The United States, with just 5 percent of the world's population, has about 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
With about 2.3 million people behind bars, our nation incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. About 1 out of every 31 American adults is either in prison, jail or on supervised release - the flip side to “zero tolerance,” mandatory sentencing laws and “get tough” policies on crime.
And all this costs us, as a nation, about $68 billion a year.
The number of inmates in our nation's prisons has quadrupled since 1980, and state budgets for corrections have increased more than 900 percent over the past three decades.
The picture is even worse in Vermont.
The percentage of the state budget devoted to corrections has risen from 4 percent of the general fund in 1990 to 10 percent of the general fund in 2008. Our state's incarceration rate has increased 80 percent over the past decade, compared to a national average of 18 percent.
According to the Pew study, Vermont is one of five states - Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware are the others - that spend more on their respective corrections programs than they do on their higher education systems. The state should be ashamed to be on this list.
Vermont spends $1.37 on corrections for every $1 spent on public universities and community colleges. That is the highest ratio of any state.
According to data compiled by the Pew Center on the States in 2008, between 1996 and 2006, Vermont's prison population doubled - from 1,058 to 2,123 inmates - and the corrections budget increased 270 percent - from $48 million in fiscal year 1996 to $130 million in fiscal year 2006.
What are we getting for this money? According to the state Department of Corrections, half of Vermont's prison inmates released in 2004 had new convictions within three years.
But something is being done, something that will save money and reduce the number of inmates who return to prison after serving their initial sentences.
As part of the cost-cutting mandates of the state's Challenges for Change program, the Corrections Department has been told that it needs to reduce its budget by $7 million in fiscal year 2011.
To save that amount, the department will need to move more of its inmates into community settings - such as transitional housing or pretrial home detention - rather than keep them in jail.
When the situation warrants it, the department is also making efforts to steer nonviolent offenders, particularly those with drug and alcohol problems, toward substance-abuse treatment instead of prisons.
It's a policy that's long overdue. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 48 percent of all drug arrests in 2007 were for marijuana offenses and nearly 60 percent of all people in state prison serving sentences for drug offenses had no history of violence or of significant selling activity.
The other factor driving the increase in the prison population is mental health. The Department of Justice estimates 16 percent of adult inmates - more than 350,000 - suffer from mental illness, and the percentage is even higher among juveniles.
Study after study has demonstrated that carefully tailored rehabilitation models can reduce recidivism and drug use better than prisons, and that a program that emphasizes parole, probation and local drug treatment is a more effective way of dealing with low-level offenders.
This is a policy that needs to be emphasized here in Vermont.
We will always need prisons for hardened, violent and dangerous criminals. But prison must be seen as the last resort rather than the first option.