The prison population in the United States is finally declining, thankfully, and at the Washington Post, Patricia O’Brien has a modest proposal for thinning that crowd even more: Stop incarcerating women, no matter the crime. Her suggestion is extreme, and we’d probably be better off just eliminating sentencing for most drug-possession crimes for both genders, though she does make some good points. An excerpt:

“Could women’s prisons actually be eliminated in the United States, where the rate of women’s incarceration has risen by 646 percent in the past 30 years? The context is different, but many of the arguments are the same.

Essentially, the case for closing women’s prisons is the same as the case for imprisoning fewer men. It is the case against the prison industrial complex and for community-based treatment where it works better than incarceration. But there is evidence that prison harms women more than men, so why not start there?

Any examination of the women who are in U.S. prisons reveals that the majority are nonviolent offenders with poor education, little employment experience and multiple histories of abuse from childhood through adulthood. Women are also more likely than men to have children who rely on them for support — 147,000 American children have mothers in prison.

Prison nation

The United States is a prison nation. More than 1.5 million people are incarcerated in the country. And this obsession with punishment is expensive. Cumulatively, states spend more than $52 billion a year on their prison systems. The federal government also spends tens of billions to police, prosecute and imprison people, though research demonstrates that incarceration harms individual well-being and does not improve public safety.

What purpose is served by subjecting the most disempowered, abused and nonviolent women to the perpetually negative environment of prisons?”