I was disappointed to read that the President’s 2011 budget calls for a $527.5 million infusion for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/justice.pdf). Should the budget pass, the BOP budget will rise to $6.8 billion in the 2011 fiscal year. My position, of course, is that we need prison reforms in the federal system that would lower taxpayer costs by eliminating programs that warehouse non-violent offenders for multiple decades.
It surprises me that President Obama’s administration hasn’t yet appointed a new director of the BOP. Perhaps the President must focus his attention on issues of more national importance, but the attorney general or one of the deputy attorney generals must oversee the federal prison system. It’s tragic that while our country’s federal deficit soars, and millions of Americans are out of work, these minimum-security camps that operate like fitness clubs keep tens of thousands in custody. This wasteful spending fails to take advantage of technology that would operate at a fraction of the cost and that would be far more effective at improving safety in society.
Prison budgets disturb me. They disturb me because I know that these rising budgets lessen the likelihood that administrators will innovate. We should be thinking about how we can improve the limited prison resources we have, not spending more to expand a system that so expertly perpetuates failure. It sickens me to know that I have watched these human warehouses pack more and more prisoners inside over the past 270 months. When I began serving my term, federal prisons confined fewer than 40,000 people, and today’s count shows that we have 213,000 prisoners in federal prison.
American prisons confine too many people and American prisoners serve sentences that are far too long. I had hoped the federal deficits would compel administrators and legislators to think smarter about how to use our nation’s prison system. But federal prisons have not yet received sufficient scrutiny from President Obama’s administration and that saddens me.
My exercise today continued. I ran 10 miles, followed by 600 pushups.
[consecutive running log: 3,756 miles over the past 423 days]
[pushups in 2010: 13,600]
Monday, 8 February 2010
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