The topic of whether or not the American prison system works effectively enough and how to make the U.S. prison system function more efficiently is a very popular one.

Pundits and politicians as well as social commentators on the Right and the Left have their own theories and arguments on the issue.

But the bottom line is that the U.S. prison system doesn’t work in any meaningful way.

No society can exist without laws, and it only makes sense then that a society needs to have some sort of penal system in place that exists to deal with people that break society’s laws.

In theory, the U.S. prison system is better than the prison systems in many other countries, but in practice it’s a completely different story.

In theory, prisoners get medical care, three meals a day, and are not subjected to torture or abuse like prisoners in so many other countries are.

The American prison system is built around the idea that rehabilitation of prisoners is possible and that even those that break the law can be educated and given the tools that they need to become productive members of society.

In practice, however, the American prison system falls short of those ideals.

Prisons in the US are dangerously overcrowded, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even fully awake to realize that putting dangerous criminals in overcrowded conditions with nothing to do is going to lead some problems.

But American prisons are also dangerously under funded, which is part of the problem. There are not enough programs to keep prisoners busy or educate them because the money is just isn’t available to put those programs in place. If the prisons were less crowded, individual prisoners would have access to more of the programs that they need in order to be rehabilitated.

MOVING ON TO DIFFERENT DRUGS

So why are the prisons so crowded?

One of the biggest reasons is the relentless prosecution of drug crimes in the United States.

Illegal drug use is actually dropping in the United States but not because of the overzealous prosecution of anyone that is even tangentially connected to an illegal drug.

Illegal drug use is dropping because people have moved on to abusing prescription drugs instead of illegal street drugs.

The punishments for getting caught will illegal street drugs are much harsher than the punishments for abuse of prescription drugs so there is less risk if people use prescription drugs.

REASON FOR HEROIN USE INCREASE?

The overly simplistic drug laws in the United States treat all illegal drugs with the same severity so that someone that gets caught with a small bag of marijuana will serve the same amount of time in the American prison system as someone caught with a small quantity of heroin, or another more dangerous drug.

Clearly it never occurred to the people writing the laws that when you hand out the same punishment for possessing two drugs and one drug is much less dangerous than the other drug, people will choose the more dangerous drug.

This might have something to do with the marked increase in the use of heroin and cocaine in the mid-90s when these drug laws took effect.

ALL PLANNED?

Because the drug laws treat all offenders the same, the prisons are full of prisoners that are facing a life sentence in prison for a minor drug offense.

Any cultural scientist will tell you that when you put someone that was previously not violent or in any other way a threat to society in prison with hardened criminals who are violent, give them no educational opportunities or meaningful work, and no chance of getting out, you will just be creating a violent criminal where there wasn’t one before.

The blind adherence to badly thought out laws and badly executed policies is why the American prison system just doesn’t work.

Of course, you then must ask yourself, did someone plan it all out this way?