I am about to repeat myself--to tell you something I’ve told you before--but as a friend of mine pointed out, we need to hear something three times before we remember it. The first time we barely hear it. The second time it seems familiar and the fact begins to registers. The third time it finally sinks in. I am also about to tell you this because I handed out articles to my students for them to read, and as I read the articles, I was, once again, shocked by what I read.
America imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world. For awhile we were second to Russia. Now, per capita, we imprison more people than Russia--or any other country. As a recent Record Eagle article pointed out, we welcomed our two millionth prosoner into jail just a few days ago. Two million is a meaningless figure. What is two million. Well if you divide 2 million into 250 million -- the population of America -- you find out that one out 125 people in America are in prison.
Once again, that figure isn’t that shocking. So what -- one out 125 is a lot, but it doesn’t sound like that much. If you take into consideration that included in that 250 million are all the babies -- all the one year olds and two year olds--and all the old folk in America, then one out of 125 begins to sound like a heck of a lot of people. After all, we have many, many old people -- and they aren’t incarcerated -- except in old folks home. We are locking up an unbelievable number of people in America.
But the real shocker is the fact that 60 per cent of the people in Federal jails are there for drug offenses. That’s 60 percent. That’s two out of three prisoners. For what? for drug offenses. For selling drugs and for taking drugs and for, in one way or another, being involved with drugs.
Why are we jailing all these people who are harming themselves, harming each other. Leave them alone. Let them kill themselves. Let them kill each other. We should stop jailing them chasing them, policing their activities.
This society is nuts. We catch a person smoking marijuana and we jail them and it costs us around $30,000 dollars a year. Thirty thousand dollars. That’s more money than many people make in a year. Two thirds of all Federal prisoners are there because of drugs. Thirty thousand times 1 million equals thirty billion dollars a year--every year. Thirty billion dollars.
These dollars are like monopoly dollars. They aren’t real money. It doesn’t seem to be coming out of our pockets A million here, a million there, a billion here, a billion there. I don’t know which fact makes me angrier: The number of people we have in jail. The reason we are jailing these people. The amount of money it is costing us. It is all nuts -- and craziest of all is the fact that two thirds of these people are not even harming 98% of us--they are taking drugs, selling each other drugs. This so stupid, it is almost beyond words -- so I’ll stop using words -- For now -- but I’m not through with this topic.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein