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Page 2 of 2 AMY GOODMAN: Nonviolent offenders.  MICHAEL JACOBSON: That's what I meant to say, I'm sorry. That runs throughout the report, especially in the area of people with mental illness. The report tries to be very strong and very clear that we not only over-incarcerate generally, but we hugely over-incarcerate people with mental illness. And there are a lot of nonviolent people who don't pose a threat to public safety, who have various stages of mental illness, who should not be in jail and prisons. They should be better served in their communities. And that would be better for public safety, as well, and cheaper. But for those who do have to be confined somewhere, for the most part, they're not getting the treatment they need. And they're coming out worse than they did when they went in. And that's not good for public safety.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Jacobson, you talk about the increasing use of pepper spray, taser guns, and other weapons that can cause serious injuries. MICHAEL JACOBSON: Well, it's -- you know, as technology increases, it's not surprising you see this sort of technology. We had it when I was the New York City correction commissioner. But the goal is – and almost every prison and certainly most jails have a policy of using the least force possible in any situation. You never want to get to use something like pepper spray, for example, until you've gotten through talking, negotiating, and trying everything possible before you ratchet up your use of force, either to pepper spray or above that, to a taser or above that, obviously, to more deadly force. But you want -- so what the commission was really concentrating on is making sure that facilities had not only excellent use of force policies, but the staff and the leaders of those facilities had the training, which is extensive and not cheap, to be able to enforce those policies, to make sure that force and restraint are used only when necessary. And in these facilities it's sometimes necessary. But you never, ever want to overuse them. AMY GOODMAN: And you talk about the ways that families are kept apart -- the breaking of bonds with even going so far as to talk about the phone that is -- that the prisoners used. That is an issue that people on the outside don't know very much about, but as you point out, the cost of receiving a collect call from someone in prison -- much higher than in the free world -- operates like a tax on poor families. MICHAEL JACOBSON: Yeah. Exactly. And like a lot of issues here, this varies across the country. Some systems charge prisoners the same as they -- the same as the phone company would charge anyone else, and some less. And some charge much more. And the problem with charging much more, obviously, is that prisoners for the most part are indigent, as are their families. They can't afford big long distance telephone calls, charges. And one of the most important things that all experts in corrections will tell you is that keeping that bond between families is hugely important. And the way our prison system works, those bonds are strained in a variety of ways. First, because a lot of the systems charge obscene amounts for calls, and so it just limits the kind of contact you can have with your family. The second, because -- and this is true in almost every state -- the way prisons are sited is that they're mostly in rural areas, where they're actually viewed as good economic development projects. Most large cities are the drivers of prison populations, so in New York, for example, probably 60% or 70% of all inmates in our state prison system come from the city. But a lot of our prisons are in rural areas, and some right on the border of Canada. So the combination of siting prisons far away, of charging prisoners a lot for phone calls. Some states send their prisoners out of state to other facilities or private facilities. All strain that bond between communities and prison prisoners. Again, it's not just a matter of humanity, almost all criminologists and corrections experts will tell you that if you want people to come out of prison and stay out of prison, one of the things they have to have are strong family and community bonds. AMY GOODMAN: And this privatization of the prisons. Do you see this as a threat to human beings being held in facilities that are for-profit? MICHAEL JACOBSON: Well this, is -- the report really didn't get into that. It just didn't -- they met for a year and again, as I said, they really tried to keep their focus on safety issues. My own feeling about private prisons is that the biggest issue with private prisons, for me, is that when you introduce that kind of private capital into this field, what private prisons do, either directly or indirectly, is mitigate toward more and more prisons, because what they're interested in is market share. That's what they do. This is a business. So the more prisoners they have, the more money they make. So the biggest issue for private prisons for me is, above and beyond, the fact that they cause people to be sent out of states to private prisons that are in other states, is that they effectively lobby state legislatures for more tough-on-crime laws. But the report really tried to look at what happens while people are in, and one of the reasons they wanted to do that, and why it was so clear that what happens in jails and prisons doesn't just stay in jails and prisons, is our national recidivism rate – again this differs state-by-state -- is that after three years, almost 70% of everyone who leaves prison is re-arrested and 52% of everyone who leaves prison is back in prison. AMY GOODMAN: We're going have to leave it there. Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice. New report that has just come out on the prisons. It's very -- we will link to and let you see it at the web site, prisoncommission.org.
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