Prison Proportion

From today's New York Times and the Pew Center on the States,

Size of US prison population - 1.6 million
Size of Chinese prison population - 1.5 million

Michigan, the lovely state in which I live, is one of only 4 states that spends more on incarceration than on higher education.

Coddling Criminals

Now that the war on terrorism is the new hotness, we don't really need the drug war much anymore. So, it was a bit refreshing that a candidate for president finally came out in favor of a progressive drug policy. His drug policy discussion starts about 2 minutes from the end.

Legalize drugs and use the money made from selling drugs to fund rehabilitation? I love it. And why not apply the same principle to alcohol and tobacco which are the most serious important addictive drugs to rehabilitate people from? The approach is far from polyannish. A great site which uses only facts and research to back up this type of drug policy is drugfacts.org. Go to the treatment chapter and you'll find this quote from a 1994 study on cocaine done by the RAND Corporation:

Domestic enforcement costs 4 times as much as treatment for a given amount of user reduction, 7 times as much for consumption reduction, and 15 times as much for societal cost reduction.

Treatment is way cheaper and more effective than drug enforcement and it turns out that the worst way to control drug use is to fly helicopter gunships around Columbia. Another chapter, compares The Netherlands to the United States, in terms of amount of drug use and the violence associated with it and the results are pretty significant.

I've been going through that website mainly over the last few days because I'm interested in using acupuncture and chinese medicine to help recovering addicts. Including these techniques the ones usually used, should make treatment even move effective and less costly.

I Like it Here. It's Nice.

From this month's Harper's index:

• Percentage of American adults held in institutions (prisons or mental) in 1953 and today respectively: 0.67%, 0.68%
  
• Percentage of institutionalized adults in 1953 in mental institutions: 53%
  
• Percentage of institutionalized adults in prison today: 97%

So, half of those we call criminals today were called mental patients in the 50's. The other possible interpretation is that crime is way up in exact proportion to the amount insanity is way down. Seems unlikely. I discussed these numbers a few months ago with my mom and she thought that the numbers indicate that we are using jails as proxies for mental institutions. There is probably some of that going on but as a whole that explanation feels incomplete.

To me, these numbers indicate that crime and mental health are mere rationalizations for removing people from society. I would go farther to say institutionalization performs some function for society that needs to be justified in clear terms like crime and mental health but probably is much more difficult to understand.

Here's another tidbit from Harper's index that's also justice related:

• Amount by which the salary of Judge Judy exceeds the salaries of all nine Supreme Court justices combined: $26,000,000

(The photo is from Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party, Library of Congress)