PRISON IS NOT THE ANSWER

A Letter To The Editor

I'd like to comment on a couple of articles that I recently read in the
papers. One concerned where President Bush is asking for $4.66 billion from
Congress to run the Federal Prison System for the year 2002. Shouldn't we
ask ourselves why this money is needed? Well it's needed of course to keep
up with the exploding prison population, but one might ask why is that
happening?

There are currently 154,000 inmates in the federal system, more than half
are nonviolent drug offenders. This is due to the fact that we have
mandatory sentencing and no parole in the federal system. These people are
spending four to six years more than rapist and murderers.

In the second article ex-drug czar William Bennett says, "The drug war
worked once; it can work again." He makes this statement as though the drug
war was a huge success during the Reagan/Bush years, when in fact more
people went to prison under Clinton than the total 12 years Reagan and Bush
were in the White House.

From 1890 to 1990 we put 1 million people in prison, then we doubled that
in just 10 years largely in part because of the drug war, but has this
prison fever helped the drug problem any? No. Mr. Bennett seems to think
that now that G.W. Bush is the president and Mr. Walters is the new drug
czar that the drug war will magically work for America. The truth is that
it makes no difference who is in power; we cannot incarcerate our way out
of this problem, and as long as we keep trying we will only keep shelling
good money after bad for an even bigger prison system.

Mark Gentry
Goldsboro