Statistics, history suggest reasons why so many in US are in prison

By Ed Runyan | February 17, 2016 at 12:10a.m.

american prison system

WARREN

The United States prison population has increased 500 percent since the early 1980s, when Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign began.

Throughout the decade, drug laws became more punitive, especially after the emergence of crack cocaine.

Today, the U.S. has the second-highest incarceration rate in the world, but it also has the highest drug-offender incarceration rate in the world, according to John Carl, one of two authors of a recent book, “A Country Called Prison.”

The U.S. sends people to prison at a rate of 707 people per 100,000 population, second behind the country of Seychelles. France incarcerates at a rate of 149 per 100,000 and Great Britain at a rate of 102 per 100,000, Carl said.

In a speech about the book in September, Carl framed his argument for reducing the American prison population by saying there are those who belong in prison because we fear them, such as child molesters or murderers. But non-violent offenders, like most drug offenders, are people we are just “mad at.” Forty-six percent of inmates are there for nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession, Carl said.

Drug offenders should be treated more like a person with an illness than like a criminal, Carl and his co-author argue in the book.

There has been discussion at the national level about reducing the number of people in American prisons, though the issue did not get much attention at recent debates among the presidential candidates.

There’s also been discussion locally, with a Trumbull County judge saying in an interview he disagrees that long prison sentences will solve the escalating drug problem because offenders seem to have problems dating back to early childhood.

“It’s amazing ... how many of them have a drug addiction, how many of them have a lack of parental involvement, a lack of education,” Judge Ronald Rice of common pleas court said.

Judge Rice learns a lot about defendants he sentences because he receives a confidential report about the offender from the county’s Adult Probation Department that includes information from law enforcement records and interviews with the offender and others.

The Ohio prison system released statistics last year that provide some insight into the lives of people who entered prison during two months in 2014. Though it makes sense that people entering prison would report low educational levels and a high level of drug abuse, the statistics are an eye-opener.

While less than 1 percent possessed a college education, 92 percent reported being drug dependent.

Most were unemployed, 17 percent were high-school graduates, 36 percents were dropouts, another 17 percent had achieved their high-school graduation equivalency, and 19 percent had taken some college courses.

More than 70 percent had never been married, less than 10 percent were married, 12.4 percent divorced. Only 40.4 percent had grown up living with both parents, with 41.7 percent growing up with only their mother and 5 percent living only with their father and 9.2 percent living with their grandparents.

Susan Kunkle, a Kent State University professor who worked in a federal prison in Florida and in juvenile facilities in Ohio, said one of the statistics that “jumps out” is the low number of people with a high school diploma.

“Over one third have no education. That’s extremely significant. In 2009, 89 percent of people [nationally] had at least high school or equivalent,” she said of the overall population.

“Education opens portals throughout the life of the person. Additional doors and opportunities open up,” she said, leading to things like home- ownership and marriage, “all of the things that prevent people from coming into the [prison] system and keeping them from coming back into the system.”

Kunkle said the “astounding” percentage of new inmates with a drug problem supports the effort in Ohio and elsewhere to create “speciality docket” courts such as drug courts and mental-health courts.

“In the juvenile system, we realized we were not qualified to deal with all of these issues and started to reach out to experts,” she said of her years in the juvenile justice system. Many programs also have been added to help ex-offenders re-enter society, she noted.

Kunkle said she’s seen indications that elected officials are seeing that the War on Drugs that began decades ago “is fraught with unintended consequences,” such as greater numbers of women in prison.

“People are realizing the policies are not working,” she said. “They were intended to eliminate drug dealers.”

Richard Rogers, a criminal justice professor at Youngstown State University, said no one should read the Ohio prison number for college graduates and assume that providing college training would stop huge numbers of people from going to prison.

“If someone said, ‘Let’s give everyone an education,’ you might be disappointed in the outcome. What shapes character No. 1 is the family,” he said. “It’s a rare person who doesn’t finish high school. Something else is going on there.”