Disturbing figures from Prison Land:
Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer. . . .
Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report's other author.
The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.
The debacle that is the modern prison system fascinates me, so I did a little surfing at sites that oppose the current arrangement. I was trying to find out what they're recommending, and it pretty much looks like the "R word": Rehabiliation. Use more rehabiliation, so we can let the prisoners go free.
Problem is, modern notions of rehabilitation don't work, so I oppose such measures. So what to do? There's nothing we can do. Other, more effective, means of punishment have been outlawed by the cruel and unusual punishment provision of the Bill of Rights. Pretty much any sort of punishment besides fines and imprisonment have been deemed cruel and unusual. Any effort to stigmatize criminals--whether with a scarlet A or something more aggressive--is frowned upon (though we've succeeded in putting sex criminals on the Internet). Corporal punishment isn't deemed worthy of discussion. Harsh conditions in prison that make a person fear incarceration more than hell itself--breaking rocks, bread and water, chain gains--have been proscribed (though I'm not convinced harsh conditions would help; heck, nothing's harsher than serial homosexual rape, but people are still committing crimes).
I don't have an answer, but any solution that relies on feel-good shrinks and the innate goodness of human nature--on modern notions of rehab--is trash.
