Tricky Humanity
February 28th, 2008Angelina Jolie has written an editorial for the Washington Post on Iraq. My first thought was, “Who cares?” and it is still a sentiment I have but she makes a great point: we must step up our humanitarian assistance to those people in Iraq. Where we differ, I think, is in my belief that we should do it in unison with our political, military and social assistance, by which I mean that we should not pull out or significantly draw down troop levels, but I concur wholeheartedly that the nation of Iraq must receive more humanitarian aid from ours. I simply don’t believe that money alone would be effective as that nation would plunge into anarchy without our serious presence, and if that country descended into absolute terror where would the money go? The pockets of insurgent and terrorist leaders, the slush funds of men whose sole goal in life is power and control. Left-wing critics would argue that that is where the money is already going in the form of Halliburton and Bush’s Administration but I try to shrug off such arguments as reactionary dribble although I can’t help but address it, as I feel the United States is doing good work in Iraq, on the whole, and the mission is nowhere near failure. I feel that worth repeating because sometimes it seems like no one is saying it, anywhere.
Now, a different humanitarian note closer to home:
For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars. Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 _ one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it’s more than any other nation.
The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said. The steadily growing inmate population “is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime,” the report said.
Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are pressuring many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft on crime. “We’re seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets,” she said in an interview. “They want to be tough on crime. They want to be a law-and-order state. But they also want to save money, and they want to be effective.”
The report cited Kansas and Texas as states that have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. They are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.
You’ll never hear me call for an end to the criminlization of drugs, Dear Reader, because I can’t under any circumstance justify signing a permission slip for crack cocaine and I don’t buy the argument that users don’t hurt anyone except themselves but I do believe that we must stop sending people to prison for smoking marijuana or using drugs. It is ludicrous to punish such people with prison sentences but it shouldn’t be allowed, either, or encouraged. Yet the fact remains that our prisons are overcrowed and we have far too many “innocent” (in the hippocratic sense) people behind bars.