I think we need to look harder at why our prisons are so full.
Far too many inmates are non-violent offenders with mental health and/or addiction issues. This country has done a poor job addressing those issues in past years. Because we now have a heroin crisis, we are starting to offer better treatments for addiction, but have a long way to go. As for mental health care, we need a lot more out patient programs and providers since we closed down most of the institutions many years ago.
Our prisons are not overcrowded because justice has been served, but because politicians and the media have hyped a nonexistent rise in crime to make people afraid and win elections with "get tough on crime" platforms fueled in part by for-profit prison lobbyists.
A few years ago, I was pulling into my driveway when this nicely dressed man came over to my car. I rolled down the window and he introduced himself. He was running for mayor of our town. He wanted to tell me that they had just busted a drug dealer in my cul-de-sac. I should say he wasn't just telling me, he was bragging. OK...they got one small time dealer off the street, but it was his boasting that got me. It took everything in me to not roll my eyes in front of him.
You are a better woman than I, Peas...I would have.
Regarding your post above, the closing of mental health facilities has contributed to our homeless population as well. I have witnessed homeless people here that I know to have mental health issues create disturbances at the jail when it was bitterly cold out just to have a warm place to sleep. It was heartbreaking.
Sometimes the sentences handed down are disproportionate. Case in point, the Elkhart Four from Indiana who should certainly have been been charged with housebreaking but were instead charged with felony murder. They were unarmed but the home owner shot one of them dead and his friends were sentenced to terms that would keep them incarcerated until they were at least in their fifties. CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT IT.
Now contrast that with the travesty of the "Affluenza Teen", the son of wealthy parents, who was given parole by a corrupt (retiring) judge after killing four pedestrians while drunk driving. He wouldn't have gone to prison at all if he hadn't been filmed breaking his parole conditions and fled to Mexico with his mother where he was arrested in a brothel. His sentence after killing four people and fleeing the country? Less than two years. HERE'S THE LINK.
Until some sanity is introduced into sentencing the jails will continue to be inadequate.
No. Overcrowding is not reason. But, if we really see that what we are doing is not accomplishing anything other than keeping folks off the street, which is a valid function, we have to decide if it is enough and how we can use the same resources for better outcomes. It costs us the same whether we put people in solitary dungeons or have them in cells with sunlight and books to read, opportunities for work, and job skill training, etc. etc. Why not try to actually allow inmates to grow and develop, hopefully positively, while they spend their time incarcerated. It's too easy to forget that people in prison are still people and many carrying tremendous guilt and regret. I never like to give up on people.
Many including I feel safer with them penned up or at least separated from society. Your words spur thought towards maybe a separate society. Not one or two but multiples on a tier system. Outside the inner ring justice is to be had less and less until you get to the outer in which there is none.
Bozette 