Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard underscored the problem of overcrowding at the county jail earlier on Friday as he sought to explain the folly of the jail-'em-all mentality that law-and-order zealots like state Attorney General Bill Schuette hope to bring back into vogue.
"What we have is a jail utilization issue. We have people taking up beds that really don't need to be in jail. I'm not saying these people haven't committed offenses and don't deserve punishment, but there are other ways to handle them," Bouchard said, according to the Detroit News.
"We were 14 (prisoners) over capacity today," he said. "If just one or two of the judges had examined some of their sentences, we wouldn't have been in this situation."
Bouchard doesn't agree with simply allowing the prisoners to walk, which is essentially what happened after he was forced to declare an overcrowding emergency at the county jail earlier this month. Instead, he'd like to see them fitted with GPS tethers or enrolled in alternative programs rather than thrown behind bars.
For much of the 1980s and '90s, Americans' thirst for revenge via the courts drowned out any attempt to craft reasonable criminal justice policy. Jail construction exploded and sentences grew harsher as the nation cowered in fear at the nightly reports of urban drug violence and dysfunction. Meanwhile, entire generations of young men have found themselves ensnared in a criminal justice system that has become like a revolving door.
While the idea of jails and longer sentences as some sort of social (and economic) magic bullet has since fallen to the wayside -- many of us have even finally accepted that locking up juveniles for life is wrong, no matter how viscerally satisfying it may be to crime victims -- the impact continues to resonate and continues to make it difficult for communities to find the right balance between incarceration and other approaches to justice.
Locking 'em all up isn't the answer. But simply letting 'em all go -- especially felons -- with no supervision or alternative service programs in place isn't necessarily the best choice either.
Finding the right balance continues to be an issue that cash-strapped local communities struggle with. But we'd probably be much further along in the search for real answers if we'd spent less time treating the criminal justice system as a tool for "payback" and focused more on reasonable punishment.