It is a known fact that America has the highest incarceration rate in the world and people of color are highly overrepresented in the prison system. To lock up this many people, the country spends about $182 million per year.
Prison reform should be a top priority within this country; rehabilitation is always the better option when compared to severe punishment through incarceration. Instead of rehabilitating people who needed help for a serious illness and addiction, we send them to jail to further their struggle with substance abuse.
This past week the Miami Herald posted an in-depth article about the footage an inmate managed to secretly film within a Miami prison.
One worrisome aspect of the videos is blatant drug use and inmates visibly struggling and dying from synthetic drugs who the guards choose to ignore.
In one of the videos, you can see a man face down in a pool of his own blood as he coughs up more blood. This is due to K2, a synthetic drug commonly found within the prison system that kills inmates quickly.
“They don’t give a damn,” the prisoner taking the video says in one clip. “They don’t look, they don’t care if we’re living, they don’t check to see if we’re safe.” It seems as though there is no regard for any of the inmates as humans with families and loved ones.
Yes, many people in that prison broke the law and may have even hurt people, but that does not mean they should live in unsafe and unsanitary conditions — this is the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
We need to make rehabilitation a top priority instead of just throwing people in jail over and over again and never giving them the chance to get out of a system no one actually wants to be in. If we are able to help more people build better lives that do not involve crime, society overall is benefitted from a lower crime rate.
Without more rehabilitation, the opioid crisis will never be beat. We cannot expect to help people struggling with the illness of addiction if we keep throwing them in jails where they will just have more access to harmful drugs.
Clearly, jails such as this one are not rehabilitating anyone to live a good life once they get out of the system. Prisoners in this jail are just allowed to overdose all day long and the guards pay little mind to them.
This is not how a prison should look. America needs to change the way we treat people who have committed crimes, especially those involved in drug crimes.
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