“Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard,
Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards.”
-Bob Dylan
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is startling…
In 1980, there were nearly 200 people incarcerated for every 100 thousand Americans.
By 2010, the number had more than tripled, to 731 for every 100 thousand Americans.
In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.4 million plus people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails — a 500% increase over the past thirty years. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is now higher than any where in the world.
But what is this “mass incarceration” doing to our communities? Our families? Our country?
Is it time to take our place in history and begin to search for meaningful alternatives to restore both criminals and victims to wholeness?
In so many ways, incarceration has become big business for private enterprises and there is profit to be made in supporting every more severe punishments. It astounds me that a nation claiming to be predominantly “Christian” finds it so easy to try and punish children as adults, when Christians and Jews alike, through their respective rituals of Confirmation and Bar/Bat Mizvahs, believe that only at around age 13 do children become truly “responsible” for their actions and are expected to anticipate consequences. It feels as if we are reverting to the dark ages in terms of response to crime – and childhood actions that once would have been deemed punishable by temporary suspension or grounding now become fodder for the court system. Young people who once might have spent some time in juvenile detention now face “hard” time. Three strikes laws, mandatory sentencing, ever more draconian criminal charges, and we lead the “civilized” world in citizens imprisoned as a percentage of population. Not a standing of which to be proud!