The Prison Reality

Our prison population is growing three times faster than our actual population. We are building more prisons than schools. Last year we were the world leader in total number of citizens incarcerated - coming in ahead of China who has a population which is more than four times as large as ours. According to the Pew Report released yesterday, 750 out of every 100,000 people are incarcerated in the United States, ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

Altogether, there are more than 2.3 million Americans incarcerated according to the study which gathered its data at the beginning of 2008. Further, a U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30, 2006 showed that a record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole.

The majority of today's prison population is made up of non-violent offenders. Since 1970, the prison population has increased more than eight fold. The War on Drugs is largely responsible for this reality which began with the Nixon administration and their establishment of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973. Now, more than 2 million of the 7 million Americans in the criminal justice system are drug offenders. For more information on this topic - Thirty Years of America's Drug War, courtesy of Frontline.

Eric Schlosser, author of Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, makes several excellent points in his book pertaining to prisons and the criminal justice system as a whole. Most telling are those which pertain to the education and mental health of many of those who are locked behind bars. In his book he points out that 70% of the prison population is illiterate and approximately 25% suffer from mental illness.

Instead of promoting laws which push for longer sentencing and steeper penalties, we need to move forward an agenda which is more proactive and prevents people from committing crimes. We need to provide people who are at risk in the system with the resources that are essential to becoming productive members of society.

Education, community resource centers, treatment for addiction and rehabilitation programs are the answer. Drug addiction should be treated as a mental health issue, not a crime. We spend more than fifty billion dollars a year on our prison system. This is money that could be used to propel our public schools. Further, this dollar figure does not take into account the resources that are utilized by police departments to fight petty crime such as marijuana possession. Since 1990, more than 10 million Americans have been charged with crimes surrounding marijuana.

It is time to address these issues and we need to demand that our elected representatives take action. We cannot continue down this road. Incarceration is not a humanitarian solution to dealing with those who are uneducated and suffering from mental health issues.