Standing room only
Marciniak, Ed
Ed Marciniak STAMDING ROOM ONLY What to do about prison overcrowding Until very recently, the U.S. prison system has been our fastest-growing industry, expanding from 500,000 prisoners in 1978 to...
...Drug addiction is undeniably the nation's foremost health problem...
...This situation testifies to the reality that not only is our national campaign against drug abuse failing, but that, as the U.S...
...It should be treated as such...
...Schizophrenics and persons with a bipolar disorder are more likely to be arrested for conduct related to their ailments...
...Were this incipient trend to become widespread, the number of prisoners nationwide would plummet...
...What brought on this upsurge, and what can be done to revise it...
...Department of Justice reports, seven out of ten inmates now in state or federal prisons are there for drug abuse and other nonviolent offenses...
...In dozens of U.S...
...Department of Justice, tougher sentencing is being justified, in part, by the widespread belief that incarceration is the chief reason violent crime declined in U.S...
...The sixteen-hundred-bed prison, he said, would generate 800 jobs and an annual payroll of $40 million...
...Under consideration are proposals to convert the gymnasium into barracks, and during the summer to house inmates in tents...
...But progress is slow because most states have a serious shortage of needed mental hospitals and treatment centers...
...Prisons are for criminals...
...And the number of juveniles under the age of eighteen in adult prisons continues to grow...
...Many prisoners sleep on the floors...
...cities, the largest institution for sheltering them is now the local jail...
...Some fifteen states have eliminated parole boards, and those that retain them have become reluctant to grant paroles...
...The largest single group in local jails comprises those incarcerated, directly or indirectly, because of alcohol, crack cocaine, marijuana, or heroin use...
...And in Sayre, Oklahoma, the city manager recently concluded, "In my mind there's no more recession-proof form of economic development....Nothing is going to stop crime...
...incarceration rate leads the world...
...prison system has been our fastest-growing industry, expanding from 500,000 prisoners in 1978 to nearly 2 million in 2001...
...If taken, however, two steps would almost halve our prison population...
...Christian Parenti asked in the Chicago Sun-Times (April 15, 2001...
...An ounce of prevention has given way to a pound of punishment...
...others wait to be sent to prisons in downstate Illinois...
...Because of the serious shortage of public and private living quarters for the mentally ill, city and county jails have become the local "hospitals" and caretakers...
...Two examples: The Cook County, Illinois, jail has a court-ordered capacity of 9,798...
...retribution is in...
...In May 2001, its population was 11,803...
...Could it be that America's massive prison expansion is becoming another Vietnam, an intractable war full of lies and viciousness that eventually lacerates the entire society before finally collapsing in defeat...
...Second, stop using jails or prisons to house the mentally ill...
...Many and conflicting trends would have to be reversed to begin depopulating our prisons...
...As might be expected in an environment where rehabilitation is underemphasized and underfunded, the number of former inmates who return to prison for parole violations keeps growing...
...Recently, several states, including New York, Illinois, and California, have actively sought to develop ways to send fewer nonviolent offenders to prison, hoping to refer them to treatment centers instead...
...In New York state, 80 percent of the women incarcerated were mothers with children...
...And in Decatur, Alabama, the Morgan County jail squeezes 256 inmates into a facility built for 96...
...prisons and jails is estimated at $40 billion and constitutes the nation's largest, costliest program in human services...
...Illinois Governor George Ryan explained last April that a new maximum-security prison was being built in a downstate community "because it will be an important shot in the arm for a poor community badly in need of economic investment...
...Furthermore, serious urban crime may be going down but the publicity about it in the mass media has not...
...Rehabilitation is out...
...cities during the 1990s...
...Nationwide, women prisoners have more than doubled since 1990, mainly for drug-related offenses...
...The U.S...
...most sleep on the floor...
...Not education or transportation but correctional services ($1.3 billion a year) continue to be the largest item in the Illinois state budget...
...Because of the growth of American prisons, it is not surprising that they have come to be viewed as magnets for economic development...
...According to a report from the U.S...
...Although about a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States since 1980, most are already dangerously overcrowded...
...First, repeal state laws that now mandate the incarceration of drug offenders and develop instead many more public and private treatment centers to which nonviolent drug abusers can be referred...
...The yearly cost of operating U.S...
...Ed Marciniak is president of the Institute of Urban Life at Loyola University Chicago.versity Chicago...
...It will not be easy to reduce significantly this rise in imprisonment...
...He was referring to a recently built, $37 million, 1,440-inmate, 270-employee all-male prison...
...We treat nonviolent drug offenders as criminals when they should be patients...
...With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds 25 percent of the globe's prisoners...
Vol. 129 • January 2002 • No. 2
