Mississippi has the fourth highest imprisonment rate in the country, and two “liberty-minded” organizations convened in Jackson Tuesday night to explore new strategies to reduce the high prison population.
In a presentation about mass incarceration, University of New Orleans professor Dr. Chris Surprenant offered ideas that included putting only violent offenders in prison, shortening initial sentences, and removing financial incentives that are tied with the incarceration rate.
America’s Future Foundation, a network made up largely of young libertarians, and the Center for the Study of Liberty, which organizes events on “free thinking” around the country, co-hosted the event at Hal & Mal’s Restaurant in Jackson.
“I think that we should look at relatively short initial sentences for all crimes,” Surprenant said. “All of the data on prison sentences suggests anything over five years does not deter people any longer than five year sentences do.
“If we believe that at some point someone who committed a crime at 16, 17, 18, is no longer of the state of mind or in the position where they’re going to commit a crime, should we keep them in prison?”
Currently, there are 2.2 million Americans in federal, state and local prisons, which is about seven percent of the population; in Mississippi, 609 of every 100,000 people are imprisoned, and about 2 percent of the population are in the criminal justice system (including those on parole or probation), according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The professor also suggested expanding tort law and finding other punishments, such as expanding probation, for non-violent offenders would reduce the incarceration rate.
Surprenant addressed arguments made in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, specifically the idea that race is the main reason behind the mass incarceration.
“I would love it to be the case that the reason why we have so many people in jail is because we have a lot of racist laws, a lot of racist cops and a lot of racist judges, and there are those,” he said. “But if you woke up tomorrow, and we were all a shade of tan and we eliminated race overnight, we would still have the incarceration problem that we have now because there are significant financial incentives to keep people in prison and to fine them.”
He argued that state and local prisons have an incentive to imprison more people because inmates are counted towards the population and therefore lead to more federal funding.
Surprenant, who teaches philosophy at the University of New Orleans, is the editor of Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
“He argued that state and local prisons have an incentive to imprison more people because inmates are counted towards the population and therefore lead to more federal funding.” Sorry Alex, that’s not an argument….that’s a fact. The same goes for all of Mississippi’s state agencies who goes as far as to greatly inflate population statistics/records to capture as much of those federal dollars as possible.