...available to those inmates who had money and outside resources. This would enrage the public because they were always encouraged to believe that it was their tax dollars being squandered to provide plush lifestyles for convicted felons. This is why there was a strong political push to eliminate higher education in the prison setting as afforded by the grants available. These grants were removed from inmate access. Some of the colleges tried to adjust financially to continue to accommodate undergraduate classes to the Associate Degree level, but they have failed and are leaving the prison settings.

This came about primarily because of taxpayer unrest about the fact that convicted felons were enjoying opportunities for higher education that the taxpayers could not afford for their own children. It was the same of the new institutions being built with air conditioning and tile on the floors. Now institutions are being built without air conditioning except for high-ranking staff, Administrative Offices, and Clinic and Feeding area. No floor tile allowed for the inmate residence and general work areas. The idea is to present the outside public that prisoners are not living in homes better than the taxpayer is able to provide for himself and his family.

I read an interesting article in THE ECONOMIST (December 9th, 1995) in the AMERICAN SURVEY section called Fighting Crime:

The case for emptier prisons. Although the article is dated, the issues are not. I will cite highlights of what I believe continue to be relevant issues for today’s consideration. Check it out:

"America now imprisons more people than Russia. According to statistics released on December 3rd, 565 out of every 100,000 Americans are behind bars. And although blacks comprise only 13% of the population, they account for almost half the country’s 1.4 million inmates.

It is true that America has more crime than other places, and that black Americans commit too much of it. But these two facts do not explain everything. Black Americans commit about the same share of violent crime as they did in 1976, and the total crime rate has actually fallen since 1980. Over the same period, the number of inmates has tripled, and the proportion of black prisoners has increased.

Why, then, do the Americans continue to vote for those who vow to lock yet more people away? One reason is that fear of crime does not diminish, even when the incidence, of crime falls. Another is that although total crime rates have fallen since 1980, violent crime has increased by about a third. Law-abiding people naturally want murderers, rapists and muggers caged. But this does not explain why the prison population has risen almost ten times faster than the rate of violent crime.

It is not crime that has changed, but punishment. A study of why the prison population has grown attributed about a third of the growth to demographics, the increase in violent crime, more arrests and longer sentences. The other two-thirds came from jailing people for offenses that did not require prison sentences in the past. In particular, the war on drugs has crammed America’s prison with non-violent petty criminals. In all, the number imprisoned for drug offenses tripled between 1986 and 1991; and has grown since; in Washington state, the number of prisoners in for drug crimes has risen almost 1,000% since 1980.

As a result, violent criminals are a decreasing share of the prison population. In 1991, according to the Cato Institute, only one out of five drug offenders in state prisons, and one out of three in federal ones, had a violet history. And the increase in the number of drug offenders in prison comes at a time when usage of all illegal drugs is lower than it has been for years, although it remains high in the inner cities.

Black Americans have been disproportionately hit by the war on drugs because they tend to commit the wrong kinds of drug crime. For example, under federal law the possession of five grammes of cocaine powder is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum prison sentence of a year. Possession of five grammes of crack cocaine, though, is a felony that carries a mandatory five-year sentence. Blacks are much likelier to smoke crack: the recult is a large increase in the number of blacks in prison.

Such mandatory minimum sentences, at both federal and state level, are filling up prisons faster than new ones can be built; more than a dozen states also have "three-strikes" rules, which require long prison stretches for a third felony. Mandatory sentences, in either form, are crude. In particular, they do not distinguish between levels of seriousness of different types of crimes; the federal minimum sentence for possession of a small amount of LSD is ten years, much more than for kidnapping, rape or attempted murder.

The basic aim of the war on drugs has been to remove anyone involved in the drug trade from the streets to the cells. Yet demand for drugs remains high in the inner cities, and the history of the trade demonstrates that supply always meets demand. Locking up a drug courier does not mean there is one courier the less at large: only that an aspiring, often under-age, one gets his chance.

Mandatory minimums thus do not inhibit the operations of the drug trade; but they ensure that lots of non-violent, low-level drug offenders sit in prison for a longtime. In 1990, almost 9O% of first—time drug offenders in federal courts went to prison, with an average sentence of more than five years. First-time violent offenders went to jail less often and for shorter periods. No wonder that the proportion of drug prisoners in federal prisons goes on rising.

Much of this rampant incarceration is pointless. Drug-users do not need to spend five years in jail to know they have offended; like most petty criminals, most grow out of their bad habits quickly enough. Besides, most give up crime, and hardly anyone starts, after the age of 30. But mandatory sentences mean that more minor villains will stay in prison well past their criminal prime. At a cost of $21,000 a year for each increasingly creaky inmate, that is a waste of money that could be better spent on deterring the dangerous young.

America is good, and getting better, at locking up the worst and most incorrigible criminals. But it casts too wide a net. The 1995 crime bill, with its proposed $12.2 billion in prison construction and extension of mandatory sentences, is very much in this mould. There are better and more creative ways of dealing with criminal misfits.

One would be to try to cut the demand for drugs rather than the supply. The latter has never worked, as the stable or falling street price of drugs makes clear. A Rand Corporation study found, however, that a dollar of drug treatment lowers consumption as much as $7-worth of law enforcement. Treatment lowers the volume of drugs consumed; the less the consumption, the fewer the drug-related crimes.

There is also a case for insisting on prison for violent first offender and tougher treatment for violent juveniles. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the cost of locking up a violent criminal was much less than the cost of the mayhem he would probably have committed. The great majority of violent criminals in state prisons have at least one violent conviction in their pasts. And there is a case for developing forms of punishment that stop short of prison (see box). Technical parole or probation violations, such as being caught drinking or in the wrong district, are the most common reasons why people go to prison. They can be an over-harsh--and hugely expensive--punishment for people considered non-threatening enough to be on the streets.

It is not just criminals who are paying an exaggerated price for America’s addiction to incarceration. The criminal minority, in effect, consumes an increasingly disproportionate share of the public purse. State spending on prisons has increased more than sixfold in real terms since 1979, using money that could have been spent on education, parks and hospitals. Getting tough on crime is punishing not just the bad guys, but law-abiding citizens as well."

The "(see box)" was a following article entitled, If not jail, what? and cited various alternative "solutions" rather than imprisonment. What impressed me about the article is that the emphasis was not for more civilized, less reactive-revenge oriented criminal justice systems. It was for shifting the severity of punishment from drug-users to "violent" criminals. The article didn’t even bother to beat the seeming "dead horse" concerns for rehabilitation of criminals. The article did present an almost hidden concern about drug crimes and that is to slow down of the extreme focus of trying to eliminate the "supply" of drugs and rather devote more, energy to eliminating the "demand" for drugs. The ratio of dollar effect of treatment over law enforcement was impressive; $1 of treatment being worth $7 of law enforcement.

This is in line with my notion that American tax dollars could be better spent on the CAUSES of crime rather than simply dealing with the EFFECTS of crime. I realize this notion of "causes" for crime is an extremely complex issue; especially for the conflict of different theories of focus as to what actually causes crime.