Dealing With Root Causes To Tackle Incarceration Rates NPRHost Scott Simon talks with Jeffrey Beard, secretary of the California Department of Corrections, about high incarceration rates and the social effects they have on communities. Beard is a member of a National Academy of Science committee studying the high rates of incarceration in the United States. SCOTT SIMON, HOST This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News, Im Scott Simon. Jeffrey Beard has watched Americas prisons grow larger and larger every year adding prisoner after prisoner. He began working in the Pennsylvania Corrections system in the early 1. He was secretary of corrections by the time he left in 2. The Art Of Dealing With People Pdf' title='The Art Of Dealing With People Pdf' />Pennsylvania had more than 5. Its a trend thats matched all around the country. Jeffrey Beard is now secretary of corrections and rehabilitation in the state of California. A couple of years ago, that states prison system had grown so perilously overcrowded the Supreme Court ruled it was cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the state to reduce its prison population by more than 3. The Art Of Dealing With People Pdf' title='The Art Of Dealing With People Pdf' />That job now falls to Jeffrey Beard. Secretary Beard joins us from Sacramento. Thanks so much for being with us. The Penobscot Panawahpskek are an indigenous people in North America with members who reside in the United States and Canada. They are organized as a federally. The Art Of Dealing With People Pdf' title='The Art Of Dealing With People Pdf' />JEFFREY BEARD Sure thing, Scott. Im happy to be here today. SIMON And why is as a generalization why has the prison population grown to large BEARD I think it, back in the 1. Test a quality, property, or characteristic of people, things, or settings. We have all talked about or discussed hypothetical situations. Pinnacle Studio 10.8 Patch. A hy. CAREER ALTERNATIVES FOR ART HISTORIANS. Compiled by Charles M. Rosenberg Email Rosenberg. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education No More Plan. How to Do Art Therapy. When many people think of therapy or counseling, they imagine lying on a couch and talking to a psychologist about their problems. Art therapy. We began our war on drugs, starting locking up people who used drugs and sold drugs for longer and longer periods of time. At the same time, the public was very concerned about violent criminals, and sentences got longer for those violent criminals. And so today, the prison populations around the country have been driven largely by the fact that we have locked up more and more less serious offenders and we have locked up offenders for longer periods of time. SIMON What are the consequences of having so many people locked up I mean, certainly for the people who are inside the prisons, certainly for their families, but also the communities from which they come. BEARD Well, theres many consequences. First of all, youre taking people out of the communities, youre sending them away into the prisons for many, many years. They get lost from their families and then when theyre released and come back into the community, they have a very difficult time getting jobs, they have a difficult time finding a place to live. They have the stigma of incarceration thats hanging over them and it just becomes very, very difficult for them to reconnect to the communities. SIMON Secretary Beard, Ive heard a number of commissions who have studied the matter say that theres a need in the United States for what are sometimes called creative sentencing arrangements or alternatives to incarceration. How do you see itBEARD What you have to do is look at whos going to the prison system in the first place, and about 7. So instead of sending those people with substance abuse problems into the prison system, if we instead did a better job of providing substance abuse treatment to them in the communities, fewer of them would end up interfacing with the criminal justice system in the first place. About 2. 0 percent of the inmates who we get into the prison system have a mental health problem. Again, if we did a better job dealing with the mentally ill in the community, we could reduce the number of them who then interface with the criminal justice system. Many of the inmates who come into the prison system have low educational level, they have no job skills. And so if we did a better job in our high schools, increased our graduation rates, all of those things could help reduce the number of people who end up going into our prison system. SIMON Secretary Beard, with respect, I think, as I dont have to tell you, there are also people who say, look, Im sorry for the fact that this man or woman who committed a crime had such poor prospects in life and has such a low education, but if they did something wrong, theres a crime that they have to pay for. BEARD Well, yes. At the point that they commit the crime, I agree with you, they have to pay for that crime. If its a less serious crime, however, they dont necessarily have to go into the prison system. And if you decide you want to put them in the prison system, thats fine. But whats going to happen is theyre going to be more likely to go out and commit new crimes again in the future. So, I mean, that is one way to handle it. Thats what weve been doing in this country now for years. And what we see is our prison populations exploding and people sitting in jails for longer and longer periods of time. And it has cost an awful lot of money. You know, its a matter, do you want to keep spending billions and billions and billions of dollars locking up people in an unproductive fashion, or do you want to try to deal with the root causes that brought people to prison in the first place. And do you want to also try to deal with some of these less serious offenders in a different way and perhaps save yourself an awful lot of money and reduce the amount of crime thats occurring in our communities as it is SIMON Jeffrey Beard is Californias secretary of corrections and rehabilitation. He joins us from Sacramento. Secretary Beard, thanks for being with us. BEARD Thank you. Copyright 2. NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb. Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. 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