No More Room in the End

I read Jason Robinet's "American Prisons on the rise" and I agree he has his facts correct related to the number of persons incarcerated. There are over 2 million adults locked up in local jails, and in State and Federal prisons in the United States. No country in the world incarcerates more of it's citizens than the U.S.
However, I diagree with Jason's logic that the reason there is a rise in the inmate population in the U.S. is due to the failures of the State's prison system. The rise in the inmate population is the result of a social failure. There are many reasons why persons commit crimes and end up in jail. If all the experts in the field of criminal justice knew the answer we would have eliminated jails years ago. But that is not the case. In fact the exact opposite is true. If you look at the Bureau of Justice Statistic's (Department of Justice) regarding adults incarcerated, there has never been a year when the jail/prison population across the U.S. was ever reduced from one year to the next. I agree jails in and of themselves do not work. They were never designed to "correct" but rather punish.
People end up in jail due to a lack of an education, they came from a dysfunctional family, they were subjected to abject poverty, they are addicts/alcoholics, or (my favorite) they simply just did not think they could ever be caught. It was never a jail's mission to rehabilitate or correct the behavior or thinking of these people. The jail/prison's mission was simple. Keep these persons in jail safely, treat them humanely and do not let them escape. Once jails became crowded the critics first reaction was to point their fingers at the jails. Why? Jails are merely the repository of those who can not/will not obey the laws of the land.
So how do we keep people out of jail? We need to treat the problem not the symptom. In otherwords, we need to work on ensuring there are no dropouts, kids grow up in a wholesome environment, we treat alcoholics/addicts before they go to prison, and we place rehabilitate programs inside the jails so they can "save" those who want to be helped. In otherwords, its a community problem that we all need to help with. Additionally, about 50% of the men in the Texas prison system have violated their probation/parole. These supervisory systems need to be be structured to make their clients (ex-inmates) successful. Most are currently set up to make the probationer/parolee fail.
This is a problem that we can not build ourselves out of. More jails are not the answer. Besides, jails are expensive to build and operate. The Travis Co. Sheriff's Office is currently building a 1,336 jail bed facility for a cost of about $70 million. That's about $53,000 per bed! (Note: My father retired in March after serving as the Jail Administrator of the Travis County Sheriff's Office for 11 years. He spend a total of 28 years working in the TCSO jail system.)