February 11, 2020 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Why did philanthropy suddenly decide to tackle the problem of mass incarceration?
Actually, it wasn’t so sudden. Open Society Foundations’ first domestic project back in 1994 was the Drug Policy Alliance, which opposes the criminalization of drugs and drug users. The Ford, MacArthur, JEHT, Public Welfare, Rockefeller, and Rosenberg foundations all made criminal justice a significant grant-making priority in the 1990s or 2000s.
But the dollars involved were modest. Not until a decade or so ago did funds really begin to flow, and they haven’t stopped.
These days, new money is gushing from West Coast philanthropies with vast fortunes to deploy: Steve and Connie Ballmer’s Ballmer Group and the Heising-Simons Foundation, as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Open Philanthropy Project.
Donors who care about social justice found it hard to ignore the rapid, unprecedented growth of the prison and jail population. The United States incarcerated about 330,000 people in 1972. Today, the number is 2.2 million. Says one foundation executive: “The fact that we incarcerate more people than anyone else feels un-American.”
As the prison population grew, other factors came into play:
Crime rates fell for violent and nonviolent crimes. People reported feeling safer. Politicians talked less about crime. That “has made the debates about criminal justice a lot less emotional,” says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project.
Spending on criminal justice burdened governments. The total annual cost of keeping someone in prison in the United States averages about $33,000, the Vera Institute has estimated. It tops $75,000 in California.
Fiscal conservatives took note, especially after state budgets were squeezed by the 2008 recession. “We were spending a fortune building all these prisons and not getting a commensurate return in terms of safety,” says Marc Levin, who leads Right on Crime, an advocacy group funded in its early years by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Perhaps surprisingly, the rise in the prison population had little to do with the reduction in crime. Social, economic, and demographic factors, and not harsh criminal-justice policies, drove the drop in crime, the Brennan Center for Justice reported in 2015.
Two years later, the Open Philanthropy Project, which guides the philanthropy of Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, commissioned an independent scholar named David Roodman to do a thorough review of research on the relationship between incarceration and crime. He concluded: “The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter crime and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release.”
Advocates notched some quick wins. South Carolina and Texas enacted comprehensive legislation to overhaul their criminal-justice systems in the late 2000s. “Nothing breeds more interest in this issue than people moving the ball forward,” says Jake Horowitz, who leads Pew’s public-safety program.
Racial inequities drew increasing attention. African Americans are more likely to be stopped by police, arrested, detained, and given harsher sentences than whites. Mass incarceration “is the civil-rights crisis of our time,” says Helena Huang, project director of the Ford Foundation’s Art for Justice Fund. (See more in this article.) Black Lives Matter, among others, pointed to racial inequities in the criminal-justice system.
