People You’ll See In Hell

We waste resources locking up drug offenders.

The terrible fact is that in many states, more governmental funding is available to lock up non-violent offenders than is available for higher education. Marijuana is a harmless drug and LSD has done even less damage than marijuana. Ignoring the scientific realities and bending to societal panic and outrage that is fed by a bored news media has financially hurt the United States more than the actual “offenses” would have in a million years.

Correctional staffs, charged with watching these “offenders,” have their limited resources stressed by the influx of petty offenders and as a result are mentally diverted from what their real goals should be. “Look at all the pot smokers we have in jail,” the press proclaims, ignoring all the alcoholics running free in our nation’s bars every Friday and Saturday night.

While there are several complex ideas as to what the goals of the American correctional system are and what they should be, realistically, there are only three choices to choose from:

1. To punish
2. To rehabilitate
3. To punish and then rehabilitate

If we strip down the extraneous motivations behind the act of imposing criminal sanctions, we can come to the conclusion that the criminal justice system itself is designed to maintain the social order, to identify those people within society that, if allowed to continue in the manner in which they are behaving, threaten to undermine the structure of our society. By either removing those people from society or changing their behavior so that their behavior becomes more acceptable to society, corrections departments are doing what they are meant to do.

Yet, with the limited resources available to those within any closed, entropic, environment, choices must be made as to how to apply those limited resources. Much of the energy consumed by a social organization is spent solely to maintain its structure and our local, state and national governments are no different.

Those who determine where funds will go have, in the past, determined that the cheapest and easiest way to handle those who buck the system is to put them into a box away from the rest of society and keep them there until it is time to let them out.

While this seems effective, it is, in fact, a shortsighted approach, as those who work in criminal justice fields and human services fields know.

The challenge for correctional administrators is to have revenue diverted from projects more popular to those who determine where funds go, and after freeing those funds, channeling them to correctional programs that most effectively rehabilitate offenders who can realistically be rehabilitated.

While the goal of complete rehabilitation of all offenders will likely never be achieved with the technology available to us at this point, it is still a worthy goal.