Articles & News

April 11, 2008

Prison is no longer the answer for Kentucky

By: Ben Kleppinger, Eastern Progress Online

You know those political ads where the candidate promises to "get tough on crime?" It sounds like a good plan. Who wouldn't want to stop criminals? But getting tough all too often means nothing more than sending minor non-violent offenders to jail for bizarrely long amounts of time.

For example, if someone is convicted of possession of a controlled substance in the first degree in Kentucky, they could go to jail for five years, according to Kentucky law. That means if someone becomes addicted to a prescription drug and steals a couple pills, they could soak up tax money in a cell for five years.

Kentucky spends nearly $19,000 on each inmate every year, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice. Spending five years and almost $100,000 not helping someone overcome their addiction is tough on Kentuckians' wallets, not crime.

In the 1970s, the crime rate was about the same as it is now, yet Kentucky has nearly ten times as many inmates now. While working on an editorial video for the Lexington Herald-Leader I learned that Kentucky had just over 2,800 inmates in 1970, compared with over 22,000 today. The problem is not an increase in crime; it is an increase in unnecessary spending because people are afraid.

People are afraid of criminals. No one wants to be the victim of a crime, so when a politician says how passionate they are about cracking down on crime and making people safer, they win votes.

What we need are positive programs that turn criminals around and prepare them to reenter life as productive members of society. Hiding our problems behind concrete walls and metal bars will do just that: it will hide the problems, not fix them.

Non-violent offenders who have made a few mistakes don't need hard time, they need a drill sergeant and a grandmother (metaphorically) to re-raise them as disciplined and happy individuals.

The absurdity of the cost of imprisonment is rivaled only by the spectacular failure of the prison system to do anything positive for society.

Rather than spending all our money holding minor drug offenders in jail, we could rehabilitate them, or even put them through college.

Our tuition at Eastern is going up due to the new budget cuts, and we still pay less than half of what it costs to go to jail.

I don't think colleges should have to trim their budgets so we can continue to imprison more and more Kentuckians ad nauseum; it should be the other way around.

What if we sent non-violent offenders to college instead of jail? Rather than taking away so many years of their lives, we could make them earn their freedom with a 3.0 GPA and a bachelor's degree. And it would cost half as much as putting them through jail.

They could even be required to hold a part-time job at the same time, reducing the economic impact even further while vastly improving our society's work ethic.

I'm not saying this plan is perfect, or even feasible. I'm saying the idea of jail time is obsolete and useless. Prison isn't scaring people, and it's not solving anything-the number of inmates continues to grow.

We need new solutions for a new generation of problems. We're not going to get anywhere making the old rules harsher.