Is imprisoning people guilty of sickness worth the cost, fiscally, socially and spiritually
At best, it cost the United States about $40,000 a year to imprison one inmate in a state or federal prison. Latest statistics show that at least two percent of the total population is in some phase of the justice system, with approximately a half a million of them ending up in prison for periods of anywhere from 6 months to natural life. Prison inmates are essentially warehoused during that period of time, perhaps performing some prison job in a prison industry that profits very little, its primary products going to the prisoners themselves.
The cost of imprisoning a human is indeed staggering when we consider facilities, personnel, and technological costs to maintain prisons and prisoners, but this is just the tip of the total costs the society bares. Many prisoners leave behind families who had come to depend on the prisoner as the primary income earner for wife and children. Families losing the bread winner to prison will normally have to go on public assistance of some sort, food stamps, welfare, state sponsored insurance and the like. While many of these inmates were no contribution to society or to their families, still a fair percentage of them held jobs and supported their family and paid their taxes. All this is lost when prison inmates leave their homes for the small cells that will become their home for years to come, and society loses potential assets also, taxes that would have been paid, work that would have contributed to the economic or social fabric, to the building of a strong American.
Nor does the children of these prison inmates fare better with fathers and mothers incarcerate. As well as having to live with the stigma of having a parent in prison, the child loses that fraternity with society that is all important in establishing the trust that will be necessary for the fullest development of the child. Children of prisoners will most likely follow in the parents footsteps, feeling themselves somehow determined by genes or fate to become as their parent became. Although not true, they will believe they are destined to suffer the sins of their parents.
Society does have a responsibility to secure itself against lawbreakers, and in many cases, such as with violent offenders, only incarceration can give us that security. Murders, rapist, child molesters, these cannot be permitted the freedom to wander the land, at least not until society is perfectly assured that the causes of the behavior are no longer motivating the inmate.
Most prison inmates, however, are not imprisoned for violent crimes. A large portion of them are drug offenders. A healthy debate still exists that maintains these offenders should not be incarcerated, but rather they should be treated as diseased individuals. The legalization of drugs has been proposed as a way of reducing the prison population and its fiscal and social costs. No civilization has permitted the sale of poison to its population, and most of these drugs are just that, poison. We should certainly restrain such sellers and even give them an appropriate retributive punishment in the name of justice.
While drug sellers should indeed be incarcerated, it is doubtful that turning illegal drug users into prison inmates is the best, most reasonable course for a society bursting at the seams with prison inmates convicted of drug use. Surely, a society based on the perfectibility of man, on the hope of the power of science and social justice, surely such a society as ours can find an alternative to prison for these people who are essential sick. So say many groups today who are promoting medical rather than judicial treatment of illegal drug users. Given its toll on our society, perhaps we should all give a closer and more compassionate look at prison inmates who are being punished for being the victims of those who have sold them a slavery even prison cannot abolish. Perhaps psychology and the social sciences can finally prove its worth by coming up with a better method of bringing these people back to health. Are you ready to release the sick from shackles and chains, to the hope of man? Isn't that what the Enlightenment promised us? Does the light still shine?