Moratorium Campaigns
No More Prisons

By Christie Donner and Gail Williamson

emanding that politicians put preventing crime—via education, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment and community development—ahead of punishing it, organizers across the country have mounted a grassroots movement to enact state moratoriums on new prison construction.

Activists are deeply concerned by the unabated expansion of the prison industrial complex over the last two decades. As many of this magazine’s readers know, the United States currently has more than two million people behind bars, the highest per capita incarceration rate in the history of the world, at a $100 billion annual price tag (see “Stopping the Prison- Industrial Juggernaut,” NVA, January-February 1999). Over the past 20 years, the nation’s elected officials have built a constantly increasing number of prisons in which they warehouse and exploit predominantly poor people of color, 75 percent of whom were convicted of nonviolent offenses. Poor, working-class and mostly minority communities—especially the African-American community—have been hardest hit by the “War on Crime,” especially its “War on Drugs” front, even though there is no evidence that people in those communities commit more than their share of crime. One out of three African-American youths and men between the ages of 20 and 29 are under some form of criminal justice supervision on any given day.

Moratorium projects now exist in New York, California and Colorado with the common goal of generating a public consensus that current incarceration policies are unjust, misguided and ill-conceived.

Community Solutions
“Most of us who are active in and around the criminal justice system are familiar with the fact that since 1970, the number of men and women behind bars has grown by 500 percent, while the cost of corrections has grown by about 1500 percent,” says Kevin Pranis of the New York Prison Moratorium Project. “In every state, prisons are replacing schools, homeless shelters, hospitals and drug rehab programs in response to poverty and joblessness in rural and urban communities.”

The New York project is an all- volunteer organization formed by students and former prisoners in 1996 to push for a five-year moratorium on prison construction and for repeal of the draconian mandatory sentencing drug laws initiated by New York’s Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller in the 1970s. It seeks to educate the public about the dollar-for-dollar tradeoff between prison spending and moneys budgeted for higher education, showing how the engorgement of the prison industry contributes to the stripping down of our public education system. Since 1983, New York has added 33,458 beds to its already sizable prison system; construction costs and interest on those costs have reached almost $6 billion. In 1995 alone, the project reports, “national spending on prison construction grew by nearly a billion dollars while spending on school construction fell by an equal amount.”

Families of color have been hit particularly hard by these actions. There are more Black and Latino youths in prison in New York State than there are students in all of the 64 schools of the State University of New York. Since 1991, state university students have experienced a 35 percent increase in the cost of obtaining a higher education. The share of funding for the City University of New York system that is covered by the state has declined from 77 percent to about 49 percent, a decrease that has forced a near-doubling of undergraduate tuition costs. Students are graduating from colleges and universities with massive personal debts, yet 80 percent of graduates cannot find jobs in the fields in which they were trained. The New York Prison Moratorium Project is building a statewide network among students, community and legal activists and policy makers to challenge uncontrolled prison expansion. It is also developing a grassroots community education project to reach youth specifically in New York City neighborhoods that “supply” the bulk of the state’s prisoners. Finally, the project is coordinating the “Not With Our Money: Students Stop For-Profit Prisons” campaign as part of a national coalition, the Public Safety and Justice Campaign.

‘We’ve Got to Do Something’
In 1999, the Colorado Prison Moratorium Project was instrumental in making Colorado the first state in the nation to introduce legislation calling for an outright halt on further prison construction. The legislation was defeated in 1999 but was reintroduced early this year by state Sen. Dorothy Rupert and Reps. Penfield Tate and Ben Clarke.

Colorado Senate Bill 104 mandates both a three-year moratorium on both public and private prison expansion and the development of prevention, treatment and sentencing alternatives. At the center of the bill is a proposal for the creation of a legislative and community task force to evaluate current drug sentencing laws, the cost and effectiveness of alternatives, prevention and treatment options, the impact of incarceration on children, minority overrepresentation and issues affecting reintegration. The prison population in Colorado has exploded by more than 400 percent since 1984, at a cost of more than $3 billion. Projections indicate that the prison population will increase another 40 percent by 2005. Seventy percent of men and 80 percent of women who were sent to prison last year were convicted of nonviolent offenses, the majority for drug crimes; drug offenders are the largest and fastest-growing class of felons in prison, up 476 percent in the last 10 years. While people of color are a 21 percent minority in Colorado, they compose 57 percent of Colorado’s prison population—but only 18.6 percent of the entering students at the state’s four-year colleges. A recent report by the Colorado Legislative Council found that African-Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be incarcerated in Colorado, and Latinos/as are four times more likely than Anglos.

The state spends approximately $25,000 to incarcerate a person each year and spends between $75,000 and $100,000 to build each prison cell. For the 1998-1999 school year, however, the state spent only $4,748 per public K-12 student, ranking Colorado second-lowest in the nation for public school funding.

“The original impetus for … this bill,” Sen. Rupert told the Boulder Weekly earlier this year, “was seeing all the money being sucked out of the system. The more it went out to corrections, the less there was for education, crime prevention and health care. I saw those programs dwindling, so I said, ‘We’ve got to do something.’”

So far, more than 60 Colorado organizations and faith communities have endorsed the prison moratorium. But, according to Sen. Rupert. “There’s so much money in building prisons. … [W]e’re building prisons all around the state’s perimeter in our small towns. We have a lot of legislators in small towns that see this as an economic development scheme. The people who build prisons also give people money to run campaigns.”

The Colorado project expects that the moratorium legislation will be defeated but believes there is a chance that the task force might be approved as a necessary first step to redesigning policies that will strengthen communities, not dismantle them. The project is also evaluating the viability of organizing a ballot initiative, similar to a proposition that was passed in 1996 in Arizona.

Who Loses, Who Gains?
The California Prison Moratorium Project was created in September of 1998 to stop all public and private prison construction in California for five years. The project’s central organizing tenet is that prisons not only harm prisoners and the communities they come from, but also are detrimental to the communities where prisons are located. One strategy has been to connect and work with rural activists to oppose prison construction in their hometowns.

The project reports that:
• More than 60 percent of the new prison jobs, including all the best-paying jobs, go to outsiders, most of whom end up living outside the town in which the prison is located. In Corcoran, CA, for example, fewer than 8 percent of new prison employees live in town.
• The only people who make money in real estate from a new prison are the ones who sell the land for the prison. Real estate values and rents for homes go up initially, but only until the prison is built. Values then drop back to pre-prison levels because the anticipated economic benefits never materialize. Renters tend to come out much worse because rents tend to stay at the new higher levels.
• A few people in town get rich because of the prison, but many more get poorer. In Corcoran today, the population of the town is roughly the same as before the prison was built, but the number of people with incomes below the poverty line has doubled.
• The prison industry is big business, one of the two fastest-growing industries in the nation. Corporations are receiving a growing proportion of tax dollars to operate private prisons while taking advantage of the cheap labor. Investment broker Smith Barney is part owner of a prison in Florida. American Express and General Electric have invested in private prison construction in Oklahoma and Tennessee. Corrections Corporation of America, the world’s largest private prison corporation, operates 54 facilities in 11 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Australia. And prisons-for-profit must operate as cheaply as possible, with lower staff wages, no union, fewer services for prisoners—and, often, substandard diets, extreme overcrowding and inadequate health care for inmates.
• Prison wages range from an average of 23 cents to a dollar an hour. Chevron, TWA and Victoria’s Secret use prison labor to do data entry, book telephone reservations and make lingerie at that rate. UNICOR, the federal prison industry corporation, uses inmates at $40 a month for a 40-hour work week.

The California Project is also organizing to defeat the “Youth Crime Initiative” which will be on the California ballot March 7. The initiative would make it easier to arrest and entrap young people, place youth in adult prisons and lengthen sentences for whole categories of young people and adults—all of which would fall most heavily on people of color.

Prison moratoriums are not a new concept. As long ago as 1973, President Richard M. Nixon’s Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended a 10-year moratorium on prison construction, and a 1976 work on the subject (Knopp, F.H. et al, Instead of Prison: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Syracuse, NY: Safer Society Press) noted that “in 1972, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency called for a ‘halt on the construction of all prisons, jails, juvenile training schools, and detention homes until the maximum funding, staffing and utilization of non-institutional corrections have been attained.’”

As activist Russ Immarigeon writes in the May/June 1999 issue of Community Corrections Report, “A moratorium perspective posits that there are enough jails or prison cells but not enough community-based services and programs to address various aspects of preventing crime, reducing offender recidivism, repaying victims, and rehabilitating offenders. Furthermore, a moratorium perspective argues that unless local, state or federal governments stop … constructing new prisons other community based approaches will not work.”

* * * For more information, contact * * *

New York Prison Moratorium Project—Kevin Pranis, Shana Siegal, c/o DSA, 180 Varick Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10014; (212)727-8610, x 23; email, kpranis@igc.org or grandmasters@ earthlink.net.
Colorado Prison Moratorium Project—Christie Donner, Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center, P.O. Box 1156, Boulder, CO 80306; (303)444-6981; email, cdonner2@juno.com; website, www. rmpjc.org.
California Prison Moratorium Project—Michelle Foy, P.O. Box 339, Berkeley, CA, 94701, (510)594-4060; email, pmpca @usa.net; website: www.prisonactivist. org/pmp.
National Equal Justice Association—Gail Williamson, Rev. Arthur Elcombe, Box 420812, San Francisco, CA 94142-0812, (415)552-5833.

The authors thank Russ Immarigeon for his permission to include information contained in his article entitled, “A Moratorium on Prison Construction? Part 1: Implications for Community Corrections Programming and Planning,” Community Corrections Report, May/June 1999.

Christie Donner coordinates Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center Prisoner Rights Project and was statewide coordinator for the Prison Moratorium Campaign. Gail Williamson works with the National Equal Justice Association in California and edits the National Equal Justice Association Bulletin. A version of this article appeared in the Fall 1999 NEJA Bulletin.