The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

It is estimated that nearly one in six inmates committed their crimes to support a drug addiction. More than 16 percent of jail inmates suffer from some sort of mental illness, 70 percent of whom were arrested for nonviolent offenses. When someone is picked up on the streets intoxicated, why are we paying $43,000 a year to lock them up rather than providing them with treatment services?
At a recent forum I attended, then-Corrections Commissioner Kathleen Dennehy reported that there are approximately 250 people civilly committed every day, with no criminal charge whatsoever, who are there for one reason only: because there aren’t enough detox and treatment beds.
Sheriff Andrea Cabral touched upon this issue in a recent Boston Herald article.
Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, and Sheriff Michael Bellotti have echoed Sheriff Cabral’s concerns that we need to be looking into alternatives to incarceration, such as examining our state’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws and providing treatment on demand for substance abuse.
It’s too easy to simply lock these individuals in our jails.
We need to ask ourselves whether building more jails and prisons is the answer. I believe it is not. The more we build, the easier it is to simply lock people up without ever asking whether that is the best use of our resources or the best way to make our communities safer.
H.1723 - An Act Relative to Incarceration and Its Impact on Public Safety - calls for a five-year moratorium on the construction or expansion of jails and prisons while creating a special commission to make recommendations related to overcrowding, the effectiveness of incarceration on issues such as mental illness and substance abuse, and alternatives to sentencing for more cost-effective means to reduce overcrowding and ensure public safety.
It is clear that our current strategies for reducing overcrowding are not working. New jails and new prisons will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars without addressing how we can actually improve public safety.
More money for the Department of Correction is not the answer. Incarcerating more of our citizens who are in need of forms of treatment is not the answer. We need to understand that overcrowding cannot be solved by building more correctional facilities; it requires a fundamental re-examination of why our facilities are overcrowded to begin with.

Carl Sciortino is state representative from the 34th Middlesex District, including neighborhoods in Somerville and Medford.
http://news.bostonherald.com/editorial/view.bg?articleid=1003317&format=text