Pubdate: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal (FL) Copyright: 2008 News-Journal Corporation Contact: http://www.news-journalonline.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/700 Note: gives priority to local writers JUSTICE DUNGEON 2.3 Million Behind Bars in the 'Land of the Free' The United States has more people in prison and jails, 2.3 million, than any other country. China, with a population four times as large and a reputation for repression, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people behind bars. Those aren't figures to be proud of or take comfort in. Nor can they be justified by the falling crime rate. The New York Times quotes Paul Casell, a law professor from the University of Utah, saying that "one out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense." The quote, reported without qualification, is a flat-out error in at least one regard: Based on 2006 figures by the Sentencing Project, 62 percent of jail inmates, or almost half a million people, were not convicted, but awaiting trial in jail. The assumption that people are in jail because they unquestionably deserve it is wrong in other regards. Puffing on a marijuana joint or taking a snort of cocaine may be considered a "serious criminal offense." But it is so only because it's been categorized as such. Taking a puff of marijuana is demonstrably less dangerous than getting drunk, while taking a snort of cocaine does not in and of itself pose harm to anyone. Drug use is not the same thing as drug abuse. The law treats the two as such, which is like treating recreational drinking as alcoholism. The result has been an explosion of imprisonment for personal vices rather than violent crimes. Drug arrests, especially for innocuous drugs like marijuana, have more than tripled in the last 25 years. In 2005, more than 42 percent of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses. In 1980, just 41,000 people were in prisons and jails on drug offenses. That number has risen to half a million. The criminalization of largely victimless behavior has little to do with the prevention of violent crime. The country's disproportionate prison addiction is even more disgraceful when racial disparities are taken into account. The numbers suggest that blacks and other minorities, who constitute more than half the prison and jail population, are more predisposed to commit crimes than whites. In fact, laws are predisposed to punish minorities, and blacks especially, more than whites. Judging from arrests and sentences for the very same offenses, cops, judges and juries, who tend to be white, are predisposed to punish blacks and other minorities more than whites. (Blacks account for 14 percent of the country's regular drug users, for example, but 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.) It hasn't helped that legislatures, including Florida's, have diminished judges' discretion through mandatory- and minimum-sentencing guidelines. Cash-strapped and felon-filled states are discovering that the politically expedient punish-and-banish habits of the last 25 years have created more problems than they're solving -- in costs to taxpayers, in broken families, in untreated diseases, in fostering an enormous subculture of ex-felons (Florida has more than 1 million out of a population of 18 million) who'll struggle to find willing employers. Last year Texas radically altered course, investing millions in drug treatment, diversion beds, parole procedures and drug courts. Nevada is releasing inmates who "earn time" by completing rehabilitation and education programs. Kansas is no longer imprisoning "technical" parole or probation violators -- people who miss a drug test or an appointment with a supervisor. Instead, they're diverted to some form of community service. All of those approaches have value. So would reforming the mindset that one-cell-fits-all punishment has much to do with crime-fighting, let alone with justice. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake