In a recent sermon I quoted a statistic which was incorrect–I thought I had remembered that one out of every thousand adult citizens in this country is incarcerated. Actually, it is one out of every hundred. This is one of those figures that is difficult to believe, but it was reported on the front page of NY Times on April 23.
The article went on to say that we are, of course, the world leader in “producing prisoners” (and “producing” is probably the correct term), with China a distant second. The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized countries are apparently shocked by what they see when they look at our figures. For example, the U.S. has 751 in prison for every 100,000 people; England’s rate is 151, Germany’s is 88; Japan’s is 63. Russia is the only country that comes close to us, at 627 per 100,000.
Explanations are given: guns easily available, the drug trade, lack of a social safety net, and the American temperament, with its emphasis on individual responsibility. Several experts have pointed to one salient factor, a surprising one: democracy. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants, insulated from popular demand for tough sentencing, whereas we have a highly politicized criminal justice system.
Whatever the reason, putting people in jail for long periods of time for dubious reasons is not serving us well. There is little emphasis these days on rehabilitation–the justice system (surely a misnomer) is mostly heavy on punishment. So what are these folks going to do when they get out? Be upstanding citizens that go out and get good jobs and pay taxes, perhaps? Not a likely scenario.
Maybe we need to ask whom we are punishing and why, and what the result is of all this recrimination. Vengeance doesn’t work on the individual level, nor on the societal. Maybe we should consider mercy–at least for those non-dangerous “criminals” who are filling our prisons and stealing our tax dollars from social services and schools–which, incidentally, they could be attending more cheaply than it costs us to keep them in jail.
