Quote:
Originally Posted by filtherton
I bet they'd see a significant reduction if they let out everyone who was in prison for possession of a controlled substance.
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Amen.
Prisons in the United States are full because we put nonviolent offenders and the mentally ill where they don't belong, and we create said nonviolent offenders via our mandatory minimum laws. It's not just possession--there have been cases where women have been convicted of drug crimes because their
husbands were selling drugs.
Oregon just voted yes on a crime measure that is going to cost us $150 million to fund, and the measure came with no direction as to where that money is supposed to come from, therefore it must come from the general fund. This crime measure is meant to punish nonviolent offenders, such as those committing ID theft and meth-related crimes, and proscribes mandatory minimum sentences for such crimes. I voted no, because I am tired of living in a state where we spend more on prisons than we do on education, and tired of living in a state where we pack our prisons full of people who do not belong there--be they nonviolent offenders or the mentally ill.
Where do they belong, then? We need to establish some kind of rehabilitation program for these nonviolent offenders, and we need to create a space for mentally ill offenders who do not belong in the general prison population. We also need to take a serious look at how we educate our children so that we're not creating more delinquents via our educational system.
By sending these people to prison and then releasing them, we are just creating more of a problem. If we want people to learn how to live a good life and follow the law, why do we pack them into a place full of people who don't know how to do either? A lot of how we behave is taught to us by those around us--we act the way the situation dictates. By sending these people to prison, we're just reinforcing bad habits and not teaching them anything new. This is true of the way we run the education system too--we have a tiered system where the kids who behave and perform well end up in classes with other kids who behave and perform well, while the kids who do poorly and behave poorly end up in classes with other kids who do the same. If we structured classes so that a few poorly behaved kids were in a class where the bulk of the kids were well-behaved, the modeled behavior would rub off. Instead, we basically tell kids who perform and behave poorly in school that they're second-class citizens and must all stick together in a lesser classroom where they are more likely to be taught by a bad teacher (I'm really tired of running into this phenomenon as a substitute aide). What are we doing? We're setting up kids to see themselves as second-class citizens and act that way for the rest of their lives.
Our current educational system is not an answer to the societal woes that end up with these inflated prison populations, and our current justice system does more harm than good when it comes to dealing with nonviolent offenders. We test our kids to the point that we teach to the test and do little to teach them anything beyond the information they need to pass said test, and we test our kids to the point that they become a test score instead of a student. It's dehumanizing! No wonder we have problems.
How do we fix this? Well, the fundamental problem is the system itself, not the funding. All the money in the world won't fix the system that causes these problems, unfortunately. We have to make sweeping changes to both the educational and justice systems. I doubt that's likely to happen, though.