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.