Joseph Stalin once observed, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”
So here’s a statistic to ponder: More than one in 100 adult Americans are in jail or prison.
Putting it another way, that’s 2.3 million individual tragedies.
Here are more tragedies:
• State governments spend nearly $50 billion a year keeping people locked up. Colorado alone is spending $704 million on prisons this year, an 8.2 percent increase over last year’s budget and almost as much as the $746 million the state spends to support higher education. In 1980, prisons took just 2.6 percent of the general fund, while 22 percent went to higher education. Today, prisons and colleges each receive about 10 percent of the general fund.
• America leads the world in both the number and the percentage of its incarcerated population — with many more people behind bars than even second-place China, whose population of 1.3 billion residents is four times that of the U.S.
• The burden of incarceration falls most heavily on minority males. One-ninth of all black men age 20 to 34 are behind bars.
These statistics come from a report released this past week by the Pew Center on the States and this year’s state budget.
The Pew report attributes much of the ballooning prison population to tougher state and federal sentencing rules imposed since the mid-1980s. Imposing longer sentences on repeat offenders has reduced crime rates somewhat. But the Pew report also documents that for the nonviolent criminals who make up about half of the incarcerated population, alternative punishments such as community corrections and mandatory drug treatment can be more effective than draconian sentences at reducing repeat offenses for far less cost.
Colorado, which has literally doubled and redoubled sentences for some crimes in the last 30 years, began some modest reforms in 2003 when Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, won passage of a bill that increased treatment for drug and alcohol abuse for inmates.
Coloradans are rarely sent to prison for using drugs, but drug or alcohol abuse is a factor in 75 percent of the crimes that land people in our prisons. In short, an offender may have been sent to prison for robbing a liquor store, but he committed the robbery to get money for drugs.
By treating the underlying addictions that often lead to crimes, Gordon’s more enlightened approach — now being expanded by Gov. Bill Ritter — has finally begun to slow the growth of prison costs in Colorado. Ritter has asked for just a 6 percent increase in next year’s prison budget, the smallest such increase since 1992.
That reduction in the rate of growth in our prison system is a modest first step toward reducing what can be the tragedy of crime and imprisonment. Colorado should continue pursuing better and more cost-effective ways to bring down our crime rate.
