by David Kaczynski

Our criminal justice system is single-minded in seeking to incapacitate people prone to anti-social behavior. While some people certainly need to be incapacitated to protect the rest of us, the blind pursuit of retribution can do more harm than good.
 
When police and prosecutors are overzealous, innocent people may be sent to prison or even executed (in states that have the death penalty) for crimes that they did not commit.  But there are other unintended consequences as well:
 
If all or most public safety resources go toward punishment and incapacitation, then not enough is left over to support programs that have been shown to save lives by addressing the root causes of crime. For example, the Governor’s proposed state budget contains a 40% cut in programs designed to prevent child abuse. While it is understandable that we all need to sacrifice a little to help balance our state’s budget, it is disturbing to think that those being asked to sacrifice most are young children exposed to the risk of abuse. Unless this funding is restored, we will all end up footing the bill to incapacitate a growing number of adults who were left unprotected as children.
 
In our zeal to punish, we often fail to correct and educate. Not enough correcting is going on in our correctional facilities. 96% of state prison inmates will return to their communities at some point. It would only make sense, morally and fiscally, to convert the inmate’s loss of freedom into a net gain in self-awareness through programs that promote social and emotional learning. When people emerge from prisons more damaged than when they went in, we are only compounding our problem. Fortunately, we are now  seeing  some positive movement as more experts – working both in and outside the system - are buying into the premise that effective re-entry planning, including life skills education, needs to begin on day one of incarceration.
 
Who do you think gets left out in the cold when we pour all of our resources and energy into punishing the offender? It’s the victim. New York’s victim compensation fund is terribly underfunded – miniscule when compared with the amount of money devoted to the incarceration and supervision of offenders, and not nearly enough to cover the needs of New York crime victims. If you lose everything in a natural disaster, you may well receive some assistance. But if you lose a loved one to homicide, you may only get a fraction of what’s needed to cover the financial costs, and little or nothing for  treatment to help you cope with the emotional impact of such a traumatic loss.
 
Friends of mine in Connecticut were refused burial costs for their murdered son from that state’s victims’ compensation fund because the police report speculated that he was trying to buy marijuana when he was murdered. The murderer was considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law – but not so the victim. No matter what the son may have been doing when he was killed, his parents surely deserved to be treated as the innocent victims that they are.