Here in Houston, a downtown Harris County jail building sits on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, where it overlooks a steady stream of hikers, bikers and the occasional kayaker paddling down the brackish waterway. But "overlooks" may not be the right word. Many of the seemingly transparent windows that line the seven-story red brick building are fakes — architectural camouflage that helps make the jail appear like neighborhood-friendly lofts to any passing weekend warriors.
In reality, it's not so easy for the 3,500 people held within the walls to see out into the world, and outsiders cannot peek in. Consider it an all-too-appropriate design.
The individual buildings may look different, but jails and prisons across the country uniformly operate as opaque institutions. They have little accountability to the taxpayers who fund them, the individuals who are housed or work there, and the society they're supposed to serve. Outcomes are poorly tracked. Inhumane conditions within facilities go ignored.
Here's what we do know about prisons: Incarceration costs more than $80 billion each year. Prison growth since the 1970s has provided little benefit to public safety. In some cases, prisons may actually make crime worse.
Taxpayers are stuck paying a lot of money for bad results. By any objective standard, the U.S. prison system is a failure.
In counties, states and the federal government, Democrats and Republicans are working together on a bipartisan agenda to reform our nation's broken criminal justice system, focusing on policies that shorten unnecessarily long sentences or divert people from incarceration in the first place. However, any reform that stops at the prison walls will be an incomplete project.
As long as prisons and jails remain a part of our criminal justice system, policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that these institutions are run effectively, humanely, and with a focus on rehabilitation.
The mission won't be as politically friendly as releasing those with nonviolent drug offenses or helping veterans with post-traumatic stress avoid time behind bars. One-and-a-half million adults live in prisons, and not all of them are sympathetic cases. But there is near consensus across the country that sentences are far too long and all sense of proportional punishment has been lost.
Then there is this inescapable truth: 95 percent of people in prison come back to live in free society. Prisons fail at the important task of helping them reintegrate, and often leave people worse off than before their sentences — less able to make a living, less connected to their communities, more likely to re-offend.
So how can we fix it?
The first step is transparency. Prison reform is stymied by the profound lack of public information about and oversight of our prisons. In the rare instances when policymakers investigate beyond the bricks, you can almost guarantee they'll find a culture of violence and inhumanity.
Just look at Alabama. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice released an astounding 56-page report documenting the unconstitutionally cruel conditions of the state's prison system, including ubiquitous weapons and an unrelenting spree of rape and murder among the system's 16,000 male inmates.
The report specifically noted that the state failed to track violent deaths or adequately investigate sex abuse.
Alabama may be a worst-case scenario, but the problem is pervasive nationwide.
"If you look at the prison system in particular and corrections in general, it screws everyone up who touches the system," John Wetzel, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, said at the Urban Institute last month. "And a big part of that is the system has been so opaque."
Wetzel was co-chair of a prison reform knowledge lab that convened 39 attendees - including myself - with the goal of discussing how we can reform, as Urban Institute Vice President for Justice Policy Nancy La Vigne put it, "one of the least transparent and most closed public sectors that we know of."
That lack of transparency was obvious in Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger's recent article about David Witt - a 41-year-old prisoner who died after being slammed to the ground by a guard. Witt's family was unaware of the circumstances around his death for months afterward.
But millions of Americans don't need to read investigative reporting or hear expert testimony to understand the cruelty of our prison system. Like Witt's family, they've lived it. Half of all adults in America have experienced the incarceration of a family member, and one in seven have had an immediate family member spend more than a year behind bars. For families with brothers, fathers, sons and daughters behind bars, fixing our broken prisons is a personal cause — one that has multigenerational ramifications. They know in their bones how our prison system contributes to the very problems it is supposed to solve: breaking up social networks, depriving families of emotional and economic support and undermining the already precarious stability of poor and minority communities.
Prisons don't have an incentive to do anything else. Rehabilitation efforts go neglected in our laws and budgets. Policymakers lack the metrics to measure the reality of imprisonment. It is time to reimagine the fundamental nature of our prison system and rewrite the rules.
This means making a serious effort to improve living and working conditions in our prisons, holding administrators accountable for reductions in violence and progress in health outcomes, creating environments of respect among staff and residents, and making successful re-entry into society a top priority.
Prison reform used to be a political impossibility. Now there's an opportunity for change. We can't let the moment pass. Too many people, too many neighborhoods, too many families will continue to suffer. It is time to shine a light that can penetrate the brick walls of our prisons and ensure that the system works for everyone — taxpayers, staff, victims, and those serving sentences.
Rhee is president and chief executive officer of Arnold Ventures, which recently dedicated $17 million to support fundamental prison reform.
