Pubdate: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 Source: Jacksonville Daily News (NC) Copyright: 2008 Jacksonville Daily News Contact: http://www.jacksonvilledailynews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/216 INCARCERATION RATE NOT A HEALTHY SIGN The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world - per capita and in raw numbers.Even China has fewer humans behind bars than the United States has. A study released Feb. 28 by the Pew Center on the States reports the U.S. incarceration rate is eight times greater than that of any other industrialized nation. For the first time in the country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail. It's no wonder the United States economy seems headed for shambles. A culture on a crusade to imprison more and more people isn't well. It's delusional, following a self-destructive path, unable to distinguish wealth from poverty. Incarceration should serve no purpose other than to protect the innocent from violent predators. Using a cage to punish nonviolent criminals makes no sense. Yet the War on Drugs is the only reason jail and prison populations have gone up steadily for the past 30 years - an era in which violent crime has steadily decreased. More than half of all federal prisoners are in prison because of the drug war - most of whom pose no threat of violence to others. So that politicians can sell tough-on-crime platforms, our states col-lectively spent nearly $50 billion on corrections in 2007, up from $11 billion in 1987. In Kentucky, the inmate population has increased by 600 percent in 30 years. Society feeds, shelters and clothes every single prisoner. But the cost is far greater. Each dependent prisoner represents one human who no longer produces and contributes to the economy. And it gets worse. When fathers become prisoners - wards of the state who can't contribute - they leave behind children who typically become dependent upon the collective. No economic advantage comes from a prisoner. Each and every prisoner is pure liability. A healthy society views prisons as necessary evils - options of last resort to protect the public from violence. It views prisoners as liabilities, and free humans as assets. A healthy society works hard to minimize prison populations, for the sake of limiting liabilities and helping the common good. In the United States, we've somehow mistaken prisoners as assets. We've purchased a lie, sold by politicians looking for easy political gain. It's a sick and twisted perspective, and one that threatens to break us. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake