It's time to overhaul U.S. justice system
March 10, 2008
The Ann Arbor News
America's tough-on-crime mentality is taking its toll.
It was reported last week that 1 percent of the adult population in the United States is behind bars, the highest rate in the nation's history. The country has both the highest incarceration rate and the greatest number of people behind bars in the world, according to a study by the Pew Center on the States.
Back in the 1980s and early '90s, state Legislatures across the nation, eager to prove to voters that they wouldn't tolerate lawlessness, enacted stiffer penalties for criminal behavior.
Mandatory minimum sentences and mandatory life sentences for many drug crimes became the law in Michigan and other states.
Prisons began filling up; states began building more prisons to hold them. The number of beds in the Michigan corrections system increased by 5,856 between 1998 and 2001 alone. The number of imprisoned people in the United States grew by about 80 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to The Washington Post.
Michigan's incarceration rate now ranks 11th among all states and is the highest among the Great Lakes states.
What does that mean to taxpayers? Michigan's corrections budget is approximately $1.9 billion a year, rivaling the amount the state spends on higher education.
In total, the states are spending some $50 billion on corrections. The federal government spends $5 billion more.
That's money not being spent on colleges or universities, police protection, early childhood education, health care, food or home heating assistance, children's protective services or parks. Investing in some of these items could help prevent crime in the long term.
Unfortunately, Americans aren't big on long-term thinking. We're fond of quick fixes for every problem - and that includes crime. We'd rather go on a prison-building binge to get criminals off the street than spend the money on prevention programs that would reduce the crime rate 15 or 20 years from now.
That brings us to the human toll: Absent prevention programs, how many young lives will be lost to our extensive prison system? We don't know the answer to that question. But we do know that changes in sentencing laws must ensure dangerous criminals are locked away and provide alternative sentencing and rehabilitation to nondangerous offenders.
Prison rehabilitation and community re-entry programs are needed to cut down on recidivism.
Having the highest incarceration rate in the world is nothing to be proud of. It is time to recreate the criminal justice system to make it more, well, just. | 
