We send people to prison who need help. Normal people that have a problem, we throw in prison. We only have 5% of the world’s population while a whopping 25% of the world’s prisoners. We are quick to incarcerate. We jail drug addicts, we sentence 16 year olds as adults. Alcoholics go to prison. Underprivileged turn to crime because they lack the skills to get a job. We are spending between 30K-60K per year per inmate. We are allowing drug companies to inundate our society with medications that our children steal and then get addicted to, turning to criminals and drug dealers to feed the addiction. Mentally disabled? You too can get tossed in the slammer.
Why do we not spend that money up front, educate, drug rehabilitation, counseling and medication for treatable mental disabilities.
When I was 16 I got busted for crimes that could’ve landed me to 40 years of prison time. I had been commiting crime and doing drugs for only a couple of years before that, with prior convictions. The local judge did not want me to go to trial, he knew I would end up in prison. This judge deferred my arraignment based on counseling and community service. The appointed counselor helped me start understand my issues and helped me begin to work on them. He worked with the victims, that I violated, to assign my community service, to them. I was devastated, then lifted once I realized that they were all willing to help me. Through love and understanding, it helped. I still had a hard road to tow, I still used drugs. I stopped criminal activities, worked legitimate jobs and eventually became a productive member of society. All of this and I bet for less than the cost of 1 year in prison.
Why would we save a few thousand dollars on the front end only to spend 10’s of thousands on the tail end. We must find a way to educate and rehabilitate rather than incarcerate. Through education and affordable programs this can be changed. Let’s stop turning petty crimes into hardened criminals.
Hailing from a state with more laws and lawmakers than most anywhere else on this pale blue dot, I have come to realize that-laws and their makers create criminals out of thin air. The more laws that exist, the more people will be incarcerated. I have to believe that the golden rule started it all, with the best and simplest of intentions: Treat others how you would like to be treated. Sometime later, the ten commandments reaffirmed the evolutionary deduction that societies endorsing common murder are doomed to a hasty and deserving extinction. As well as not to steal, cheat, or hold your neighbor in contempt out of envy (that last one enforceable solely through a true fear of God). Nonetheless, a very straightforward system of rules. However, the exponentially more vast volumes of legislature we as a society have now arrived at come with very serious ramifications. Beyond correcting basic wrongdoings, our legal system has created its own language, the purpose of which is to separate people from the very laws that govern them, so that an expensive and clever translator must be enlisted for even the most basic transgressions. Never mind the fallacy that human language, though a tremendous and hardfought gift of mankind, can truly quantify the actions and emotions and motives of the hairless apes that thought it up. I believe that having a legal system that abides by our constitution is a truly wonderful thing; but I believe so long as there is money to be made in running a prison, replete with inmates, lawmakers will continue receiving payments to keep them filled up. All the while flogging certain constitutional rights to do so.
Thanks for the post, well said!