What Democrats get wrong about prison reform

[Counselor706]

Drug crime is not what’s driving the high prison population in the United States. It’s crimes of violence. And this omission has consequences. It means that any “solution” is unlikely to achieve its intended goal and in the meantime society will continue to suffer long-term damage—physical, psychological and economic—from a persistent cycle of unaddressed violent crime.

For all the attention we pay to people convicted of drug crimes, they make up only 15 percent of our state prison populations. Over half the people serving time in state prisons have been convicted of a violent crime; half of those convicted of violence—or more than 25 percent of all prisoners—have been convicted of the most serious crimes: murder, manslaughter or sexual assault. Senator Booker (rightly) disagreed with locking people up for life on drug charges, but that’s something that really happens only in the relatively small federal prison system. In state prisons, which hold nearly 90 percent of the nation’s 1.5 million prisoners, almost 95 percent of inmates serving long sentences have been convicted of serious violence, not drugs; about half or more of such inmates were convicted of murder or manslaughter.

Here’s a final example of just how vast our prisons are, and just how unavoidable violence is to any discussion of criminal justice reform. If we freed everyone in prison tomorrow except that 25 percent who are there for murder, manslaughter or sexual assault, we’d still have an incarceration rate higher than that of almost every European country. Any effort to normalize our outsize reliance on incarceration will have to move past drugs. And we need leaders who are willing to help us get there.

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[Shelly2inme]

Thank you

Thank you for taking time to post something meaningful and educational. The mainstream news outlets could make these facts about prisons widely known. But they are not in the business of educating people about what is really going on. The facts about the prison situation in the USA speak to the real problem. At a core level their is something very wrong going on in human society and passing laws will never correct the core problem. Ignoring the core problem will also not make it go away. Truth and reality are vital to really changing anything. Thanks again for a great post.

 

[RocketLauncher]

Why the constant politicizing of every single word, stat or action that occurs in Ammurikha? Interesting article despite it's partisanship lean.
Long prison sentences for drug crime make being caught with drugs a more dangerous and violent game. People will shoot, fight, stab etc., to avoid prison for simple pot possession. Ammurikha has a major problem with it's incarceration rates. To lay the blame at any party's door other than the ruling party is ridiculous. The DOJ is under a Republican President, it's up to the President to address theses issues not politicians in a televised debate. That being said what are the Republican's doing to lessen the problem of violence in and out of prisons in the US?

 

[waratah]

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1.5million!

At $50,000 per year per prisoner, that 75 billion dollars.

The root causes you could solve, the crime you could intercept with 75billion!?

 

[Rightguide]

Too many fucked up male barbarian children without dads at home being unleashed on society.