iled miserably over the years and new legislation will do the same. We are spending hard-earned money out of our own pockets to support prisoners. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, total sentenced drug offenders went from 3,384 in 1970 to 55,624 in 1998 because of the stricter penalties enforced by the government. This shows that drug arrests are inclining, but according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, crime has been decreasing over the past few years. How can this be when crime and drugs are so closely related. The economic cost of the states on criminal justice are more than the federal government. We, the tax payers are spending thousands of dollars on the support of each prisoner each year. Most of the drug offenders in prison are low-income people who were trying to support their family the only way they knew how, selling drugs. Is this a crime that should have such a strict penalty attached to it? Why should we have to pay such a high price to house people that were committed of doing such a non-violent crime? If an addict or occasional user is convicted of simple possession of a small amount and sentenced to the five year mandatory minimum sentence, the cost to the public of prison alone is $110,00.00. For the same price, we could give the offender one year in prison, one year of residential drug treatment, and three years of supervised probation and outpatient drug treatment, and still have $62,500.00 left over. The nation spends about 100 billion dollars a year on crime control. We could surely spend this money on something more useful, like schools and poverty. Since 1980, we have tripled our prisons population even though crime rates have been declining since the seventies. In all reality, incarceration does little to deter a criminal from committing another offense when they are released. There are many other programs that would provide drug addicts with the treatment they need to go “straight”. Pr...
