Correction or Punishment

by Gongwer News Service
December 18, 2009

Gitmo’s not coming to Michigan. The only thing the federal decision announced this week to move Guantanamo Bay detainees to Illinois settles is that after months of speculation on whether suspected terrorists would be relocated to the now closed Standish Maximum Security prison is that they will held in the Land of Lincoln as opposed to the Land of the Lincoln automobile.

In truth, the decision to locate the detainees to Thompson, Illinois, and not Standish, was not a big surprise. Standish had fallen out of the running a while ago, and Governor Jennifer Granholm said when the announcement was made that she was not disappointed. Questions about ensuring security of the detainees and the area were never answered by the federal government, she said,

So all that is resolved in making the decision about Illinois is that the detainees are not coming to Michigan. Questions remain whether the detainees should be brought to U.S. shores at all, whether doing so makes the U.S. less secure, and whether doing so comports with U.S standards of justice.

Also unresolved is the status of Michigan’s prisons and its corrections system altogether. For Standish closed symbolizes the current situation the state confronts: corrections as much a cost factor as it is a safety and justice factor.

Corrections is thus no different than any other state issue. Education is as much a cost issue as it is one of preparing children for adulthood and boosting the state’s economy. Healthcare is unquestionably a cost issue as much as it is one of justice and equity for the low-income, as well as an economic measure. Roads, the state’s environment, its historical sites…you get the picture.

But corrections does carry with it some unique philosophical baggage. First, there is that whole notion of corrections. Through most of human history, prisoners were not corrected, they were generally executed (if not also tortured and compelled to a confession to save their souls). So pick pocketing was a hanging offense in Britain, and when pickpockets were hanged, pickpockets were working the crowd gathered to watch the executions.

But with the Enlightment, at least one of them, came the idea that prisoners, like all persons, were still perfectible and could be corrected. So along with jail time came education and training, ways of providing a prisoner with a new chance to redeem himself.

By the 1970s, imbued with post-1960s Aquarian ideals, the pendulum swung way too far to the notion of correction. Former Corrections Director Perry Johnson said he heard regularly from persons who argued that prisons should be closed and eliminated because they were worse than crime itself. Clearly, Mr. Johnson once said, these were folks who had a tenuous grasp on reality.

Just a few years later, as the state began a massive prison construction and expansion program under the administration of then-Governor James Blanchard, then-Corrections Director Bob Brown told reporters that unless parents and schools started teaching standards to very young children, the state would face an ongoing crisis with a growing crime problem and more prisons.

He said that at a time when the state was no longer interested in correcting anyone. Fed up with crime, the state simply wanted people put away. The growth in prisons occurred as the state also made punishments tougher, eliminating good time, requiring minimum sentences be served, establishing sentencing guidelines that often meant longer sentences. The whole attitude towards crime changed. No longer was anyone interested in cutting anyone any slack for even minor offenses.

In the 1980s then-Rep. Perry Bullard, a Democrat from Ann Arbor, successfully had misdemeanor sentences lengthened to a maximum of 93 days so people sentenced to 90 days would not have their information kept forever in the legal system. By the 1990s, lawmakers simply started requiring sentences set to 93 days, so any offense would be forever tagged and recorded. Commit any crime, at any time, and you are marked forever effectively as flawed, morally corrupt and unable of any redemption.

Crime did go down, though experts will debate on all the reasons why. But there is no debate that the cost of corrections kept going up in the state. It costs the state more now to incarcerate people than it is to educate them in four-year universities. And now the state has deflected the debate over whether corrections should correct or punish to the debate over how much we are willing to spend.

From a two-decade spending spree to build prisons, the state now seems in a rush to close prisons. The state has closed more than a dozen such prisons, including Standish, has cut back on corrections personnel and is wrestling with the idea of whether to release prisoners, and if so, which prisoners. And it is coping with the effect closing those prisons has on local and state economies. Prisons provide reliable, stable, decent paying jobs that the mostly small towns in which prisons are located are desperate to get and keep. Closing prisons causes such severe economic hardships that people will look seriously at bringing in terrorists to stifle economic terror.

Michigan is not alone in this. Most states are struggling with how to control the cost of prisons. But whether prisons are closed or opened, whether prisoners are released or sentences lengthened, it does not settle essential issues of crime, crime control and judgment of crime. Decisions on prisons, complicated and difficult as they might be, are, in fact, the simplest decisions in the crime/punishment/justice conundrum.

So Gitmo is going to Illinois. That much is certain. Little else is, but that is at least something. Small comfort to solving the larger issues, but that little one got done at least.

For nearly 50 years in Michigan, Gongwer News Service has provided independent, comprehensive, accurate and timely coverage of issues in and around Michigan’s government and political systems. For subscription information, including a free trial, visit Gongwer online.