Recidivism: Just Another 'ism that is Still a Problem in America

67.5% - That's the 3 year re-arrest rate for prisoners in the United States. Of those, 40% find themselves back in prison within 36 months of release...

There are several metrics where the United States claims the top spot. Along with having the highest divorce rate and the highest obesity rate, we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. China, which has a population four times the size of the United States, has the second largest prison population, trailing the U.S. by 25%. Approximately 1 in 30 Americans is currently incarcerated, on probation, or on parole (ie. Actively in the penal system). On a side note, having the highest obesity rate means that we also have the"largest" prison population...

Of course, it's not really a surprise. So many laws carry prison time as a possible consequence that a reasonable guess is that more than 70% of the adult population in the U.S. has committed an offense that could land them in jail. Ever gone to the bathroom to get someone their prescriptive medicine? Your husband or wife, maybe? The way the law is written, you could be convicted of dispersing a controlled substance, which carries jail time... Nearly half of American adults will admit to driving while under the influence of drugs (legal or not) or alcohol in the last 3 years, also an imprisonable offense, and a third admit to having used illicit drugs in their lifetime (mostly marijuana or prescription drugs). This particular group includes more than one U.S. president in the last 20 years, though one of them "didn't inhale..."

But, getting thrown into prison is just one problem. The numbers introducing this post extrapolate out to mean that.once you've been there, you are more than 10 times as likely to go back if, and when, you are released. We have a system designed to keep you out of society once you're in the system. That's not the way a penal system in a free country should operate. It should be a system that only punishes those who really deserve to be punished, and once they serve their time, they ought to be transitioned back into normal society.

I understand that this is a hard position for politicians to take, because nobody wants to be labeled as soft on crime, but there's a difference between punishing a crime, and destroying a life, and in their zeal to criminalize anything they don't like, hire more police, and build more prisons, politicians have long since left punishment behind. We've long since passed the point where our elected leaders should be ashamed of all the lives that our penal system has destroyed.

Really, only those crimes that harm society, and which are not reasonably deterrable, should result in prison time. Crimes like DUI can be reasonably deterred by requiring a person convicted of a DUI to have an ignition interlock installed on their car. There's no reason to spend $25,000 to lock them up for a year, when a device that costs maybe 1/50th of that can prevent the crime from being repeated. Of course, DUI is just one example of wastefulness in our penal code.

We'd save billions of dollars each year just by keeping most traffic offenders out of prison. Then, there are all the drug possession offenses, property crimes, many white collar crimes, and so on... These are crimes that don't usually put the health, safety, and freedom of others at risk.

Some of those crimes should involve repayment, sure, but the current penal system doesn't even allow for that to happen. For those crimes, there should be a labor program that offenders are required to participate in, if they don't have a job. That way, they are repaying their victims, and not placing a $25,000 annual burden on the taxpayers. Plus, they learn to take responsibility for their actions, and when they finish the program, they don't have a difficult transition back into society, since they never left it...

We need to take a serious look at fixing our broken system. Set aside our fear of being called soft on crime, and consider the more dangerous problem of creating a society where almost all of us are criminals, just lucky that the government doesn't use our indiscretions too throw us all in prison...

Yet.