One in a hundred U.S. adults in currently incarcerated. This means that pretty much everyone in the entire country knows a couple people in the clink. Think about it. Off the top of your head, do you know anyone currently in prison? For some people there is an absolute “no”. This is not the case for most people, and for some in urban America, they know many people who are currently incarcerated, and for an unfortunate group of people, many of the people they know have been in the prison system at some point. To narrow the statistic, about one in three hundred women are currently serving a sentence in some manner. About one in thirty-six Hispanics and about one in nine black men between the ages of 18 and 34.

       So how do we keep all of these people out of jail/prison to begin with? There are a couple answers that would greatly diminish the numbers, almost overnight. The first is to change our drug laws. The “War on Drugs” in this country has done little to slow the sale or movement of any drugs, but has yielded enormous costs to taxpayers both in funding government programs that fail miserably every day, right in front of our eyes, and by burdening us with having to pay for all of the long term inmates that this “war” has produced. As the debate steams over the consequences of drug legalization, the profits for drug dealers soar and the cost to the U.S. tax payer soars along with it. Drugs lie crack and heroin are bad. They destroy families and ruin lives. Still, is it the government's right to tell people what they can or cannot do with their own bodies? Legalization is an entirely different topic, but where it concerns the inmate population in this country, it warrants consideration. We could cut the entire prison population by hundreds of thousands if drugs were legal. Even at 100,000 fewer inmates, you'd be talking about billions in savings to the U.S. tax payers. At an average cost of between $30-$50 a day or more per inmate, that's roughly $1.6 billion in savings. Any takers?

       Aside from drug laws, there are other, smaller factors to take into consideration. People are going to be angry when I say this, but repealing hate crime laws in mandatory. People found guilty of hate crimes are being sentenced to longer terms, sometimes the difference being the incarceration itself, even if only for 6 months. The person who gets called a “nigger”, a “cracker” or a “dirty jew” while being beaten bloody probably doesn't feel much more violated than the kid who just happens to run into the wrong bunch of thugs after school and gets beaten bloody. The purpose of hate crime laws is to deter racism and discrimination, but again, it is not the government's place to legislate personal morality. You can't tell someone not to hate. You can show them why 90% of the time their hatefulness is just pure idiocy, but you can't stop them from feeling it. It requires them thinking for themselves, which is something our government is greatly against.

       Educating people is obviously one of the most important steps in keeping them out of prison. Figuring out how to show a kid growing up in a poor urban neighborhood why it is wrong to rob the kid sitting on his stoop for his hand-held gaming system is a tough chore. This falls mostly to parents. A parent has to be able to guide their child from birth to help them make choices and learn how to make choices on their own. How to not give into peer pressure and what constitutes right and wrong.

       As a teacher (A+ certification instructor) for Job Corps, a program run by the U.S. Dept of Labor, I got a good first hand look at how hard it is to unroot someone's deep seated belief system. Core values that have been held for years and years. How do you tell a young adult of 16 years that the system they grew up in, being totally selfish and doing whatever it took to satisfy their immediate wants is the furthest thing from right? That it is impossible to determine that if you have a right to live, you must also accept everyone else's right to do so or you nullify yourself? That forethought in your actions will determine the outcome of the rest of your life and failing to use your head to think ahead will yield the worst possible results?

       It's a difficult task. I saw a couple students here and there grasp it, but most, having grown up in broken homes (if having had a home at all) just seemed to pass it off as something to listen to while waiting for class to be over. Their core values were made up primarily of “I'm getting mine, doing whatever it takes to do so as quickly as possible, and that's that...” It was often times impossible, even to get them to see the merit in doing things the right way for themselves. Sadly, a few years later I know a few of them are currently incarcerated.

       Perhaps it would be more fair to actually punish the parents. To let parents know that letting their kids break laws was going to get them in trouble too. We see this in theory all the time, but rarely in real life. Unfortunately, many of these parents grew up only knowing how to live in the “now” as well. Therefore, telling them that they'd be punished in the event of their minor breaking laws would only result in them seeing the reality of this when it came to light on their doorstep. Still, educating these young urbanites would be a huge step in the right direction. Helping them find hope in something once in a while wouldn't hurt, either.