Iowa has an incarceration crisis of global proportions

If Iowa were its own country, it would have the second-highest incarceration rate in the world — ahead of every country on the planet besides the United States itself.

Like Iowa, most U.S. states incarcerate a higher portion of residents than all foreign countries, according to a report published this month by the Prison Policy Initiative. It’s not because Americans are innately more criminal than citizens of other countries. It’s because we have a lot of jail cells and we feel the need to fill them.

Iowa’s incarceration rate of 582 per 100,000, slightly below the national average of 664, ranks just above El Salvador, which is considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The Central American nation’s homicide rate is nearly 10 times higher than Iowa’s.

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Iowa policymakers have at least paid lip service in recent years to the idea of shrinking the prison population but they have not made much progress. The number of state prison inmates dipped to a 20-year low last year, attributable to pandemic-related releases and diversions, but the number has crept back up since then.

As of this month, the state’s prison system is 12 percent over capacity with about 7,800 inmates. Some county jails also are near or at their capacities.

The chairman of the Iowa Parole Board has a goal to get the prisons within capacity in the next two years, The Gazette’s Rod Boshart reported last month. The board accelerated releases at the height of the pandemic, but releases plummeted to at least a 15-year low last fiscal year.

Letting people out of prison is a good thing, but keeping them out may prove more difficult.

“Now, as things inch back up because the gates are now opening from the jails back into the prisons and the numbers are coming up, we’ve just got to find new ways to be aggressive and think outside the box to both promote release, but we’ve got to keep the community safe at the same time,” said Andrew Boettger, an Ames attorney appointed this year as chairman of the Iowa Parole Board.

Letting people out of prison is a good thing, but keeping them out may prove more difficult.

John Neff, a local scholar who studies incarceration, compared figures from the prisons and community corrections programs and found prison vacancies often are filled by probation revocations.

“What I think will happen is the Board of Parole will empty the beds and District Court judges will fill them by revocations of probation,” Neff wrote in a recent letter to the editor.

In other words, prison beds in Iowa don’t tend to stay empty for long. The system will find someone to fill them.

With an incarceration crisis the magnitude of Iowa’s, no parole strategy alone will be adequate to bring us back in line with global norms.

Over several decades, states and the federal government have built giant crime-fighting machines — police departments with powerful unions and never-ending budget increases, multi-jurisdictional task forces to federalize what should be routine local enforcement and a vast network of jails and prisons.

That system, it turns out, doesn’t do much to prevent crime. It may actually exacerbate the underlying issues that lead to crime.

When all you have is a jail cell, everyone looks like a prisoner.

(319) 398-8262; editorial@thegazette.com