Video - Billie Holiday at the 1958 Monterrey Jazz Festival
STLBeacon | There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons and jails. Some view that statistic as an alarming indictment of our criminal justice system. Others -- like myself -- find it alarming that we have so many criminals. In either event, the number represents well under 1 percent of the total population.
A fashionable criticism of this state of affairs is that we are wasting scarce resources by jailing nonviolent offenders, especially drug users. Before you make up your mind on this issue, Beth, I'd like you to consider two points. One concerns the way in which we classify offenders; the other pertains to the actual cost of crime.
Although criminals sometimes have a distinctive M.O., crime is not a union job. Yesterday's common thief can be today's burglar or tomorrow's stick-up man. We define a criminal by the offense for which he was most recently convicted. Because most convictions are the result of plea bargains, these classifications can be misleading. The violent crime of robbery, for instance, may be negotiated into the nonviolent offense of stealing from a person, thus rehabilitating the offender by a fiat of semantics.
Drug users are the poster children of bleeding hearts who argue that these souls need treatment, not punishment. Two awkward facts tend to refute that notion: The cure rate for addiction is dismal at best and users steal to support their habit.
A heroin addict is not a guy who wants to party but is too lazy to work. The junkie steals for the same reason you get vaccinated -- he doesn't want to get sick. Imagine a severe case of the flu: the muscle ache, joint pain, throbbing head and most of all the nausea -- the overwhelming, all-consuming, sicker-than-a-dog nausea. That's what a day without junk is like for a heavy user. He doesn't necessarily want to hurt you, but given the alternative, he'll do whatever it takes to get his fix. He can't possibly support a several hundred dollar a day drug habit by honest labor, so he becomes a one-man crime wave.
And at what cost to the rest of us? The city of Detroit has been virtually decimated by narcotics use and the crime it spawns. Some now contemplate converting broad stretches of the inner city into farmland. Farmland! What price tag do we put on the loss of a major American city?
Without discounting the humane values of compassion and empathy, the best argument for incarceration is that it works. Every day the offender is confined is another day that he is unable to ply his trade. Compared to the true cost of crime, I would argue that prison is a bargain. Fist tap Big Don.
