Invest in Society, Not Prisons

Invest in Society, Not Prisons
as printed in the Burlington Free Press on Feb. 27, 2006


I went to prison four times. Willingly. It was part of my ongoing research on Vermont’s prisons and jails, an area that I focus on in the Vermont House of Representatives.

The way I see it, the best way to learn about the correctional system is to listen to people who spend their days in the field. So I interviewed 53 correctional officers, parole officers, inmates, victims' advocates, and managers in the Department of Corrections (DOC). And I got an earful. One of the common themes I heard was that correctional officers felt that they were too swamped trying to meet day-to-day needs that the correctional aspect of their work was sidelined.

Those I interviewed agree on what the main problem is: There are too many people in our jails and prisons for our correctional system to handle.

Over the last ten years, while crime rates have dropped, prison rates in Vermont have doubled. Experts widely agree that there is no cause and effect relationship between the two. Instead – according to repeated testimony by inmates, correctional officers, probation officers, community advocates, and DOC staff – prisons and jails have become an alternative to community care. Drug addicts? Send them to jail. Mental health problems? Send them to jail. High school drop-outs? They’ll end up in jail.

So who is in prison? A disproportionate number people with mental health, drug, and alcohol problems, and victims of trauma and abuse. Not receiving the treatment and care they needed when they lived in our Vermont towns, they wound up in prison, an environment that usually worsens their problems.

Their problems have become our problems. In just 15 years, spending on corrections has ballooned from four percent of our state’s budget to ten percent. That leaves fewer dollars for education, mental health, substance abuse prevention, foster care, and other programs that would reduce the number of crimes and associated prison costs.

Fifteen years ago, for every dollar we spent on corrections, we spent two dollars on higher education. Now, for each corrections dollar, higher education gets 80 cents.

What happened to our priorities? Why have we let prisons grow so big? Why have we spent so few dollars on the programs that we know strengthen society? Why aren’t we providing alternatives to the kind of behavior that we know leads to crime?

We need prisons to protect society from violent repeat-offenders. But we know that prison is not a cure-all for society’s ills. We can and must end our costly addiction to incarceration, which leads to prison overcrowding. Instead, we should invest in programs that not only help the most vulnerable in our society, but will also ultimately protect us from crime.

Rep. Jason P. Lorber (D-Burlington) is author of “53 Voices on Corrections in Vermont,” which can be found online at www.friendsofjason.org.