Insane Sentences

According to the news released today, United States keeps 1 out of every 100 adult citizens in prison. 2.3 million inmates in the country of 300 million. This is crazy. Even such regimes like China (1.5 million inmates among 1400 million citizens), Iran, or Russia does not treat their people like this.

The direct causes of this situation are many: longer sentences, mandatory sentencing laws, criminalization of even most petty offenses. One of the most prominent is the criminalization of the use of marijuana and other "recreational" drugs. Yes. The majority of people arrested in the US are for drug-related offenses, mostly for possession of marijuana. Usually, those are some dope-smoking youngsters, with no violent history, no drug dealing charges and no criminal intent.

This has many negative effects. The most obvious is the financial cost borne by the increasingly cash-strapped states. The most sinister is the transformation of non-violent offenders into hardened criminals, who, after their release will have almost no recourse but join a street gang to survive. The change of potentially productive members of society into taxpayer-supported inmates. There are other social, financial and moral costs.

What's the solution? Well, it would be legalization of marijuana for one, lessening of the penalties for most offenses, or replacing incarceration with a fine for minor problems.

But the most important would be addressing the root cause of this problem. And the root cause is the "my safety above anything" (I wrote about it here) attitude of the American population.We demand that the government "does something" to protect us from the criminals, from the dangers, real or imaginary. Someone steals my doughnut? Send him to the prison, for a year, or five, or thirty! (This is real story from October 2007: "Man faces 30-year prison term for stealing doughnut" on Yahoo!News). And that's what is truly insane. Unless we change our attitude, our prisons will swell...