MandatoryTX

While studying Human Services at Western Washington University, I did an internship through Americorps with the Education program at the King County Jail on 5th Ave. in downtown Seattle. I got a taste at how effective our criminal justice system is at rehabilitating our criminals, and how good of a financial investment it is for our society.

Let's say you are a prosecuting attorney and need to get your conviction rates up. Stall a few cases who's defendants are too poor to post bail for a few months, while their careers and family life fall apart on the outside. Now offer them a plea bargain: plead guilty and all you have to do is "time served" (the few months they already served.) Because responsible people have people they need to take care of outside of jail, a lot of innocent and good people get criminal convictions on their records because of these kind of nasty tricks.

A full one percent of the USA's population is incarcerated. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world - worse than any dictatorship or socialist dystopia on the planet. Besides the large number of innocent people in jail, jail must also be considered a social service - what other way is better to keep someone from committing domestic violence, for example? I have actually met people who like it in jail, and like to live there at the tax payer's expense. I have heard of homeless people intentionally getting into jail so they could get out of the cold and see a doctor. As good of a resource jail is for these people, we simply cannot afford to provide this kind of high-end social service for some 1% of the population.

I have an alternative I started writing about while studying Human Services, called "Mandatory Treatment." If you catch someone with cocaine on them, don't offer them 3 hots and a cot for a few years, instead make them go into a 3 month in-patient drug rehabilitation program. First, it is going to be LESS pleasant than a longer term in jail, it is a harsher punishment. Second, unlike jail, it might really get them thinking about their life and their mistakes - they might actually change their behavior. Third, it will be much less expensive.

But Mandatory Treatment can work with non-narcotics programs. Driving while under the influence for example - long jail sentences hardly suffice for treating alchohol-related behavior problems, while Mandatory Treatment would have much better odds. Another example is domestic violence: jail is not going to give an abuser sufficient counseling and introspection to change behavior. From vandalism to shoplifting, Mandatory Treatment would work far better than what we have now, for a lot less money.