Here are my thoughts:
1: Teach children young about major consequences. In high school, there should be a type of class where kids have to learn about punishments for non-victim acts. If people really knew what the consequences were, and how prison might effect their role in society then perhaps they wouldn't commit them in the first place.
2. We need to look at other countries whose crime rates are lower, and also their incarceration rates are lower. What are they doing that we are not? What types of victimless crimes are punishable there? What are their prisons like?
3. Obviously people who have committed a horrific crime need to be "locked up". But what about the person that is caught once with an illegal drug? What good is prison doing for them? Why not have their punishment be acts of service? I suppose we do already have "community service", but maybe it's not enough.
An excerpt of an article in the NY Times reads:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)We are doing an okay job at keeping our crime rates low, but at what cost? Millions and millions of dollars!
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
Another article reads:
Many programs in other nations have preemptively reduced crime.
Based on the efforts of other nations, it is estimated that encouraging social development of children and families decreases crime and yields returns up to $7.16 for every $1 spent. In order to decrease crime by 10%, $228 additional tax dollars per family would need to be spent on incarceration compared to just a $32 dollar increase to help at-risk children complete school.
Other nations effectively use creative programs to decrease crime and recidivism
. Project Turnaround in New Zealand allows the offender, victim, and community representatives to attempt to come to terms with the crime committed and to create a plan of action for the offender to make amends to the victim and the community. Less than 10% of offenders are referred back to the court for not fulfilling the agreed-upon plan. This system received an International Community Justice Award in 2000 for "reducing reconviction rates while retaining public confidence."
Different philosophies are used in other nations in terms of prisoner treatment
. In Cuba, the emphasis is more on rehabilitation and a return to the community than on punishment or societal isolation. Prisoners are allowed to wear street clothes, earn a comparable income (to that of a free person who holds the same occupation), and are incarcerated in their home province no matter what their security level is. Additionally, prisoners become eligible for a conditional release program halfway through their sentence (for sentences of under five years), through which they work on farms or in factories with co-workers who are not informed of their prisoner status. Through this program, offenders are also able to visit their families at home (unsupervised) twice a month for three days at a time. Of those prisoners who participate in alternative programs such as the conditional release program, the recidivism rate is about 15%."
Or...why don't we just send all of our prisoners to an island? good plan.
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