According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the amount of prisoners in the United States is at a high of 2,226,800 adults incarcerated in federal and state prisons. The same department notes that 4,814,200 adults were on probation at the end of 2011, and 6,977,700 adults were under correctional supervision.
The continued expansion of our prison population can largely be attributed to the continued expansion of the national war on drugs. Our prison and current criminal justice system have failed American society at large and should undergo an overhaul to limit the amount of nonviolent offenders.
The first point of note in the failure of our criminal justice system is the recidivism rate, or in layman’s terms, the rate at which previously convicted and subsequently released individuals are reconvicted for another crime. The Pew Center reported that by 2007, about 43 percent of individuals released in 2004 were back in prison.
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, that number is only marginally better than the 46.9 percent of reconvicted individuals in 1997 from 1994 releases.
In California, following the passage of Proposition 36 which revised the state’s three strike policy of a mandated life sentence for a third felony into a mandated life sentence only for a serious or violent crime, around 1,000 inmates were released early.
So far, the inmates released because of Prop. 36 have only a recidivism rate of 2 percent, according to a report by the Stanford Three Strikes Project and others, even with far less money to help them reintegrate into society.
Oregon, the state with the lowest recidivism rate as of 2011, with 22.8 percent of inmates released in 2004 being reincarcerated by 2007, is a shining example of possible alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders.
In the 90s, Oregon passed laws allowing parole officers more leeway with responses to infractions so long as they were not serious and nonviolent. They followed this with a law in 2003 requiring correctional treatment facilities to adopt practices that were shown to reduce recidivism in order to continue obtaining state funding.
States looking to cut their budget or the ever-growing prison population should consider adopting Oregon’s tactics.
Even while working to reduce the rate of recidivism, the fact remains that a large portion of incarcerated Americans are in jail for nonviolent, often drug-related offenses. According to the Human Rights Watch, since 1980, the number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold.
In 2000, they found that almost three quarters of new prison admissions were nonviolent offenders, most of whom were placed in prison based on increasingly high length mandated punishments and three strike rules. Even if we were to ignore the so-called “hard drugs,” according to a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2010, marijuana arrests make up around 52 percent of all drug arrests in the United States.
The ACLU estimates that in 2010, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas each spent more than an estimated $20 million housing inmates for marijuana possession.
Simply put, our system is broken. We are wasting money and time on nonviolent drug crimes, and even when it comes to other crimes, we as a nation have one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. We need to reform the laws that continue to place individuals in jails and prison rather than helping them find a way to become more productive and accepted members of society.