Should Nonviolent Offenders Be in Prison?
A look at why incarceration for nonviolent offenses often costs more than it protects, and what alternatives could accomplish instead.
If you or someone you love is facing time behind bars for something that never hurt another person — a paperwork offense, a financial crime, a role someone else pushed them into — it is fair to wonder whether prison is really the answer. The people who have spent time inside will tell you the honest answer is often no. Prison houses a population that includes men who committed no act of violence, who spend their sentences simply trying to survive and stay away from the parts of the facility where violence happens.
What Incarceration Was Actually Built to Do
Jail was designed to keep dangerous people away from the rest of us. Child molesters. Robbers. People who, if they were loose, would hurt someone. That purpose is real, and it is not controversial. When a person poses an ongoing physical threat, separating them from the public is exactly what confinement is for.
The trouble starts when the same tool gets used for a completely different problem. Handing out sentences of 15 and 20 years for offenses like tax evasion does not remove a physical threat from the community, because there was never a physical threat to begin with. It simply removes a person, at enormous public cost, for a very long time.
The Cost Nobody Puts on the Ledger
Long sentences for nonviolent offenses waste billions of dollars. That money pays for beds, guards, meals, and medical care for people who were never going to harm anyone. It is spent instead of being recovered, and it is spent instead of being returned to the very people who were harmed in the first place.
Think about what that means in a fraud case. The victims lost money. Locking the defendant in a cell for two decades does not put a single dollar back in their pockets. There are ways to confine people to their homes. And the people who were defrauded could probably get their money back — make the defendant work and take 50% of their income, or something along those lines. That approach actually addresses the harm. A prison cell does not.
Where Discretion Goes Missing
The system also struggles to account for how a person ended up in trouble at all. Consider a man serving roughly 12 years because he was a drug mule. He was mentally challenged — anything people told him to do, he was going to do. He carried the sentence while the people who used him did not.
That is the kind of case where you would expect discretion to matter, and too often you do not see that type of discretion. Whether someone was the architect of a scheme or a tool used by it should change the outcome. When sentencing treats those two people the same, it stops looking like justice and starts looking like a machine that only knows one setting.
Why This Matters to Anyone Facing the System
If you are the family member of someone in this position, understand what you are up against. The framework that decides your loved one’s future was not built with them in mind. It was built for people who present a physical danger. Making the case that your person is not that requires showing who they actually are — their limitations, the pressure they were under, the role someone else assigned them, and what they are capable of if given a path that is not a cell.
It also means pressing for the alternatives that already exist. Home confinement. Work requirements with income directed to the people who were harmed. Options that let a person remain a functioning part of a community and actually repair damage rather than sit idle while the public pays for their room and board.
The Larger Point
There is a population inside our prisons that was not violent. They were just trying to survive, trying to stay to themselves, and trying to stay out of where the violence was going on. Every day one of them spends in that environment is a day the system is spending money to accomplish nothing — no safety gained, no victim made whole, no person made better. Recognizing that is the first step toward arguing for something better, whether you are advocating for policy change or for one person you love.
Full Transcript
Would you say the people there that are there for the nonviolent reasons, like, would you say, like, man, this is not the place for them? Like, there needs to be some other type of alternative?
Absolutely. Let me tell you, there was a guy there. He was doing it about 12 years because he was a drug mule. Hell, he was a drug mule in there. He’s mentally challenged, so anything people tell him to do, he’s going to do. And you don’t see this type of discretion.
Jail was really designed to keep dangerous people away, you know, child molesters, robbers. If these people are loose, someone’s going to get hurt. But when you start giving folks 15 and 20 years for tax evasion and stuff like that, you’re wasting billions of dollars.
Now there’s ways to confine people to their home. And hell, the people who they defraud, you could probably get your money back, make them work and take 50% of their income or something.
But, you know, there’s a population there that wasn’t violent. And they were just trying to survive. And they were just trying to stay to themselves and stay out of where all the violence was going on in.