WASHINGTON -- Sadly, America's first national prison commission in 30 years failed to tackle, head-on, our lock-'em up culture and to find ways to reduce the number of people behind bars in Maryland and elsewhere. The commission's recent report is little more than a how-to manual to help wardens cope with overcrowded prisons that breed violence, disease and recidivism. What we really need is a road map to drastically shrink Maryland's prison population and, at the same time, save state taxpayers a lot of money.
In "Confronting Confinement," the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons acknowledges, "It was beyond the scope of our inquiry to explore how states and the federal government might sensibly reduce prisoner populations. Yet all that we studied is touched by, indeed in the grip of, America's unprecedented reliance on incarceration. We incarcerate more people at a higher rate than any country in the world."
The study rightly pins responsibility for our overcrowded prisons on tough-on-crime laws passed by state and federal legislators. But it does not look for ways to downsize America's booming prison industry, which adds more than 1,000 new inmates per week, costs more than $60 billion a year and employs about 750,000 workers to watch over 2.2 million inmates - almost double the 1990 prison population.
