The Suffolk County Sheriff joined state and city lawmakers and advocacy groups Thursday in calling for changes to the state’s justice system. They released a study showing residents of some Boston neighborhoods are being disproportionately incarcerated.
The report says in the Franklin Field Neighborhood of Dorchester between 2009 and 2015, more than one in five men between ages 25 and 29 were incarcerated. Residents of Roxbury, it says, are committed or detained at twice the overall rate for Boston residents.
Read the full report here.
Benjamin Forman is the research director for the policy group MassINC, which was a co-author of the report. He acknowledged there’s a high crime rate in these communities.
“But at some point, sending more folks off to prison is actually not the best answer, and the research is pretty clear about why,” Forman said. If a lot of people on your block are incarcerated, he said, going to prison starts to seem normal. “In neighborhoods where you have a lot of gang activity and drug trade, if you’re sending another youth off to prison, you’re just leading to the recruitment of another youth.”
Forman said all these incarcerations cost the state $66 million a year.
“It’s two and a half times what we’re spending on community college enrollments in our city," he said. "When you compare it on a neighborhood level especially you’ll see that in certain neighborhoods of Dorchester and Roxbury we’re spending just to incarcerate residents from that community than we are across the entire state on gang prevention.”
The report calls for an end to mandatory minimum sentences, saying three quarters of those convicted of drug offenses that carry mandatory minimums are people of color.
At apanel discussion, State Representative Evandro Carvalho, who used to be a prosecutor, said he’s not surprised by the incarceration statistics in the report. “That’s the main thing preventing my community from excelling economically,” he said. Carvalho said he’s worried by the language president-elect Donald Trump used on the campaign trail about law and order. “That’s the lingo that we’ve heard time and time again," he said. "It’s sugar code for locking up black men in America. There’s no way around it. Nationally, black men are 6.5 percent of the population and we occupy over 40 percent of the nation’s prisons.”
“Enough is enough," said Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins. "We cannot any longer afford to incarcerate as many people as we do.”
Five percent of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s annual budget pays for addiction treatment, education and reentry services. Tompkins said every year, his budget is under-funded by the state, and he has a hard time getting state lawmakers to pay attention. “It’s like we’re talking in like a foreign language," he said. "And it’s very disconcerting, because these are real lives that we’re dealing with and we’re dealing with a population that nobody really wants to deal with.”
He said his office is happy to do it, but needs financial help from the legislature.
City Councilor Andrea Joy Campbell said one way to reduce incarceration is to support diversion programs that provide an alternative. But she says there needs to be equal access to them.
“We can have great programming, but if the people who need it the most, or if brown and black people aren’t getting it, that’s a problem,” she said.
The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department and MassINC wrote the new report, with the support of the Boston Foundation.
