Prison, meant to be a punishing interlude before a return to society, has become a way of life for too many Americans. The Pew Center on the States released a report last month that found the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, with one in every 99.1 adults an inmate in a federal or state prison..
This outrageously high incarceration rates suggests that states should repeal mandatory minimum laws and focus instead on criminal rehabilitation.
Mandatory minimum sentencing impose a minimum numbers of years in prison for a particular crime, forcing judges to hand down sentences without weighing the circumstances of particular cases. Most mandatory minimum laws are applied in drug cases, according to the Prison Fellowship, a Christian rehabilitation group. These minimums crowd our prison yards with drug offenders even though close to 90 percent of all drug offenders commit non-violent crimes and can be rehabilitated while on probation.
“[Probation] can be a solution to rehabilitating non-violent offenders,” David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College, said. “Halfway houses and electronic supervision through remote drug and alcohol monitors allow states to use prison more sparingly and use community work in a much more meaningful way.”
Mandatory minimums ignore this viable alternative in favor of hard time.
Yearly state spending on incarceration peaked at $44 billion last year, even though the link between prison time and crime prevention is tenuous. Kennedy contends that rehabilitation through parole and probation seem to prove more effective in preventing crime than prison terms.
Because of a prison-happy legal system, though, probation programs are grossly underfunded.
“For every person inside, there are three to four people on probation …It’s not unusual for one probation officer to be handling over 200 cases,” Kennedy said. He also called the state of probation programs “a joke.”
By choosing to punish instead of rehabilitate, states and the federal government are responsible for our rampant incarceration rate. Only by abolishing mandatory minimums and focusing on rehabilitation can the United States reverse this destructive trend.
