NAACP Extends Hand to Prisoners Through Memberships

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's oldest and largest civil-rights organization, regularly conducts drives to recruit new members.

Most of its members are middle-class, law-abiding citizens who only have seen the inside of prison on television reality shows.

During the last 40 years, however, the NAACP has offered annual memberships to prison inmates who are interested in civil rights issues. The Baltimore-based organization also offers the memberships to prisoners to assist them in their rehabilitation.

"The NAACP began the prison program in 1972 at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., at the request of inmates wanting to participate in civil rights work and have their needs addressed," Andrea Brown-Gee, the organization's national membership director, wrote in an e-mail message to The NorthStar News & Analysis.

Today, the NAACP has 40 active prison branches and prison memberships in excess of 500 members. From the 1970s to the 1980s, prison memberships exceeded 4,000 in 16 states, Brown-Gee said.  Inmates pay $10 to join the NAACP, compared with annual-membership fees that start at $30 for individuals not behind bars.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice system, said the NAACP's prison outreach program was revived under Benjamin Todd Jealous' leadership. The board elected Jealous president and CEO in September 2008.

 "The program declined in the late 1970s, but in the last five to seven years it has been revived because Jealous has made it a priority," Mauer said during an interview with The NorthStar News & Analysis.

The NAACP's outreach to inmates predates 1980 when the nation's prison incarceration rate began to rapidly escalate. In 2010, the Center for Economic Policy Research, a progressive economic policy think-tank based in Washington, D.C., reported that from 1880 to 1970, the nation's prison population ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents.

After 1980, the inmate population grew faster than the overall population, climbing from about 220 per 100,000 to 497 inmates per 100,000 people in 2010, according to the U.S. Justice Department. The United States housed 1.6 million inmates in federal and state prisons in 2010.

The NAACP's membership is open to all ethnic and racial groups, but the nation's state and federal prisons are filled with black men. According to the Justice Department's report, "Prisoners in 2010," 3.1 percent of black men were in state and federal prisons and an estimated 7.3 percent of black men 30 to 34 years old were sentenced to more than one year of incarceration.

As the nation's prison population has increased, rehabilitation of inmates, which was one of the strong reasons for constructing prisons, has all but disappeared. The NAACP says its prison membership program helps to fill the void.

"The NAACP's purpose is to channel the energy and talents of prisoners into constructive pursuits while aiding in the rehabilitative process and reducing the high rate of recidivism throughout the nation," Brown-Gee said.

Mauer agrees. "It's a great idea because 95% of people in prison come home to their communities. Some [inmates] have strong families but inmates who don't have families need networks that help them return to society," he said, adding that 700,00 individuals will be released from prison this year.