WHY SO MANY PEOPLE IN JAIL?

Pennsylvania must re-evaluate its mandatory sentencing laws. They have
created a monster: too many inmates, for too little reason.

A recent Pew Center on the States report found that more than one in
100 American adults are serving some form of jail or prison sentence.
The statistic is even higher for black men. These record-breaking
numbers ought to prompt reasonable people to ask who all the inmates
are, how much it costs to keep them behind bars, and whether they
should have been locked up in the first place.

Pennsylvania's State Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard recently
stated that nonviolent offenders made up close to two-thirds of the
10,000 prisoners who entered the prison system during 2007. Among them
were drug addicts and low-level dealers who had no weapon when arrested.

Pennsylvania is not unique. Tough federal sentencing rules went into
effect in the late 1980s, resulting in a rapid rise in prison
populations nationwide.

No one would argue that violent offenders must be imprisoned, as
should chronic offenders. But what about first-time and petty drug
users like those who have swelled the ranks of Pennsylvania's inmates?
Drug treatment programs and counseling cost less and are more likely
produce a better result than throwing users into jail alongside
hardened criminals.

The Swiss follow a medical treatment program for heroin users, and
have seen a reduction in heroin-related deaths and in drug-related
crime. The number of new heroin users has dropped substantially.
Surely it would make more sense here, too, to halt not only mandatory
jail sentences for drug offenders but to end the much-vaunted but
highly ineffective "War on Drugs" and treat users as medical patients
rather than criminals.

Bureau of Justice Statistics track federal, state and local spending
on jails and prisons. Nationwide, it went up from $9 billion in 1982
to $49 billion in 1999. Yet a Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council
study of incarceration rates and crime statistics shows widely varying
results among states. Pennsylvania fared rather badly, according to
the study, increasing incarceration between 1991 and 2001 by an
astonishing 61.5 percent while at the same time the crime rate dropped
by just 16.8 percent.

Besides the hard costs, the human cost is high to families, too.
Children of jailed inmates often depend on public welfare, and many
suffer emotional and developmental harm and alienation.

Most reasonable Americans can distinguish between the potential threat
of an occasional marijuana user and a sexual predator or a murderer.
It's simply wrong to create a permanent class of ex-cons for
relatively minor offenses.

Pennsylvania must shift its approach to drug crimes from automatic
punishment by reviewing and adjusting or ending mandatory minimum
sentencing laws.

Demonizing all criminals, regardless of the degree of their crime, is
poor public policy.