Melecki: Prison system too expensive, needs reevaluation

It costs a lot to punish the law-breakers of society. Our taxes pay for the police who do investigations and make arrests, court officials who administer trials in a just manner, and corrections facilities and staff who oversee the incarceration of those found guilty.

The U.S. Department of Justice estimated in 2004 that it costs $22,650 annually just to house one inmate. With the economy getting worse and prisons becoming overcrowded, this is hardly a cost that society can bear to pay.

Lawmakers around the nation are working on lowering this expense at local and state levels. Recently, the most popular trend has been to charge inmates for many of the costs they incur while in correctional facilities.

Systems in places such as Polk County, Fla.; New York State; Maricopa County, Ariz.; and Des Moines County, Iowa, considered prison fees in their latest legislative sessions.

Richmond, Va., the state of Arizona, and Overland Park, Kan., already have inmate payment systems up and running. Some take money out of inmates' personal accounts, which contain any money relatives send and any money they had on them when they were arrested. Some charge one dollar or more per day. Some are billed upon release.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court heard a case earlier this week dealing with correctional facility fees in Bristol County. The case is an appeal of a 2004 Superior Court decision that struck down charging inmates five dollars per day for their time behind bars.

Other proposals have suggested paying by the service or good. For example, inmates would pay a fee for meals, a separate fee for getting their GED and even a fee for toilet paper.

I understand that it's expensive to house people in correctional facilities. However, charging them is not the answer to our budget issues.

A majority of inmates do not enter jail or prison with much money in the bank. A study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics in 1999 shows that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment, there is a nearly 2 percent increase in the monthly inflow of inmates. This shows that economics is directly related to imprisonment.

Further, a 1985 American Academy of Political and Social Science article makes the case that those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are over-represented in the prison population.

If so much of the prison population has no money going into prison, charging them for anything while they are serving their sentence will only result in getting no money or forcing their family members to pay their debt for them. Then the premise of taking fees from them doesn't accomplish its goal. Depending on the system put in place, it might violate some of the few rights our society still allots inmates, such as the right not to be punished cruelly and unusually.

If the families of low-income inmates end up taking on the fees these prisoners owe the correctional system, the system ends up punishing not the inmate but the family members, who most likely don't have a lot of extra money lying around.

But these facts don't change much for taxpayers. We still want to pay less for our correctional system. Perhaps the answer lies in looking at what we are incarcerating people for. Mostly, we need to re-evaluate our standards on convictions for drug possession and use.

How much longer will we pay $62 a day to pay for some kid who took a hit off a joint to be incarcerated? In Nebraska, if a person is found guilty of being under the influence of a mind-altering substance such as marijuana, they are subject to a Class III felony which carries between one and 20 years in prison or a twenty-five thousand dollar fine or both.

I just don't see the benefit of someone spending 20 years in a jail cell for getting high, especially if it's their first offense.

A 1996 U.S. Department of Justice report shows that average offenses are longer for drug possession and trafficking charges than other serious offenses, both in maximum sentence length and total time to be served until release.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that 57 percent of the federal prison population is serving time for drug offenses as of 2000. Thus, we are spending a lot of money on drug crimes. So much money that it would save us a significant amount to rethink our punishments for first and second-time drug offenses.

In 1995, the Brookings Institution reported that if even half of inmates who report their only crime as selling drugs were telling the truth, then in states such as New Jersey, 15 percent of prison spending is being devoted simply to sending a message about drug dealing. We might be able to decrease this 15 percent to five or 10 percent with a re-evaluation, which is a significant amount.

Some drugs ought to be illegal, but this war on drugs has gone too far.

Instead of forcing drug dealers (who probably have so much money it won't matter) and drug traffickers (who probably have so little money, their family will be the ones who will be economically punished) to pay prison fees, we should focus on finding a way to utilize our funds more efficiently.

We haven't found the greatest rehabilitation program for drug offenders yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't out there. Let's work on it so we can stop stuffing our prisons with drug offenders time and again and we can start curbing the problem our society is facing from the effects of drugs and alcohol.

And while we're at it, we should definitely look at why we continue to keep marijuana illegal while drugs like nicotine and liquor, which have been shown to be much more destructive, are kept legal. We are simply throwing away our money.

If we actually want to solve criminal problems while maintaining fairly low taxes, we need to make sure that we utilize our tax money to the best of our abilities. We shouldn't attempt to obtain funds from inmates who are most likely not going to be able to pay them anyway. We should, instead, sentence offenders to punishments that actually accomplish the goals of curbing crime and relapses.

Forcing prisoners to pay for their own punishment? Nice try. Now come back to the real world and start looking for solutions that will actually work.