Overall social policy is much more limited than people would believe, Mauer said.
He described the two wars on drugs in the country due to policy. While there is a middle class war that calls for treatment facilities and rehabilitation, war against drugs in the lower class has people populating the prisons, Mauer said.
To make neighborhoods safer, Mauer recommended options like treatment and career opportunities. He talked about the restorative process, which brings offenders and victims together to heal wounds.
Allison Fairchild , a junior in broadcasting, said Mauer made her think about issues that affect the whole country in one way or another.
I was really affected by his reasons for why the (prison) system sends so many people to jail, Fairchild said. It’s more about making people feel safe in a superficial way, rather than punishing people for their crimes.
