Justice Strategies

In the face of tight budgets and growing public opposition to new prison spending, officials in many states have employed a variety of "back-door" schemes to finance new prison construction. The mechanisms vary but the consequences are the same: rapid prison expansion that takes place with little public involvement or oversight.

A review of recent prison, jail and detention expansion initiatives shows that such back-door financing mechanisms are becoming more common at the federal, state and local level. Behind this trend is a cottage industry of investment bankers, architects, building contractors and consultants who have made enormous profits by encouraging local and state governments to borrow tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to build prisons and detention centers that the public does not want and cannot afford.

Women's prison population up 757 percent since 1977; women particularly sensitive to overall prison population growth trends.

Women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, surpassing male prison population growth in all 50 states and climbing 757 percent between 1977 and 2004. The majority of women in U.S. prison systems are incarcerated for nonviolent drug and property offenses. Many suffer from chemical dependency, mental illness or both.

A broad-based movement is building to overhaul Wisconsin's sentencing practices. The Treatment Instead of Prison (TIP) campaign — a dynamic statewide coalition of 24 organizations — has launched a coordinated effort to call attention to the many benefits of using substance abuse treatment as an alternative to incarceration for people charged with low-level, nonviolent offenses.

Many of Wisconsin's leading policymakers indicate they are ready to consider new approaches.

Despite recent efforts in Maryland to expand access to treatment for addicts caught up in the criminal justice system, the bulk of the state resources available for addressing the problem remain "locked up" in the prison system. The nearly 5,000 drug prisoners incarcerated in Maryland (1 in 5 state prisoners) represent a $100 million-a-year "investment" in a failed approach to combating addiction.

A Justice Strategies analysis of sentencing patterns for drug offenses determined that the state's drug sentencing guidelines:

Since the infamous photos of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq first came to light, much has been said about the role that the U.S. military and CIA have played in connection with the human rights violations. But reports of similar abuse in the United States are all too common, which suggests that America's dehumanizing prison culture has now been exported elsewhere in the world.

The process of putting together a bond deal is complicated and delicate. Investors choose from thousands of options when buying municipal bonds and most seek deals that involve something between little risk and no risk at all. Yet the projects financed by bonds are often massive, involving dozens of risk factors. The task of investment bankers and others who put together bond deals is to put together a package that not only eliminates or minimizes risk factors, but also minimizes the appearance of risk.