http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2001945656_jdl03.html

Jerry Large / Times staff columnist
Prisons not the solution for social problems

Every year more people are placed behind bars because of their failings as individuals and our failure to mend holes in our social programs.

This year's report from the U.S. Department of Justice said 2,078,570 men and women were behind bars at the end of last June, an increase of nearly 58,000 over the year before.

We lock people up at a higher rate than any other country.

There were 715 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents last June. Mexico's incarceration rate is 169 per 100,000, and Canada's rate is 116.

Prisons have become our ultimate solution to social problems. There are, of course, lots of people who ought to be locked up, but we've gone overboard.

Many people who are in prisons today could have been steered away from crime, or dealt with in a less costly and more productive way.

Many of them used drugs, came from poor neighborhoods and aren't well educated. More of them than chance would dictate are black or Latino Americans who tend to be clustered in poor neighborhoods where jobs and adequate education are in short supply.

If we were Europeans, or Canadians, that combination of factors might suggest some social solutions. We could fully fund K-12 education and restructure it to make it work for the broadest spectrum of children. We could expand efforts to fight drug and alcohol abuse and to treat people who become addicted.

If we had a real system for dealing with mental illness, we'd dramatically reduce the prison population.

Instead prison budgets go up, while education budgets go down.


It isn't working.

As soon as we build one new prison, we need another one. All over the country, prisons are overcrowded.


Washington State's prisons are no exception. The Department of Corrections' Web site showed 11 facilities and programs over capacity at the end of April and six more at more than 90 percent of capacity. That left only one program that wasn't about maxed out.

Building more and more prisons is costing a fortune at a time when the economy has stretched state budgets thin, so people around the country have been trying to come up with ways to lower the cost of incarceration.

I saw a story a couple of weeks ago about a sheriff in Oregon who is going to charge inmates $60 a day to help pay for keeping them locked up. There's even an installment plan so that people can pay each month after they get out.

Because ex-prisoners generally don't have much money to begin with and have a hard time getting jobs, they'll probably have to rob a few houses to make the payments, but what the heck. We want to get tough, don't we?

The story said this wonderful idea started in Alabama 15 years ago and spread around the country from there.

But that is not the answer.

The answer is to deal with the problems at the root of increased incarceration.

About a sixth of prisoners are mentally ill. We warehouse them in prisons because we no longer have adequate facilities or policies that allow for treatment.

Drug users make up a large part of the prison population. Dealers belong in jail, but users should get treatment. Prosecutors and judges recognize that, and there have been successful efforts around the country to divert users to treatment programs.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse did a five-year study comparing repeat drug offenders who did time in prison with repeat offenders who got drug treatment instead.

People who got treatment were 87 percent less likely to wind up back in prison and much more likely to find steady work. Treatment cost half as much as imprisonment. Which is better for public safety and the public wallet?

Education gives people a foundation that leads to good jobs and better coping skills. Prevention is even better than rehabilitation. As it stands, about 40 percent of convicts are functionally illiterate. You don't see many college graduates robbing liquor stores.

Brigette Sarabi is executive director of the Western Prison Project, which coordinates the efforts of people working to reduce reliance on incarceration in seven Western states.

She got in involved when her daughter had a drug problem and did time. "That brought me face to face with how many people with drug problems are serving long sentences," she told me.

"Accountability is necessary, absolutely. But there might be more effective ways to deal with this.

"Prison has become the primary treatment option for the seriously mentally ill in this country. When we de-institutionalized, the idea was we'd have community mental health care. The criminal justice system is not qualified to treat them."

She said the vast majority of people in prison have drug and alcohol problems, but budget deficits have resulted in massive cuts to drug and alcohol treatment programs in the Northwest. She said Idaho had voted to increase spending but had to back off because of the economy.

People in government know the problem needs to be addressed, but they also suspect the public is more willing to spend on prisons than on solutions that seem soft. We are the heart of the problem. We need to start using our heads and asking for solutions that make sense.

__________________
...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"