Broken prison system an epidemic

Nathan Rosadini
Posted 1/8/15

New Haven, Connecticut is a city rich in history and New England heritage, home to the Ivy League Yale, the arts, and some of the country’s most renowned pizza. All that being true, homelessness …

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Broken prison system an epidemic

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New Haven, Connecticut is a city rich in history and New England heritage, home to the Ivy League Yale, the arts, and some of the country’s most renowned pizza. All that being true, homelessness and poverty levels have hurt the city for years. Nearly one third of the city’s residents live below the poverty rate, leading many to believe this correlates with crime.  New Haven is said to be safer than only 3 percent of cities in the entire United States, and with just under 130,000 residents, it can be labeled as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States per capita.

Can New Haven, Conn., really be one of the most dangerous cities in America? I do not believe so, instead these statistics are convoluted, and they are misnomers. I recently spent the summer working in the Public Defender’s office of New Haven. Instead of hard criminals that supposedly roam the streets, I spent my days in New Haven with citizens suffering from mental illnesses, homelessness, drug addictions, unemployment, and illiteracy. After spending a summer interviewing public defender applicants, I do not believe New Haven suffers from crime any more than the rest.  Instead, the city suffers from an epidemic that has swept across our country’s urban population for over the past forty years; the broken prison system of America.

Is our prison system failing? With 1,574,700 inmates locked up across our country America has become the prison capital of the world. This summer in an episode of Tonight with Jon Oliver, the comedian revealed eye-opening statistics of the grim state of our prison system that goes unnoticed throughout our nation. For one, our country now has more incarcerated citizens than does China, and since 1970, prison populations have grown eight times in size. Maybe most startling of all, the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of its prisoners.

In the past 40 years our prison population has exploded. The collapse of our mental health system and the expansive amounts of onerous drug sentences being served I believe is the cause. Instead of going to trial, 97 percent of criminal cases processed are plead, where accepting the minimum sentence has become the norm. The federal prisons are where drug offenders are serving time for offenses carrying mandatory minimum sentences, where drug offenders now account for 50 percent of the male federal prison population, and 58 percent of the female. So many parents of America’s youth are now locked away on such charges that “Sesame Street” has developed skits to help children deal with parents who are in prison. “We now need adorable puppets to explain prison to children in the same way they explain the number seven or what the moon is,” said Oliver.

On the other hand, state budget cuts have contributed to the rise of mental health patients falling into prison cells. States have increasingly cut community mental health services as well as hospital care for mental patients over the years. The result? Patients have been re-institutionalized into jails, where nearly two million citizens with mental illness report every year. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 15 percent of all state prisoners and 24 percent of jail inmates are psychotic. The cuts to save have led to the rise in the incarcerated, as Republican Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania said, “We have replaced the hospital bed with the jail cell, the homeless shelter and the coffin.”

The growing crisis that has gone unnoticed for the past decade and more is beginning to gain the attention and concern it deserves. Recently the New York Times reported Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to expand health services at each step of the criminal justice process in an effort to “reduce the growing number of inmates with mental health and substance abuse problems in New York City’s jails.” Reforms like this must become trends across America, if we hope to fix a system that was broken long ago.

A member of the Class of 215 at Providence College, Nathan Rosadini is from Guilford, Conn. He is a double major in political science and sociology is applying to law school with the hope of attending in the fall.

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