Every year, 2.2 million Americans live behind bars. Each of these prisoners cost the state $40,000-60,000, and in total, up to $120 billion is spent annually on maintaining public and private prisons. It is obvious that high rates of incarceration come at a high cost to both society and the governmental budget: but what can be done to ensure lower rates of incarceration throughout the U.S.A.?
One of the petty crimes which has amassed the largest amount of convicts is drug use and possession. Therefore, when it comes to decreasing incarceration rates, we must ask ourselves whether we would be willing to legalise non-harmful drugs.
One of the main arguments against legalising soft drugs is that by legalising them, we remove the incentive to not use them. Drugs have been proven to decrease users’ IQ by five to ten points, making users less efficient and innovative members of society and contracting the economy’s PPC. (A PPC, or production possibility curve, measures the economic capability of an economy as well as the opportunity-cost of producing two different goods or services.) By legalising soft drugs, it is feasible that the population using them would increase in large amounts and greatly contract the efficiency of labour in the country.
On the other hand, it is clear that legalising drugs would create a whole new industry, generating jobs and income. Furthermore, around 40% of crimes in the U.S. are drug-related, so legalising at least some forms of soft drugs (a move already made in Colorado, Pennsylvania and numerous other states) would decrease prison rates comfortably below the maximum.
Another way of decreasing incarceration rates would be by shortening process delays in trials. Currently, trials for criminals are often delayed due to poor bureaucracy, leading to thousands of people spending more time in jail than they would otherwise need to. Aside from the fact that it is unethical for the potentially innocent people being kept in prison, this lack of bureaucracy also means that many more people are being locked in prison than necessary. Although many politicians have promised to rectify this issue, the country has yet to make impactful strides in bettering America’s trial system.
The U.S. could also end their policy of ‘Life Without Parole’, which would arguably be a more ethical way of dealing with prisoners as well as decreasing incarceration rates by ceasing to keep remorseful prisoners in jail.
Finally, the U.S. could change the way it deals with crimes of tax evasion: instead of jailing those that commit white-collar crimes, the U.S. could punish them by placing a debt on them to be paid back to the government within a set amount of time, one that is proportional to the amount of money they have ‘stolen’ from the government plus a high tax. This would encourage people from evading tax due to the high amount of tax they risk incurring if found out, and would decrease the amount of incarceration rates in the country.
In conclusion, there are many steps that the U.S. could take to decrease the jail population and increase the amount of functioning citizens in society. Although some of these are controversial, a lot of these are simple steps that would not take many resources to initiate and are long overdue.
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