Close A Prison Door Analysis

Educate a Convict, Close a Prison Door
/They’re trying to build another prison/ For you and me to live in/ Another prison system/ for you and me/ Minor drug offenders fill your prisons you don't even flinch/ All our taxes paying for your wars against the new non-rich/ All research and successful drug policy show that treatment should be increased/ And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences/ In 2001, Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian, members of the band System of a Down, wrote this song in frustration about the mass incarceration of poor American’s, for minor drug offenses, that was going on then and , unfortunately, is still going on today.
Prisons in America are where law breakers are sent as a punishment for
Ernest Drucker, Professor Emeritus of Family and Social Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, states, “Drugs have been so heavily criminalized that they spawned an epidemic—mass incarceration” (36); also, Angela Hattery and Earl Smith, professors of Sociology, at Wake Forest University, state, “The United States incarcerates more of its citizens on drug convictions alone than the entire incarcerated population of the European Union, which has a population far greater than ours” (7). All of these esteemed scholars, of so many different fields of expertise, cannot be wrong; hence, this daunting attack on drug addiction has not only failed, but it has also led to millions of citizens going through a prison experience that did more damage, than good. The second cause of the detention of such a large number of people is the recidivism rate of over 69% of parolees that are released from prison: the lack of education to secure lucrative employment and no support system make reintegration back into society almost impossible (Hattery and Smith 13-14). By passing fair sentencing laws, treating prisoners for their drug addictions, and giving them the education they will need for reentry into society, America can reduce the prison population and lower the recidivism
Mandatory minimums where laws that were put into place to detour drug users away from using drugs. The common consensus, of society at time when these laws were passed, was that giving someone longer time in jail for using drugs would make them not want to use drugs—it did not work. The mandatory sentencing laws need to be changed because they do not lower the crime rate; instead, longer prison stays actually raise the rate of recidivism and, in turn, lead to even more people in prison. Scholars from various fields at the University of Michigan claim, putting criminals in prison for longer periods of time keep the prisons full longer but does nothing to reduce crime rates; also, when new lawbreakers are sent to prison at a faster rate the prison populations continue to expand because of the high return percentage (McMillon, Simon, and Morenoff 21). Mandatory minimums were voted into place under the assumption that these stiffer sentencing laws would stop crime; consequently, they sparked a massive growth of prisons, decimated millions of peoples’