Would We Be Safer if Fewer Were Jailed?
Jails in New York and throughout the country dealing with overcrowding and brutality, are often filled with inmates who might not need to even be incarcerated. Some of them are awaiting trial for nonviolent offenses, others have mental health needs. Can the use of jails be reformed to reduce the number of inmates without increasing society’s risks?
* deal with ~ = (문제, 과제 등을) 처리하다, 다루다/ overcrowding = 과잉 수용, 초만원/ brutality = 잔인성, 야만성, 무자비/ inmate = 수감자, 재소자; (정신 병원) 입원 환자/ incarcerate = 감금(투옥)하다
교도소가 개선이 되어 사회에 위험을 증가시키지 않고 수감자의 수를 줄일 수 있나요?
1. Keep Out of Jail Those Who Don’t Need to Be There
Jail is now for those who can't afford bail. Programs can provide services to end unnecessary jail stays and strengthen public safety.
2. Stop Placing the Mentally Ill in Jails
Divert those with mental health problems from jail, where their conditions are worsened by abuse, medical neglect and solitary confinement.
3. Local Jails Are an Important Part of the Penal System
At the low end are the alternatives to incarceration, at the upper end is state prison, and county jail is in the crucial middle.
4. Reducing Inmates Can Reduce Crime
Incarceration can lead to more incarceration. Courts must use actuarial risk assessments to determine who should be released pretrial.
5. Make Justice Jails’ Prime Purpose
Jails have become the easy solution for the problems of addiction, poverty, mental illness, rather than instruments of justice.
6. Solutions Can Have Unintended Consequences
Violating a condition of pretrial release may be treated more seriously than the initial charge.
Sample Essay
Make Justice Jails’ Prime Purpose
Any nation worth its moral weight will pay special attention to the injuries its institutions inflict upon its citizenry. Over the past four decades however, America has earned the dubious distinction of being No. 1 in the world for over-criminalizing and over-incarcerating its residents. Sixty-five million U.S. adults have a criminal record, making incarceration and the lifetime punishment that flows from involvement in the system “as American as apple pie.” What most Americans are unaware of is that much of the human carnage caused by our morally bankrupt criminal justice system transpires in our local jails, not in our prisons. There are more than 3,000 jails in the United States, holding 731,000 people on any given day, with over 12 million admissions annually. For those who are fiscally conservative, jails not only account for a tremendous loss of human capital, but expenditures related to building and running jails have increased nearly 235 percent over the past three decades.
Describing our burgeoning jail system as “warehouses for the poor, ill and addicted” diminishes the immense damage overreliance on jails causes individuals, families and entire communities. These expensive and ineffective institutions serve as surrogates for access to community based mental health and drug treatment, job training and placement, quality education and affordable healthcare. In fact, nearly 75 percent of the people in our jails are there for relatively minor offenses like traffic, property, drug or public order violations, most of which can be addressed through community-based solutions with no diminution of public safety.
Our nation’s jails, most of them rife with abuses, have become one-stop-shops for criminal justice policymakers with little vision for how we can truly help our neighbors to succeed and achieve the American Dream. Addicted to drugs? Go directly to jail. Mental health disorder? Go directly to jail. Poor? Go directly to jail. Unemployed or underemployed? Go directly to jail. This viscous cycle of using jail to respond to social needs has become insidiously routinized and pervasive in the lives of some Americans. Jails should be instruments of justice, applied judiciously and not wielded like a blunt axe, to promote and not undermine societal aspirations for a fair distribution of rights, resources and opportunities.
Unfortunately, while our criminal justice system is finally getting the critical attention it deserves, our growing call for reform have yet to be translated into measurable shifts in practice. When we finally muster the will, however, Americans are fully capable of transforming these institutions into ones guided by the very principles we collectively aspire to embed in our system of justice: fairness, compassion, redemption and reverence for human dignity. In the meantime, many of our neighbors are serving life in jail on the installment plan.
