About our prison system

This morning I came across a Reuters article entitled "Prison System a Costly and Harmful Failure: Report". Take a look:

WASHINGTON - The number of Americans in prison has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.

The report released on Monday cites statistics and examples ranging from former vice-presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby to a Florida woman’s two-year sentence for throwing a cup of coffee to make its case for reducing the U.S. prison population.

It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs as steps that would cut the prison population in half, save $20 billion a year and ease social inequality without endangering the public.
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The report was produced by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, and its authors included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities. It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
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“There is no evidence that keeping people in prison longer makes us any safer,” JFA President James Austin, a co-author of the report, said in a release.
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“The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods, and the taking of women from their families and jobs, has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains,” it said.

We can start by decriminalizing recreational drug use.

Also we need to recognize that prisons have been largely privatized and now represent a for profit industry. It is in the self-interest of the people who run them for there to be more and more of our population incarcerated. There's something very wrong with this.