PRISON

The Prison Alternative America has to wake up and realize that the current structure of our penal system is failing terribly. Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and privacy, expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd their cell-block, deprive them of meaningful work, and the result is an embittered underclass more intent on getting even with society than contributing to it. There is a better way to deal with crime and punishment in America. Americans pay too much money for prisons to fail so badly. Like many big government solutions, prisons are expensive. In the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1997, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates the total cost for our judicial system for 1993. That year, the United States had 1,364,881 adult jail and prison inmates. Based on this information, the cost per inmate for corrections, judicial, legal, and police costs totaled $ 71,467 per inmate. That is about the same as the cost of sending a student to a f...