The over reliance on incarceration has resulted in the highest prison rate this nation has ever seen, destroyed millions of families and ruined countless communities.

Billions of dollars are spent each year on corrections--dollars, which are not available for improving our education system, providing health care for all people or ensuring a safe, clean environment.

Prisons have become repositories for the mentally ill and in fact, house three times as many mentally ill people as the nation's mental hospitals. Correctional facilities are ill equipped to deal with the special challenges of the care and treatment of people with mental disorders.

90 percent of incarcerated men and women will be returning to their communities; many have been exposed to infectious diseases such as Hepatitis C, AIDS/HIV, TB, and bacterial infections.
Despite a recidivism rate of 67 percent, legislation passed each year further stigmatizes people who have a criminal record, yet are trying to become productive citizens again.

Information found on The Pennsylvania Prison Society's web page found at http://www.prisonsociety.org/index.shtml

Pennsylvania’s county jails, it turns out, are no escape from big-prison problems, jail inspection reports and incidents over the past two years show. Even short time can mean hard time for county jail inmates, most serving sentences of under two years or awaiting trial. By their nature, the county prisons and jails are magnets for trouble, and much of it is never publicized. The state requires counties to report within 48 hours all ‘‘extraordinary occurrences’’ such as murders, suicides, escapes and outbreaks of infectious disease, but the contents of the reports are not released, only the numerical totals.

Across the state each year, about 1,500 extraordinary occurrences are reported — about two per month for the average jail. Most common are assaults by inmates on each other or prison staff — more than 2,500 have occurred since January 2001. Wardens have a self-interest in not reporting the true extent of the problems they encounter, said William M. DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an advocacy group for prisoners. ‘‘It’s their careers on the line, basically,’’ he said. ‘‘So it’s in their best interests to make sure that the operation looks as good as it possibly can. And often times it’s, ‘(Let’s) not let out what’s bad, let’s not make an issue of things, let’s keep them under cover

‘‘It’s easy to dismiss the significance and the importance of the assaults that took place inside the jail by saying, ’Well, they were all criminals anyway.’ But when you stop to think, it could be someone who, through a series of mix-ups or bad decisions, would get arrested,’’ he said. ‘‘It could be anyone’s son or daughter.’’

source: A/P

The abuse in county correctional facilities are worse than I had ever thought, I always felt sure that my loved one being housed in our local correctional facility would be treated humanely, mainly because the corrections officers that work there live in the same community with these inmates and their families. I had previously thought that because they lived here among us that they could never be so dim-witted as to mistreat the inmates that they are hired to watch over, obviously I was gravely wrong.

The recent Associated Press series on Pennsylvania's county prisons documented again the low status jails have occupied historically.

The war on drugs and mandatory minimum-sentencing laws, fueled by media and political "lock 'em up and throw away the key" In the past 25 years our county jails and state prison systems have been filled with substance abusers and parole violators and more women than ever in the history of our country.


Each year, more than 100,000 Pennsylvanians pass through the state’s local jails — some to await trial and others to serve time for everything from misdemeanor drug violations to felonies.

Conditions at the county jails can vary greatly. Some are by-the-book models of cleanliness and safety; others are poorly supervised institutions where lax security and poor sanitation expose prisoners and staff to violence and disease.

These locally funded and managed jails operate with little public scrutiny. They are not required to make public their annual state inspections or the reports they file on unusual occurrences, from inmate beatings to suicides and murders. What’s more, county officials would like to shut out the state’s inspectors.


reports provide a window on a system that has endured a string of recent scandals. They also raise questions about whether systemwide reforms are needed.

Ninety-six percent of the people going into the jails and prisons are coming out, they’re coming back onto the street, and so we as a society have to decide what’s really important.

tougher sentencing laws, particularly in drug cases, are behind the surge in the jail population — which has quadrupled over the last two decades.

We don’t treat, in any meaningful way, this addiction problem, If you have an addiction; going to jail isn’t going to rehabilitate this addiction.