"One nation, behind bars"

The Detroit Free Press has this potent editorial with this same title as this post.  Here are excerpts:

The U.S. prison population, the world's largest, has grown nearly eightfold over the past 35 years and now costs taxpayers at least $60 billion a year.  An eye-popping report released last week by the Pew Center on the States found that, for the first time, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison. And that figure doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of people who are on probation and parole.

What is the goal here?  Is there a smarter way to get there?  What are we as a society getting in return for all this money?  What is this massive and growing penal system accomplishing?  Before the nation hits two in 100 behind bars, which seems inevitable, it's time for a national debate on corrections and criminal justice policies that will lead to a more rational, humane and cost-effective system.

The nation has gotten far too little for its enormous investment in locking people up. Violent crime rates are higher than they were more than three decades ago, when tough-on-crime policies, including mandatory sentencing laws, created a prison-building boom.  States can no longer afford to divert so many resources from education, health care and other pressing needs....

Nor can the nation ignore the human costs of mass incarceration.  Nearly half of the 2.3 million adults locked up are African Americans, who make up less than 13% of the U.S. population.  A stunning one in nine black males between the ages of 20-34 is behind bars....

Unacceptably high incarceration rates tear at the nation's social fabric and take public money from education, health care, transportation and other vital needs.  Nor have they significantly reduced crime. It's time to re-examine the policies that have made us the incarceration nation.

Regular readers know that I have been regularly calling upon the Presidential candidates and the media to get started on "a national debate on corrections and criminal justice policies that will lead to a more rational, humane and cost-effective system." 

Needless to say, I am not surprised that Hillary Clinton has not started a healthy crime-and-punishment dialogue given that she and her husband have both played a major role in the modern Democratic Party's apparent affinity for an irrational, inhumane and ineffective set of corrections and criminal justice policies.  But I am still hoping that supposed maverick John McCain or claimed change agent Barack Obama will start using their bully pulpits to help shake this country out of its very harmful incarceration addiction.  Or maybe they, too, are taking to Incarcerex.