Here We Go Again?

After you have spent nearly 2,000 Saturday breakfasts with the same person, you might expect that coffee talk could vacillate somewhere between the mundane and the mysterious. But, the inclusion of the laws of thermodynamics over croissants and coffee is a surefire way of keeping the spark alive. Such was a recent Saturday morning at my house while avoiding the lawn mower. Can’t say exactly how the topic arose, but before long the search was on for ancient college textbooks and the World Book encyclopedia.

In case you missed that physics class when the laws of thermodynamics were covered, the second one goes something like this: The second law of thermodynamics is essentially entropy, which is a measure of the amount of disorder or randomness in a system. Because there are many more random ways of arranging a group of things than there are organized ways (think shuffling of cards), disorder is much more probable. Taken together, all processes occurring now will result in a universe of greater disorder.

I have read about the laws of thermodynamics being used to explain the inexplicable natural disasters or the unexpected loss of life in the comforting writings of Rabbi Harold Kushner who suggests that any system left to itself will become more random. That is a law of nature. But, short of Saturday morning indigestion, you might ask, what does thermodynamics have to do with jail crowding.

Since 1994, the jail population in the U.S. increased by 43 percent while the crime rate has continued to decline. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistic’s Annual Survey of Jails, in the 10 years since 1994, the number of persons held in American jails has increased from an average of 479,800 to 684,431 in 2003, or an increase of about 20,400 per year. The same report indicated that capacity in American jails is now 735,518 and that, on average, capacity has increased 23,700 beds per year, or 65 per day. These statistics would seem to suggest that we are finally winning the contest of crowding in our jails.

Of the 50 largest jurisdictions, 24 have experienced an increase in the average daily population since 2000 while 17 have added capacity. (By the way, of the more than 3,000 jurisdictions with jails, these 50 account for 32 percent of all the jail bedspaces and also an equal percentage of the nation’s capacity.) To be fair, the BOJ annual report uses the definition of capacity as whatever any “official” jurisdiction offers. So the ACA suggestion of 25 or 35 unencumbered square feet per inmate in sleeping areas probably has not been used to determine capacity by most jurisdictions. But that’s a different topic.

Since the serious crime rate and jail populations in many jurisdictions are down (or at least flat), but jail population is again rising, “system” influences must be at work. The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) in their State Court Guide to Statistical Reporting, 2003 noted that in the last 10 years, total criminal filings in state courts increased by slightly less than 2 percent per year. The annual jail population increase in the same timeframe was over 4 percent.

Seeing a similar pattern in many jurisdictions, I asked a state’s attorney in Florida last week his take on the length of stay “creep” that is occurring in Florida and other less sunny jurisdictions. Several contributing factors were offered including sharp increases in criminal filings in courts of limited jurisdiction (misdemeanor offenses) that consume court time and resources; legislated guidelines requiring longer sentences thus keeping inmates in local jails longer to stockpile time-served credits; and “stove-pipe” approaches to information sharing resulting from databases that remain disconnected, among others.

The “stove-pipe” approach sounds like a synonym for a closed system to me and what was that law about disorder in closed systems? This may be too much of a stretch, but if sharply reduced funding for information, integration and imagination causes our criminal justice system to resemble a landscape of row house chimneys, then perhaps disorder is inevitable, but is it affordable?

If you are transposing atoms into energy, a certain amount of randomness is desirable. But in criminal justice, the disorder resulting from closed systems is expensive, inefficient and potentially dangerous. Crowded jails could be seen as one result of closed systems and somehow, most of the jails I see these days appear crowded, or else I am only invited to visit jails with double and triple bunking and inmates sleeping on the dayroom floors.

Most correctional officers intuitively know that crowded jails contribute to disorder and randomness in human behavior. Inmate-on-inmate, as well as inmate-on-staff, assaults are known to increase in closed, crowded spaces to a point that ultimately a great deal of money is spent to reduce the disorder. But spending scarce resources on just the jail is like buying new hubcaps after the car engine has blown.

The emerging trend is that crowding is re-occurring in the nation’s jails and most of the increases in the daily population can be attributed to longer stays, which are almost always related to the behavior of the judicial system. Instead of doubling the capacity of the nation’s jails, as we did over the last 15 years, maybe this time we search for methods to dismantle the stovepipes and open the system.

This starts with something as simple as regular conversation. In that same Florida county, I witnessed the component managers of the criminal justice system take action through discussion that will undoubtedly reduce the jail population by enough in one month to pay for a fulltime jail population manager. That’s dismantling stovepipes with a vengeance.

People who scored a lot higher on physics exams have said that randomness is an unavoidable element of systems. Perhaps, but randomness does not have to evolve into chaos which closes not only system choices, but minds. Maybe I should just skip Saturday morning breakfast and go straight to lawn maintenance, but then where else can I learn five syllable words and gain a glimpse of the future.

Stephen A. Carter, AICP, is principal of Carter Goble Lee LLC in Columbia, S.C.