NEWS

December 19, 2007
No. 1 at imprisoning, but not at reforming

While some leading indicators of the U.S. economy are flagging, one measure of the national condition continues to grow at a steady pace: the number of Americans in prison. As of the most recent count, 2.26 million Americans were incarcerated in state and federal prisons and jails, up nearly 3 percent from the year before and up 36 percent in the past six years.

Any business that recorded that sort of steady growth would be the darling of Wall Street. But this growth industry is not one in which the nation can take any pride. This industry takes people out of circulation for large chunks of their lives and returns them to their home communities very often in a condition no better, if not worse, than when they left.

We use words like "corrections," "reformatory" and "penitentiary" to describe this industry, in the sense that the system was created to cause lawbreakers to do penance, to get their lives turned around and to get back on the correct path. More accurately, this system is focused only on punishment. The result is that opportunities are foreclosed, and families are devastated. When one accounts for the geometrically larger numbers of convicted offenders who are sentenced to probation or community-based corrections programs, this industry touches nearly every American family.

The United States far and away incarcerates a larger proportion of its citizens than any comparable nation, including supposedly brutal totalitarian regimes. Yet the politicians and the government bureaucracy offer up only one answer to crime and its myriad economic, social, medical and emotional antecedents: Lock 'em up.

It is time to change gears and to begin, in earnest, to work on those conditions and to steer troubled people away from prison toward true reform. We know the answers. It is no secret that the vast majority of people in prisons are products of horrible family situations or have serious drug and alcohol addictions or suffer mental illness - and sometimes all of the above.

If we invested half as much in confronting those problems rather than the enormous expense of secure prisons, these lives could be changed. But there is nowhere near the political courage in this country to make the investment. So we go along, growing our prison population.

All told, the United States has nearly 2.4 million people in state and federal prisons, in jails and in military and immigration detention facilities. No matter how the numbers are figured, our incarceration rate of 738 prisoners for every 100,000 people is as much as five to seven times higher than any other Western nation and up to 32 times the rate in nations such as India. Even comparing crime rates does not explain this huge disparity.

The United States, alone among civilized nations of the world, sees prison confinement as the primary response for all types of crime. It devotes enormous resources to running prisons, resources that could otherwise be invested in the problems that lead to crime. It is long since time for this country to ask itself why that is and when it will change.

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