Parade Magazine: What's Wrong With Our Prisons

Parade Magazine

America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a

national disgrace.  Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion

that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness.

Our failure to address this problem has caused thenation’s prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to

prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.

Twenty-five years ago, I went to Japan on assignment for PARADE to write a story on that

country’s prison system. In 1984, Japan had a population half the size of ours and was incarcerating 40,000 sentenced offenders, compared with 580,000 in the United States. As shocking as that disparity was, the difference between the countries now is even more astounding—and profoundly disturbing. Since then, Japan’s prison population has not quite doubled to 71,000, while ours has quadrupled to 2.3 million.

The United States has by far the world’s highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world’s reported prisoners.

We currently incarcerate 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the average worldwide of 158 for every 100,000. In addition, more than 5 million people who recently left jail remain under “correctional supervision,” which includes parole, probation, and other community sanctions. All told, about one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release. This all comes at a very high price to taxpayers: Local, state, and federal spending on corrections adds up to about $68 billion a year.

Our overcrowded, illmanaged prison systems are places of violence, physical abuse, and hate, making the breeding grounds that perpetuate and magnify the same types of behavior we purport to fear. Post-incarceration reentry programs are haphazard or, in some places,

nonexistent, making it more difficult for former offenders who wish to overcome the stigma of

having done prison time and become full, contributing members of society. And, in the face of

the movement toward mass incarceration, lawenforcement officials in many parts of the U.S.

have been overwhelmed and unable to address a dangerous wave of organized, frequently violent gang activity, much of it run by leaders who are based in other countries.

With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only

two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something

different—and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.