Adam Serwer says forcing ex-offenders to pay for their incarceration is yet another perverse policy that makes successful re-entry next to impossible.
Indeed, the fact that the United States incarcerates too many people and spends too much money doing it is driving criminal-justice reforms in cash-strapped states around the country. Seven million Americans are in some phase of the criminal-justice system — on probation, incarcerated, or on parole — and spending on corrections has grown 300 percent in the past 20 years. The prison system now costs American taxpayers more than $60 billion annually. With a nationwide recidivism rate of 66 percent, the problem is obvious: Too many people who go to prison come back within a few years of being released.
