America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world both on an absolute and per-capita basis. As of 2012, the U.S. had 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. By comparison, Japan had 63 prisoners per 100,000, Germany had 90, Britain had 153, Mexico had 208 and Brazil had 242. The United States, in fact, has nearly 25 percent of the world’s jailed prisoners. And even if you don’t give a hoot about the social justice angle of locking up so many people behind bars (many of them from disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds), think about the impact on economic growth as we write off a portion of our nation’s potential every year.
Quite simply, we need an audacious plan to innovate America’s prison system before it becomes a homegrown Gulag Archipelago.
That’s why it’s exciting that the Institute for the Future (IFTF) recently made “The End of Prisons” one of its big ideas for the next 10 years. As Tessa Finlev explains in a brief two-minute YouTube video for the 10YF2014 project, innovation for the U.S. prison system should be based on three fundamental pillars: restorative justice, thinking of prisoners as potential entrepreneurs and trauma-informed care. The vision for the future starts by reimagining prison as a closed economy (an Archipelago, if you will) closed off from a larger economy. This is followed by thinking of ways to establish “trade routes” that connect prisons with the outside world. In short, instead of closing off prisoners from the world, something has to be done to link them with society.
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