Unlocking America:Why and how to reduce America's prison population

This is an important document by the JFA Insitute. This is a large PDF document (40 pages).

http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf

for our dail up DU'ers!

Thanks for the heads up.

Still, it deals with a serious topic and I'll read it later.

But it does deal fairly with this serious topic.

Thanks!

President Bush was right. A prison sentence for Lewis
“Scooter” Libby was excessive—so too was the long three
year probation term. But while he was at it, President
Bush should have commuted the sentences of hundreds
of thousands of Americans who each year have also received
prison sentences for crimes that pose little if any
danger or harm to our society.
In the United States, every year since 1970, when only
196,429 persons were in state and federal prisons, the
prison population has grown. Today there are over 1.5 million
in state and federal prisons. Another 750,000 are in
the nation’s jails. The growth has been constant—in years
of rising crime and falling crime, in good economic times
and bad, during wartime and while we were at peace. A
generation of growth has produced prison populations
that are now eight times what they were in 1970.
And there is no end to the growth under current policies.
The PEW Charitable Trust reports that under current
sentencing policies the state and federal prison populations
will grow by another 192,000 prisoners over the
next fi ve years. The incarceration rate will increase from
491 to 562 per 100,000 population. And the nation will
have to spend an additional $27.5 billion in operational
and construction costs over this fi ve-year period on top of
the over $60 billion now being spent on corrections each
year.1
This generation-long growth of imprisonment has
occurred not because of growing crime rates, but because
of changes in sentencing policy that resulted in dramatic
increases in the proportion of felony convictions resulting
in prison sentences and in the length-of-stay in prison that
those sentences required. Prison populations have been
growing steadily for a generation, although the crime rate
is today about what it was in 1973 when the prison boom
started. It is tempting to say that crime rates fell over the
past dozen years because imprisonment worked to lower
them, but a look at data about crime and imprisonment
will show that prison populations continued to swell long
after crime rates declined and stayed low. Today, whatever
is driving imprisonment policies, it is not primarily crime.