In the article Arrest, Release, Repeat; how police and jails are misused to respond to social problems by Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer, they researched into local jails and how the populations of jails and the policing are being used to respond to incidents that shouldn’t have been addressed by the police to begin with. This research found that there was an absurd amount of people in 2017 were arrested more than two times (430,000) and the people arrested more than twice were disproportionately from marginalized and systematically oppressed people. The groups that were mainly targeted were low income, low education, people of color (Mostly African American) and those with greater health needs; substance abuse, moderate to serious mental illnesses, and no health insurance.
None of this was a huge surprise for me to read, this system was based around the arrest of the minority groups; from the poor to the color of someones skin. Though it is a widely known fact, it raises the question as to why we haven’t seen any changes. Jones and Sawyer concluded that they found with their researchers that many of the multi-offenders are just people who lack the resources to meet the proper medical and mental health professionals. At the very end of the article the authors make a couple suggestions as to how to help these groups of people to, hopefully, keep them out of the criminal justice system. The two I found to be the most interesting to me were the suggestion of a community focused health care for substance abuse, I think it would be incredibly beneficial if we focused a bit more towards that because not only would it allow for people to get help they need while also being supported by people who also struggle within their own community. The second recommendation that was made that interested me was the idea of “Housing First” which would provide a stable home before focusing on unemployment and medical care. I think this has a potential to do great things, as they noted, it could potentially pay for itself by minimizing the use of emergency resources and also by breaking this cycle of release and reincarnation.
Obviously both suggestions have their downside, between getting a community to agree upon and allow it and the legal properties that play into making these environments, as they are tax payer created, are hurdles within themselves. If we as a society managed to push something as big as these, I think we’d find a much more positive turnover rate in terms of less repeat incarceration and more productivity within the society.
Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/repeatarrests.html
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