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February 18, 2007
Doak: Surge in prison population shows all is not well in Iowa

By Richard Doak
Special to the Register

Something in Iowa has gone dreadfully awry.

At the least, something is dreadfully different than it used to be, and Iowa is a lesser place because of it.

The change isn't immediately apparent. It has occurred so gradually that nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening.

Perhaps that's the way it is with profound change. Everything seems normal until you look back over the decades and realize how different things are.

So it is with the way we keep putting more and more of our fellow Iowans behind bars for major portions of their lives. A look back reveals how out of character that is for Iowa.

Consider that Iowa's total population has remained basically unchanged for 100 years. It has grown slightly, but has remained under 3 million through all the decades.

Through most of the last century, the number of Iowans in prison stayed about the same, too. The number spiked a little during the Great Depression, but generally around 2,000 or fewer Iowans were in prison at any given time.

It makes sense that if your total population isn't growing, the number of people in prison shouldn't grow much, either.

But the number did grow, beginning in the 1980s. Iowa's population actually declined in that decade, but the number of Iowans incarcerated began to shoot up. By the mid-1990s, more than 6,000 Iowans were behind bars - triple the historical number.

The number keeps growing. Now, nearly 9,000 Iowans are in prison. In another 10 years, it's estimated the prison population will top 11,000, at a time when the total population of the state will grow only slightly.

Think of 11,000 Iowans in prison. That would be more than five times greater than the historic rate of incarceration in Iowa.

It is hard to believe that Iowa children are growing up to be criminals at five times the rate they were a few generations ago, but that seems to be the case.

That surely is evidence of a fundamental deterioration in the social fabric of the state.

It is little consolation that Iowa imprisons a smaller proportion of its population than most other states.

That doesn't change the fact that a fivefold increase in the number of Iowans behind bars is a symptom of something deeply wrong.

Through most of the 20th century, Iowa got along fine with just three prisons - Fort Madison and Anamosa for men and Rockwell City for women. Now there are new prisons at Mount Pleasant, Clarinda, Fort Dodge and Newton. Rockwell City was turned into a men's prison, with women moved to Mitchellville. A major prison medical and screening facility operates at Oakdale.

A state with a population of 2.8 million that needed three prisons in 1970 shouldn't have needed eight prisons to protect a population of 2.9 million by 2000.

Moreover, Iowa's population is aging, which, if anything, should mean less crime. It doesn't compute.

It is revealing that two of the new prisons are at sites of mental-health institutes. Until the 1960s, each of the state's four mental-health institutes - at Mount Pleasant, Clarinda, Cherokee and Independence - housed from 1,500 to 2,000 patients. Now they're down to fewer than 100 each.

It's no coincidence that the prison population went up as commitments to mental institutions went down. The unintended consequence of deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people turned prisons into warehouses for criminals with mental problems. It is a national scandal.

Then there are the drug-related crimes that scarcely existed 50 years ago. Society decided to define drug using and selling as criminal behavior, and lawmakers decided to conduct dual wars on drugs and on crime by toughening the criminal codes, making sentences longer, often mandatory.

Those are the usual reasons cited for the prison population explosion. There might be societal reasons as well, including the possibility that greater numbers of Iowa kids simply are growing up troubled and alienated - essentially being inadvertently reared to become drug users or criminals.

That possibility is almost too disturbing to contemplate, but it needs to be examined. Rather than testing kids in reading and math, perhaps we should be evaluating children in the context of their whole lives, in and out of school, to point everyone away from a future in prison.

Any child who ends up an adult in prison has really been left behind.

And any state that must imprison more and more of its people every year has something deeply amiss.

Richard Doak is a retired Register columnist.

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