The overcrowding of prisons is the biggest problem in the United States criminal justice system, according to reformer Chris Dornin. Dornin gave a speech at Keene State College Monday, Feb. 15 in an event called “The War on Sex Offenders and Other Bad Policies.” The speech focused on the criminal justice system and the biggest problems it faces.
“The United States has about five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the prison population,” a pamphlet for Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform [CJR] reads.
Dornin helped form CJR in 2010 in an effort to help positively change the states of prisons in the country. Part of what inspired him to create the organization was his work as an advisor in a New Hampshire prison.
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“I was listening to these guys’ stories, how their lives unraveled, and I realized, that could happen to me,” Dornin said.
Mass incarceration and the privatization of prisons doesn’t help people, Dornin said, it instead keeps them in the “revolving door” of corrections.
Dornin explained that there is an enormous turnover rate in private prisons, meaning that when people get out, they will probably be back in prison soon enough.
“You can round up a lot of people if your goal is to mass incarcerate,” Dornin said.
“It makes people profit,” audience member and KSC student Hersch Chaim said. Along with overcrowding, Dornin said the expense of imprisonment far exceeds what is really needed.
“In New Hampshire it costs thirty-five thousand dollars to jail someone for a year. That is wasted money,” Dornin said.
Dornin said he thinks rehabilitation-oriented programs would better serve the public as well as the prisoners. “We need to do a better job of rehabilitating people in prison,” he said.
A major step in the right direction was taken last June, when the state passed, “one of the best pieces of legislation in the past fifty years,” according to Dornin.
The bill will allow prisoners to knock up to 13 months off their sentence by getting a GED, a degree, some type of vocational or skill training or entering a drug program. Dornin said he thinks programs like this will not only encourage good behavior, but also help prisoners plan for life after prison.
Dornin said that programs target sex offenders more than other criminals. The sex offender registry, where citizens can find complete logs on sex offenders in their area, has become a problem.
Dornin referred to the murder of David Wheelock in Keene last year. According to Dornin, someone from Canada came down to Keene and used the registry to locate two offenders. The crime appeared to be random aside from the fact they were both located using the registry.
Dornin had other examples of vigilantes using the registry to find their victims, some in which innocent, unrelated people were hurt.
One man was on the registry because he had sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19 years old. Now, years later, with a three-year-old and a wife, he is still harassed and judged for his actions as a teenager.
Dornin has been supporting the recently proposed House Bill 653.
The bill’s purpose is, “Prohibiting the use of sex offender registry information for the purpose of harassing, intimidating, or threatening a registered sexual offender or offender against children, or any family member, employer or landlord of such person,” according to the official bill text. The bill is sponsored by state representatives Cynthia Chase and Timothy Robertson.
Representative Robertson, one of the sponsors of House Bill 653, was present at Dornin’s speech.
He spoke of the man Dornin talked about above, “He’s still on a list, which doesn’t make it easy to do anything.”
To put this in perspective, “Murderers have the lowest levels of recidivism among prisoners, and the second lowest is sex offenders,” Dornin said.
Skyler Frazer can be contacted at sfrazer@kscequinox.com
