Streamlining The Prison System

One of the most frustrating things which can happen to a person is to be accused of being responsible for something they didn’t do. I remember parking my car in a parking area by a store I wanted to shop in. I noticed the car next to me was scratched and dented, but never gave it a thought. I was in the store for about a half hour and when I came out my antenna was broken off and it had been used to scratch the side of my car. The scratches were a message which stated this is what you get for what you did to my car. Of course the coward who owned the car was gone and lucky for me my car was an old wreck in those days, but never the less it was very aggravating. I am sure most of us have been accused of doing things we didn’t do at least once in our lifetime. I had about four instances of this in my life and thankfully none have been for crimes.

One time while I was at work a fellow worker somehow got the idea I was trying to fix him up with one of the women employees. I knew who was responsible, but I didn’t want to say because that is the kind of person I am. I figured he would get over it, but every day he get angrier. I told him several times it wasn’t me, but he wouldn’t listen. I think this was because he had been friendlier to me than anyone else and I had played a harmless joke on him once. I told him I would never do this, but he said you did it and wouldn’t listen to reason. Things got tense for a couple of weeks, because he didn’t care for the woman, but finally something happened and he found out it wasn’t me. I have to wonder how many instances there are where things like this happen and have much darker outcomes. Have many people been shot in gang wars because of some misunderstanding or mistake?

As I child I was corporally punished for something I didn’t do and I was only 6 years old. Parochial schools were very tough when I was a child and you would get hit for the slightest of infractions. Somebody behind me talked when they weren’t supposed to and my teacher, a member of the clergy, took me by the ear and dragged me through the entire school. I knew someone who was also punished for something by being hit and his father went up to the school and told the teacher he didn’t care if the teacher was in the clergy or not and if he touched his son again, he was coming back to beat his brains in. The teacher never touched that kid again. All this make me wonder how many innocent people are in prison.

I know there are tens of thousands of people who are in prison who have a mental illness and they should not be there. There are no accurate figures on innocent people in prisons, how could there be? We do have the largest prison population of any country in the world, even China which has the biggest population, but when you mention this you usually hear someone say that is because there are a lot of executions in places like China. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know we have too many prisoners and private prisons are making matters worse as they lobby for tougher laws so they can get more prisoners. Let me tell you about something that is scary. In cases where DNA testing was conducted 25% of people were cleared before trial, but in the vast majority of cases, DNA testing was not used. Does this mean if it was about 25% of people in prison would be found innocent? I do not know.

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics or BJS, there were 2,220,300 people in jail in this country in 2013. If we took the 25% innocent figure after DNA testing and even divided in by 4 that would mean 6.25% of people in prison are innocent and this figure would be 138,768 innocent people were in jail and the figure could be a lot higher, but it doesn’t seem it would be any lower. What is almost as incredible is the fact when new evidence comes up which could prove an inmate innocent, many of the prosecutors just ignore it. They want to keep their winning records intact. I have seen this happen many times. There is also the problem of evidence being withheld by prosecutors. There were a couple of stories about this in the news lately. There are many fine prosecutors who never sink this low, but there are some who do this as part of their routine. Some get jaded, because prisoners are constantly claiming their innocence and want their case reopened and claim to have new evidence which is just baloney,Β  because of this some prosecutors don’t take any request to reopen a case seriously.

If all the different types of jails in this country were counted we would have an incarceration rate of about 1 in 110, the highest in the world. In the US there are federal prisons, state prisons, community correction centers, privately owned prisons, local jails and different military prisons which I didn’t even count. The latest figures I have for the cost to the US taxpayer to maintain the prison population is from 2012 and it was 39 billion dollars. It had increased 5.4 billion dollars. I am sure it is a lot more today. There is something wrong with our justice system when we compare it to the rest of the world which has far fewer percentages of their populations in jail. I am not just talking about countries which don’t have much of a rule of law, but countries like our own in Europe and even Canada. Canada has a strange problem however and that is its prison population has increased dramatically in the last decade, but the amount of Canadians in prison in Canada has decreased.

There is a lot of talk lately about making all the illegal aliens citizens of this country. It has been estimated that in 2011 alone, illegal aliens were arrested for committing 138,000 crimes. We didn’t have this problem when people came here legally and applied for citizenship. They had background investigations and were of good character or they were sent home. We should not be fooled by the talk of being kind people by doing this, we are hurting our country. My wife came from Europe and had to go through all the steps to become a citizen, why should we just allow anyone to sneak in to America and get it automatically. We don’t even know anything about them. I usually don’t support one side or another publically when it comes to politics, but in this case we are only being told it is the right thing to do because these aliens are perceived as eventual voters. I think you all know what I am referring to. They are increasing the prison population even further.

Maybe it is time to change the way we look at some of the crimes on the books. If someone commits a crime which only hurts them, such as using a drug perhaps jail is not the right place for them. If someone is mentally ill, help them instead of throwing them into jail. Cut the prison population down and keep the country safer by sending the illegal immigrants home and if they want to become citizens they can apply like others had to. It is time to revamp our way of thinking.