The United States of America should be both ashamed as well as distressed at the embarrassing rate of incarceration that it has achieved that by far exceeds any other western nation by a substantial margin. It would be one thing if all this incarceration produced a society in which there was no more crime, no more violence, and essentially peace and tranquility, but that definitely is not the case. While there is no doubt that certain convicts do indeed need to be incarcerated, that number is a substantially smaller subset of the amount of people, actually incarcerated, in which, the specialty of America, is basically to lock up in particular those of color, those that are poor, and those that are stupid. As always, if you have money, especially lots of it, your chances of being incarcerated for any length of time is considerably reduced, signifying yet again that America never practices equal justice for all.
There seems to be a substantial disconnect between incarceration and costs, as if Americans somehow believe that if you lock people up and throw away the keys, besides making for a much safer America, it doesn't cost American taxpayers much of anything. Unfortunately, ignorance of the truth does not erase the truth, and incarceration is an incredibly expensive way to treat crime or crime-like activities. For many citizens, it would be helpful to picture the entire incarceration apparatus which would include but not be limited to the following: the justice department, the prison department, the police department, the infrastructure of all those departments, the pensions of all those departments, the healthcare for all those departments, employee benefits for all those departments, capital costs for all those departments, as well as the food, healthcare, education, and security needed to house the incarcerated people. All of these things cost taxpayers money, lots of money, and none of these things take into account the human toll of not only how damaging and wasteful it is to incarcerate people in the first place, but the peripheral damage to those that are related or friends of those that are incarcerated.
America believes, or at least the justice system believes, that those that commit crimes should be punished, perhaps so, but certainly not so in every case, but in any event, why would it make much sense to punish the taxpayers also. In point of fact, what is hidden from taxpayers is the cost to them of all this incarceration, to which, vera.org, produced a pamphlet of the price of incarceration for forty of our States as of January, 2012. This cost, varies substantially by State and takes into account the total State cost of prisons in which in New York, this averages to be $60,076 per inmate, whereas Kentucky at $14,603 and Indiana at $14,823 per inmate are by far, the most cost efficient. Incredibly, incarceration costs significantly more than it costs to actually educate children from K-12.
What would be far more rational to do in America, is to start, today, with wholesale changes to what should or should not be a crime that incarcerates people, and instead first take a look at the specific crime, and then compare it to the yearly cost of that incarceration. That is to say, is it worth incarcerating anyone, for a victimless crime, such as drug usage, or prostitution, or gambling, or the like? Further, there are many other crimes, such as burglary, larceny, assault, fraud, and so forth, that should not typically be treated with incarceration, but could be dealt with in a variety of ways of which incarceration should be seen as a last choice.
Far too many people believe wrongly that the bad people are being locked up; whereas the inconvenient truth of the matter is that the policing forces of this country spend an inordinate amount of time and money locking up those that are trapped in a world without real opportunity or hope, brought about by the ghettoization of the underclass of this country.