Fight ‘Em ‘Til We Can’t

Today’s Monday Musings on PD Stuff features Scott Henson of Grits for Breakfast. The highlights are Scott’s recommendations for improving the criminal justice system in Texas:

The three big ticket items I’d fund with such power and budget are training 10,000 teachers to deal with dyslexic kids and illiterate adults, dramatically expanding community-based mental health treatment, and focusing evidence-based programming on children of incarcerated parents. The reason: those are the biggest categories where funding would make a difference to prevent crime rather than react to it. Dyslexics are three times as likely as others to enter prison, children of incarcerated parents 6-8 times more likely, and the mentally ill are being warehoused in Texas prisons in huge numbers – the state estimates 30% of inmates are past clients of the indigent mental health system. If you can stop people in those categories either from committing crimes or immediately entering prison when they screw up, it would do more to improve public safety than the current lock-em-up approach.

Scott’s observations are supported by some shocking stats from the April 2007 “Harper’s Index”:

• Percentage of American adults held in either prisons or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68
• Percentage ofthese adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75
• Percentage today who are in prisons: 97
• Estimated amount that U.S. adults who grew up poor cost the economy each year through increased crime: $170,000,000,000
• Estimated amount they cost the economy through higher health care costs: $160,000,000,000

Oh what a wonderful world.