America's prison state is a disaster. One percent of the adult population is behind bars, and corrections is squeezing higher education out of state budgets. We have five times as many people in prison as we ever had before 1980, and five times as many (per capita) as any other advanced democracy.
What's worse is that it is, in this era, a completely unnecessary disaster. It's simply not true that to punish someone and control his behavior you need to lock him up and pay for his room and board.
While it lasts, prison is horrible for the prisoner and expensive for the state. And things often don't get better when it ends: of the people released from prison today, about 60 percent will be back inside within three years.
The transition from prison to the "free world" can be very tough, both for the offender and for the neighborhood he returns to. In the month after getting out, a person released from prison has about a dozen times the mortality rate of people of the same age, race, and sex in the same neighborhood, with the leading causes of death among former inmates being drug overdose, cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide.
[For more of this story, written by Mark A.R. Kleiman, Angela Hawken, & Ross Halperin, go to http://www.vox.com/2015/3/18/8...rm-graduated-reentry]
Comments (0)