Criminal justice reform in the US can’t happen fast enough
The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, with about 2.3 million people currently locked up in 2019. This includes 1,306,000 in state prisons, 221,000 in federal jails and prisons, 612,000 in local jails, and 61,000 in immigrant detention centers.
Over 540,000 people are incarcerated who have not been convicted or sentenced. Median bail levels are often too high for the typical citizen to pay when they are detained.
A staggering 7.1 million people in the United States are under some kind of criminal justice supervision, including probation or parole.
Spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of spending on Pre‐K‐12 public education in the last thirty years.
Mass incarceration perpetuates a cycle of poverty, addiction, illness, and violence. It’s a huge cost to taxpayers, a human rights fiasco, and a national embarrassment.
On average, incarcerating someone costs $80-$100 per day. While the annual cost of corrections, 80 billion dollars, is often cited as the cost of incarceration; there are many hidden social costs.
According to a recent study, incarceration generates an additional ten dollars in social costs for every dollar spent on corrections. More than half of these costs are borne by families, children, and community members.
The costs borne by the incarcerated include lost productivity, reducing an individual’s lifetime earnings between ten and forty percent. By age 48, the typical former inmate will have earned $179,000 less than if they had never been incarcerated.
Formerly incarcerated people can also be banned by law from working in many industries, living in public housing, and receiving governmental benefits. A criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a job offer or job callback by close to 50%.
These are only a few of the obstacles making re-entry to society after jail or prison so difficult.
Education levels, job skill levels, employment rates, earning power, and mental health are all often low among people in jail or prison before they enter. The time they spend there only makes these problems worse.
A parent’s income is one of the strongest indicators of a child’s chances for upward economic mobility.
Incarceration decreases economic mobility generationally.
More than 1.2 million inmates are parents of children under the age of 18. This means that about 1 in 28 or 3.2 percent of children in the US have a parent in jail or prison.
It’s even worse for African Americans, with 1 in 9 black children having an incarcerated parent. This is a figure that has quadrupled over the past 25 years.
Forty-two percent of children who start out in the bottom fifth of the income distribution get stuck there as adults. It is again worse for African Americans, with 54 percent remaining in the bottom fifth.
When a wage-earning parent is locked up, families often struggle to make ends meet. A study found that in the period that a father was behind bars, the average child’s family income fell 22 percent compared with that of the preceding year.
Having a parent in jail or prison disadvantages a child for life.
People in the system experience chronic health conditions, infectious diseases, substance use disorders, and mental illnesses at much higher rates than the general population.
More than half of all incarcerated people have a mental illness.
One in five incarcerated people is locked up for a drug offense and an estimated one-half of people incarcerated meet the criteria for drug abuse or dependence. Only 11 percent of these people receive treatment for their addictions while incarcerated.
About forty-five percent of people in local and state prisons have both a mental illness and an addiction.
Locking people up doesn’t fix addiction and mental illness.
People benefit more from receiving treatment for their mental illness or drug addiction than they do from incarceration.
Drug treatment is more cost-effective and more effective at preventing recidivism than incarceration. So why are we sending people to jail instead of rehab? It doesn’t make sense on a fiscal or legal level.
Our current system punishes people arbitrarily and causes more harm than it prevents. Society as a whole would benefit more from a system that involves efforts to educate, heal, and rehabilitate those who commit crimes.
Locking each other in cages as punishment for non-violent crimes is a primitive and barbaric way for human beings to behave. It doesn’t prevent crime, it doesn’t make us safer, and it causes immeasurable harm to families, communities and future generations.
It’s time to redesign our justice system to be just.
Originally posted on medium.com on July 29th, 2019.
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