The United States now has over 2 million individuals incarcerated in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, an ever-growing number that is fast approaching 1% of our population. Think about that for a moment...One out of every 100 citizens, behind bars. We need to do something about this. There are a great number of ills plaguing our correctional systems, including massive overcrowding. But the solution is not to simply build more and bigger prisons. We must affect change in the very fabric of the correctional system. This change would best serve the public by improving the areas of education, privatization, and community involvement.
The education system in today’s prisons is woefully inadequate. Most offer, at best, standardized GED tests and perhaps a couple of “Life Skills” courses designed to help prisoners develop the skills they will need to stay out of prison. In 1996, President Clinton even passed a Bill restricting inmates from receiving federal funding for college studies from programs such as the Pell Grant. This was a great idea. After all, we don’t want our criminals learning, now do we. This is absurd. A study featured in the Journal of Correctional Education found that inmates receiving ANY sort of college degree had a recidivism rate of below 10% and in many cases a degree dropped an individual’s chance of offending again to BELOW 1 %. All of this while some states enjoy balmy recidivism rates of 75% OR HIGHER. We need to offer these inmates as much chance as possible to take another road, or they won’t. Many universities are willing to form close working relationships with nearby prisons, if only they had the funding. Supporting such programs, and the inmates they help, would be a lot cheaper in money, manpower, and prevented crime, than the cost of putting a few inmates through college. Furthermore, institutions should be encouraged to provide inmates with incentive programs to encourage then to enter these college courses. A little learning can go a long way toward changing a would-be repeat offender into a responsible worker and a productive citizen. We need to be concentrating on improving these people as much as we concentrate on punishing them.
One of the main reasons for the dreadful lack of education and programs in today’s correctional systems is the continuing privatization of our prisons. A prison operating on a for-profit basis has absolutely no incentive to turn out rehabilitated people. Their best option for turning the maximum profit is to skimp on any budget they are given, providing the inmates with the absolute minimum that their contract allows, and then to sell them any extra services at incredibly inflated rates. We need to have more oversight for such institutions. In addition, there needs to be incentive programs. If these facilities were paid, not just for housing our inmates, but for turning out individuals with lower recidivism rates and better records of productive behavior after their release, we would start seeing a lot more useful programs in our correctional facilities. Privatization of our prisons is not a bad idea. We have seen in a number of industries that private business will typically run a much more efficient operation than any state bureaucracy; we just need to have more oversight. We need to be sure that these institutions are doing something productive, rather than simply warehousing people until they can be released to the streets with little money, a felony record, and little to no future prospects that don’t involve come sort of crime.
However, both of these matters can fall easily under the shadow of community involvement. This is a matter not merely of changing the policy of our correctional system, but of changing how we think about crime and punishment. It is unproductive for us, as a society, to be locking our offenders away in the manner that we do currently. Inmates are housed in large, isolated facilities, often being warehoused thousands of miles from their home community. We shouldn’t be isolating these individuals. We should be embracing them. When someone commits a crime, they should not be ostracized from their community; they should be watched over by it even more. We need to be placing our correctional facilities closer to our communities, and coming up with programs that will get our inmates involved in their respective communities. Too often these days a single felony will effectively lock someone onto a life of similar offences. We have large portions of our inmates effectively doing life on the installment program. They commit a crime, and go to jail. While incarcerated, they lose touch with a majority of their family and fiends, especially if they are housed far from home. They are then released with little money or community support. In addition, prisons are typically a very hostile environment, forcing the inmates into and “us and them” manner of thinking, effectively causing them to pit themselves against the system, and thus neglect what little help they might have gotten in order to get back on a better path. Finding themselves with little money and no prospects, back on the street once again, they simply return to their old ways. Sure, most of them are on parole, and will shortly be back in prison, safely out of sight and out of mind once again, but the parole system is as much of more overloaded than the correctional system. We need to have programs that will allow these individuals to not only stay in touch with their community while they are incarcerated, but to show them how to get along once they get out. The majority of inmates are no different from the average person on the street. They are simply trying to get by, doing know how to do. If you give them something new to do, most of them will gladly shift to a more prosperous and happy track, the problem is that’s just not how we think about crime and punishment in today’s society.
Thus we need to reform our correctional systems in three major ways. We need to improve our educational systems, forming close partnerships with local colleges and providing inmates with incentive programs to better themselves. We need to institute better oversight programs for our private prisons, providing them with a visible benefit for turning out more productive citizens. And finally, we need to rethink our basic stance on community involvement, encouraging our offenders to maintain healthy relationships with their community and truly focusing on rehabilitation, a word often used, but rarely put into practice in today’s correctional systems. With these reforms, not only will we cut down on our rates of crime and recidivism, we will be able to save a great majority of the individuals that would formerly have been lost in an inefficient and uncaring system.