The United States justice system needs some serious reworking. I read an article in Reuters the other day that presented some rather startling information: at the start of the year there were more than 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. This amounts to more than one out of every one-hundred U.S. adults. By contrast China, a far more populous nation, has a prison population of only 1.5 million. This number is disputed, but regardless it demonstrates that something in our country is not right.
The “War on Drugs” has been by far the biggest contributor to the growing prison population. In fact, according to Wikipedia the number of violent and property related crimes has declined in the past 20 years, whereas the number of inmates convicted of drug-related crimes has grown significantly. What good does it do to put non-violent offenders into prison? Does prison even do any good at all? There are four reasons for incarceration: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution; though of these retribution seems to be the only real reason for imprisonment. While it may be possible to argue in favor of incapacitation and maybe even deterrence, prison hardly seems an effective mechanism of crime prevention.
Moreover, I question prison’s ability to rehabilitate. More often than not prison instead exaggerates an individual’s criminal inclinations. Instead of treating the cause of their bad behavior they build their hatreds and resentments for the judicial system and for others, and with non-violent offenders, particularly drug abusers, prison is unquestionably not the right environment for restoring normalcy.
In fact, I strongly believe that currently illegal substances should be legalized or, at the very least, decriminalized. Drug prohibition has clearly failed in its aim to prevent drug distribution and usage. Regardless of the illegality of any given substance, someone who wants to use drugs is going to find a way to get them. In a lot of cases in the current climate of drug control this can lead to violence. Were that these could be had through less unsavory means then perhaps the number of drug-related violent crimes would decrease. Furthermore, we could remove a large number of people from prison, which also has the benefit of reducing prison expenditures, which last year totaled more than $44 billion, a figure more than six times that of what is currently spent on higher education.
The bottom line here is that the prison system in our country is awry, and so too is our stance on drugs antiquated. I am by no means advocating the usage of drugs mind you, I simply believe that the current infrastructure is going about things in completely the wrong way. I don’t pretend to have a better solution to the prison entanglement, but we can begin by decriminalizing drugs and not locking away non-violent offenders.
