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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Debt To Society: The Real Price Of Prisons |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mike Lehman
(No verified email address) |
12 Jul 2001
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Mother Jones magazine has been looking into the real price of the US passsion for prisons and the consequences of the inflexible and ineffective policy of incarceration that has been a favorite of politicians in the last two decades. MJ created a website where the reader can examine a number of different reports and find out the statistics for their own state. |
Illinois lives up (down?) to its reputation for relying heavily on incarceration to fight a racially-targeted drug war. Our state ranks in the top 10 for states (number 9) with the greatest disparities between those sentenced to prison compared to the precentage by race of the general population. Illinois also ranks fifth with the highest percentage of prisoners convicted of drug offenses.
Combined with the racially disparate application of the death penalty, these figures should serve as a wake up call to those who discount the discriminatory appilication of law and public policy. The effects of these unjust policies are felt far beyond the lives of those directly affected by imprisonment. While education spending has increased in Illinois only about 40% since 1980, spending on prisons has increased 250% in the same time, draining resources from the very programs that would keep more young people out of prison in the first place.
Champaign County follows the statewide trend with an emphasis on the use of public resources to feed a justice system that many feel is fatally flawed in the racially disparate nature of law enforcement conducted by such secret police units as Task Force X. Major construction projects in recent years have all focused on new jails and courts, with human services receiving short-shrift in the allocation of tax dollars. Drug enforcements efforts have sent record numbers of youth to jail, with little difference in the availability of drugs on the street. The Drug War has become America's only job expansion program, with seductive federal grant dollars bringing police into our schools on a regular basis and militarized SWAT teams to our neighborhoods. There is little evidence that these strategies are effective in curbing the problems they are intended to address, while their tactics treat the constitutional rights of citizens as nothing but inconveniences to law enforcement.
Follow this link to read more on the failed strategy of discriminatory incarceration and some alternatives that meet the public's need for justice, while doing less damage to society through more humane and effective treatment of criminal violators. |
See also:
http://www.motherjones.com/prisons/index.html
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More on racial disparities and the drug war |
by Ellen Knutson
knutson (nospam) shout.net (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
26 Jul 2001
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Human Rights Watch published a report in May of 2001 focusing just on the racial disparities of the drug war in the US. |
See also:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/
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