By Inimai Chettiar, the Policy Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she serves as national legislative counsel to end mass incarceration in states across the country. She has published scholarship on using economic analysis to advance progressive policies, most recently co-authoring Smart Reform is Possible: States Reducing Incarceration Rates and Costs While Protecting Public Safety and Improving Budget Analysis of State Criminal Justice Reforms: A Strategy for Better Outcomes and Saving Money.
It’s no secret that the United States is the largest incarcerator in the world. It’s also no secret that our government selectively enforces criminal laws disproportionately against poor people and people of color, resulting in the mass incarceration of black and brown Americans. Now, one in nine black children has a parent in prison; there are more black men under the control of corrections than were enslaved in 1850. Our addiction to incarceration has decimated the social and economic futures of generations of Americans.
What might be a secret to most Americans, however, is how the budgetary practices of state legislatures may actually be contributing to the mass incarceration problem. A report released today by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the American Civil Liberties Union explains how poorly performed state evaluations of the budgetary consequences of criminal justice legislation are causing some states to spend unnecessarily on prisons while cutting other vital state programs. The report, Improving Budget Analysis of State Criminal Justice Reforms: A Strategy for Better Outcomes and Saving Money, details how a change to the way states perform budget evaluations of proposed legislation could help reduce our incarceration rate – and save states money.
Across the nation, state governments are mired in economic crisis. Unfortunately, many states have taken a short-term attitude toward solving their economic problems: in order to balance budgets in the current year, they cut spending on essential public programs like schools, public assistance, and infrastructure. At the same time, almost all states have increased their spending on prisons. Over the last 25 years, state corrections spending grew by 674 percent, outpacing the growth of other spending to become the fourth-largest category of state spending. Currently, almost $70 billion of our annual collective tax dollars go to our penal system, often toward incarcerating people who pose little or no safety risks.
our criminal justice system, noting that two laws enacted in the late 1980s created “hefty mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, including mandatory penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were the harshest ever adopted for low-level drug offenses.”
Reason magazine recently 
This weekend hundreds of thousands will travel to Washington, D.C. to witness the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Memorial dedication service. Millions more will follow closely via Facebook, Twitter, foursquare and television. Inevitably, those watching this historic moment will ask themselves, have we become the nation Dr. King talked about in his speeches? Are we the promised land? Or do we have a ways to go?