Rich Lowry has interesting observations about what is derisively called the “prison–industrial complex”:

Prison is one of the most important institutions in American life. About a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are behind bars in the United States, a total of roughly 2 million people. It costs about $60 billion a year to imprison them.

This vast prison-industrial complex has succeeded in reducing crime but is a blunt instrument. Prison stays often constitute a graduate seminar in crime, and at the very least, the system does a poor job preparing prisoners to return to the real world. Since 95 percent of prisoners will eventually be released, this is not a minor problem. …

In an essay in the journal National Affairs, Eli Lehrer sets out an agenda for reform geared toward rehabilitation, and the conservative group Right on Crime, a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, advocates a similar program.

Most fundamentally, prisoners should be required to do what many of them have never done before, namely an honest day’s work. Fewer than a third of offenders hold full-time jobs at the time of their arrest, according to Lehrer. They won’t acquire a work ethic in prison. University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Stephanos Bibas notes that only about 8 percent of prisoners work in prison industries, and about 4 percent on prison farms.

Labor unions and businesses have long supported restrictions on productive work by prisoners for fear of cheap competition, but their self-interested concerns shouldn’t obstruct attempts to instill the most basic American norm in people desperately in need of it. Prisoners should be made to work, but be paid for it and rewarded if they are particularly diligent and skilled. As Bibas argues, some of the proceeds can go to restitution for victims, to paying for their own upkeep, and to support for their families.

Prison should align itself with other norms. Inmates with drug and alcohol addictions should be forced to get treatment. There should be maximum openness to faith-based programs, such as those run by the splendid Christian organization Prison Fellowship. Prisoners should be encouraged to keep in contact with their families rather than cut off from them through what Bibas calls “cumbersome visiting policies and extortionate telephone rates.”

Once offenders get out, there’s a good chance that they are going back. Lehrer notes that about 40 percent of ex-prisoners are rearrested within three years. The goal should be to reduce recidivism as much as possible. Offenders shouldn’t be discharged directly from solitary confinement, or discharged without a photo ID. In the job market, they shouldn’t be denied occupational licenses when the job in question has nothing to do with their crime. They should, if their crime wasn’t too serious, eventually have it expunged from the records for most purposes. …

We have proved in the past several decades that we can lock a lot of people up. The challenge now is if we can do it more humanely and intelligently and, ultimately, create less work for the prison-industrial complex.

The number one issue that comes up when claiming that too many people are in prison is the drug war, as one commenter notes:

Stop treating drug abuse as a law-enforcement problem.

We should have learned that lesson from alcohol Prohibition.

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of young men, particularly young black men, have ended up in prison on nonviolent drug offenses. Caught by the “three strikes and you’re out” laws, all it takes is three drug offenses and it’s prison for years.

Rand Paul is right about this. The “three strikes and you’re out” laws should be amended to deal with violent crime, NOT drug offenses.

Our drug laws don’t take into account anything that scientists have learned about the effects and addictive potential of various drugs. Instead, they are a cultural statement about society’s moral disapproval of certain drugs (marijuana) more than others (alcohol).

Regarding occupational licenses, one commenter points out …

Only the potential employer has the right to decide if a criminal’s crime “has nothing to do with” the qualifications of a job or that the crime in question “wasn’t too serious.”

People tempted to commit crimes need to know that not only do they end up in prison but that they are forever restricting their options for the future to jobs that involve no handling of money, no being trusted with any responsibility, and no working without direct supervision. You do the crime, the consequences are your own fault and no one is obligated to hide the fact that you CHOSE to put yourself into the situation that you’re in.

… followed up by:

Why would anyone want to hire a convict?

Would YOU?

Stealing costs businesses a lot of money. Would you hire a known thief?

It is not the employer’s responsibility to provide employment for a convict. If you are worried about their job prospects, then instead of manipulating employers into hiring them, why don’t you start a business or nonprofit and YOU hire them?