Ignorance of Human Nature Is Criminal

The problem of prison overcrowding is not going away anytime soon. If anything, it probably will get worse because government ignores human nature when enacting laws.

Moses began with 10 laws. Since then, governments have written 10 zillion laws. In the beginning, it was easy for all people to comprehend the prohibition against coveting thy neighbor's donkey. But increasingly, laws have become more complex and sometimes almost impossible to obey.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently declared carbon dioxide a pollutant. If you breathe, you pollute the atmosphere; you are a lawbreaker. If past is prologue, the next law will be: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's carbon credits. But you will covet thy neighbor's carbon credits given the alternative.

Most people would never rob a bank. Banks are a safe place to keep money because of this common trait, not because of federal and state laws against bank robbery.

Jaywalking is a misdemeanor in every city, but only because architects and engineers ignore pedestrian habits and design streets and building lots in rectangles. Humans triangulate and will jaywalk as surely as they breathe.

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not declared swine unclean, the agency nevertheless writes dietary laws. Trans fat is now "unclean."

There are so many laws, a citizen cannot help but be a lawbreaker. We have gone beyond unlawfully removing mattress tags. For example, if the EPA monitored the chemicals that you routinely pour down your sink, you'd probably be in jail by year's end.

During the last century, laws controlling alcohol and drug use mushroomed. Not surprisingly, incarcerations for violating those laws also have mushroomed. This was entirely predictable.

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen wrote "The Theory of the Leisure Class" and had this to say about drinking and drug use in the chapter titled "Conspicuous Consumption": "Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of [intoxicating beverages and narcotics] therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark [...] of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence."

In 1899, the free use of narcotics was considered an indulgence, a pleasure enjoyed by the leisure class as a measure of their status. So what caused drug cases to clog court calendars a century later?

Every law ever written to control the consumption of intoxicating beverages and narcotics has had the opposite effect.

As Veblen explains, restricting stimulants and making them more expensive only increases the common man's desire to consume them.

We will always have to live with crimes of passion. Neither law nor any threat of jail is going to dissuade a jealous husband in a moment of passion from shooting his wife's lover.

There are, of course, criminals who need to be locked up forever. Pathological killers fit this category. They cannot be reformed, at least not with our present understanding of how the mind works. But does it make sense to lock up the jealous husband in a maximum-security prison that should be reserved for pathological criminals?

According to a Pew Center report last year, 1 percent of American adults are behind bars. And 7.3 million adults (one of every 31) are in the penal system (in jail, on parole or on probation.)

In their zeal to enact more and more punitive laws, legislators have guaranteed that prisons will be overfilled. The courts have abetted the lawmakers admirably; our robed judges meekly complain as they hand out mandatory sentences. When you replace "let the punishment fit the crime" with rigid sentencing guidelines, is it any wonder why we can't build prisons fast enough?

Government always thinks it can solve problems by demanding more, not less. In this case, it wants more police, more lawyers, more laws, more courts, more prisons, more guards and more time behind bars.

I am most disturbed by politicians who proudly crow that they have appropriated funds to build a new prison and then tell us that new prisons are economic development projects. Prisons, they gloat, create construction jobs in the short run and correctional jobs for the long term. Hence, prisons are a business model.

This is how far we have fallen. In a nation founded on the principles of individual liberty, democracy and capitalism, we thirst to lock people in cages and have the audacity to call it economic development.

How pathetic is that?

Huxley’s America: A Nation on Drugs

The numbers are in: More than 2.3 million American adults are behind bars. That's one out of 99 -- or more than one percent.

The prison population has essentially tripled since 1988. And if you add in all American adults who are on parole, home confinement or still in the corrections system, the number grows to more than 3 percent of the United States population.

What does the current prison headcount say about our society?

China reports 1.5 million adults in jail, and its population is more than four times that of ours. If China, the nation we love to criticize for its human rights policies, had the same incarceration rate we do, then China's jail population would swell to more than 14 million. Boy, oh boy, would sanctimonious Americans squawk if China had 14 million jail cells.

How many Americans are in jail? If you fenced West Virginians in, you'd still have to import everyone from Wyoming to equal 2.3 million people. Kentucky with its 4.2 million Kentuckians could represent our nation's halfway house.

Drug use is the driving force behind the boom in American incarceration. Some people shoot heroin. Some smoke pot. College students pop Ritalin at exam time. Elementary schools force-feed Ritalin to children just to spite parents who tune out to Pink Floyd. Doctors and pain clinics prescribe heavy-duty painkillers as if handing out Halloween candy. (In fairness, patients would sue doctors into the poor house if they didn't.) And teenagers just steal whatever is in the family medicine cabinet or use their allowance to buy ecstasy for special occasions.

Of those incarcerated felons who aren't in jail for using or selling drugs, a significant number were convicted of a drug-related crime, e.g.: robbing a convenience store to get money to buy drugs.

The crime numbers that astound me the most haven't even been published because there is no way to calculate them.

First, consider the billions of dollars circulating throughout the underground economy. Just how many bales of cash has America air-mailed to Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan and other foreign countries to purchase illegal drugs?

Secondly, billions of dollars are spent on legal drugs. Hospice care alone is a major pipeline for narcotics. Medicare and Medicaid, as well as insurance companies, shell out big bucks for narcotics. And we have to include over-the-counter drugs in this calculation. People get high on Nyquil, and Sudafed becomes meth. Before ecstasy, teens mixed aspirin with Coca Cola. Big Pharma rules the drug scene!

And, finally, there is the cost of policing and warehousing. Whether it's the extra cost to pharmacies for hiding Sudafed from cold sufferers, the budget of the Drug Enforcement Administration, or that new federal prison that Sen. Robert C. Byrd calls an economic development project, the cost of policing our drug culture is enormous.

If we could cut our drug-induced social costs by half, then we could use that money to turn America into a Utopian paradise.

Couldn't we?

I am not so naive as to believe that we'll eliminate the drug scene. However, until the late 1960s, Americans certainly did a better job of managing it.

What happened in the 1960s was dreadful. A generation of Americans (my generation) actually believed they could do what had always been dreamed about but never achieved -- create Utopia. Free love, mellowing marijuana and LSD made it so.

In 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World" as a parody of Utopian society. He wrote about the world becoming a dystopia, wherein families and family values were crushed, promiscuity was the norm and soma (a hallucinogen) became the drug of choice.

Huxley also predicted test-tube babies. While that has not happened yet, we're surely closing the gap. In the interim, we have segregated Alphas from Gammas the old-fashioned, Wizard-of-Oz way with certificates of accomplishment.

The problems associated with our love of drugs have gone beyond building more prisons or reducing sentences. Steadily rising incarceration statistics tell us the problem is more complex than that.

The real question before us is: Has America become Huxley's soma-driven dystopia? Our paper money routinely tests positive for cocaine. Though not every bill has been used to snort the white stuff, enough have to contaminate ATM's. And metropolitan drinking water now tests positive for a variety of pharmaceuticals.

Bulging prisons would alarm sober people and force them to take action. But as our dirty money and tainted water indicate, Americans are everything but sober.