State of American Penal System

(Reaction Paper #3 for my American Legal Profession Class: This paper is a Reponse to Blake Mitchell's essay Ethics of the Criminal Defense Attorney) And now you can see what I do for class ...

Plus everyone should know that prisons in the US are aweful and we need to seriously rethink our policies toward nonviolent offenders, and our policies toward mandatory minimum sentencing/"3-strikes-you're-out" laws.

Once again this week Mitchell brought up the state of American prisons; and who could blame him? His characterization of life in prisons and jails is all to correct. Look no further than the prison reform legislation that has been passed over the last two decades (ie the Prison Rape Act) to understand the horrors that are taking place in our prison system. As was mentioned in last week’s class the United States has the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world. This statistic is even more staggering when one views that statistic along side the disproportionate amount of minorities (specifically African Americans) who are currently in the US penal system. The United States has crammed hundreds of thousands of offenders into prisons in the mistaken idea that prison will deter crime, or possibly, rehabilitate the offender. (Yes, there is, I acknowledge, a deterrent effect in some cases, and yes, some people are rehabilitated in prison, although it is not because of prison.)

The truth is that prisons are primarily good for incapacitating dangerous offenders, those convicted of violent or dangerous crimes. The problem is that prisons are filled with many people who are not dangerous to society and do not need to be quarantined; in fact, offenders often become hardened in their criminal disposition because of the experience, as Mitchell pointed out.

We must revamp our current policies and find noncustodial alternatives. This can safely be done for large numbers of offenders who are not dangerous. The figures I saw in a class discussing prisons was that well over 65% of those sentenced to state prisons were convicted of nonviolent offenses; namely drug related offenses.

Only nations that are both rich and foolish could possibly afford to follow these type of policies. They do not work. One only needs to look at the recidivism rate to realize that these policies are not deterring crime. As the size of prisons have exploded of the past 15 years the recidivism rate has remained unchanged, which, if we follow the logic, leads inevitably to the law of unintended consequences: the more people we put in prison the more crime we will have.

And indeed we are spending huge amount of tax money on prisons (which more and more are private, for profit, prisons). The public would be better served by using that money to provide adequate defense attorneys for the accused, and seriously rethinking our policy of locking up nonviolent offenders. Because, we know that our current policies are failing to reduce crime.