1. Ensure Proper Intake:  While we must ensure that the truly criminal are held responsible for their crimes, we must be smart in developing the proper pathways to incarceration. Simultaneously, we must recognize when incarceration is not the best resolution of the incipient criminality. For example, bad behavior by juveniles that is non-violent and not potentially disruptive of public order might best be addressed by other than time spent behind bars. Similarly, adults caught in the grip of substance abuse or mental illness and whose crimes are relatively minor in nature and most likely generated by their addictions or mental illness or both, might best be diverted from incarceration under systems that compel them to get their addictions or mental illness under control under sanction of law and simultaneously offer them the tools with which to overcome those same disorders.
   
2. Better Use of Incarcerated Time:Recognizing that approximately 90 percent of state prisoners and virtually all of jail inmates will be released back into the public at some point, it would be in the interests of public safety (both inside and outside prison/jail) to make the experience truly “corrective”. Programs that address underlying addictions and/or mental illness, provide for the development of employment skills, increase educational levels to the ability to read, write, and meet basic mathematical requirements, teach simple life-management skills (how to balance a budget, make use of public transportation, open/manage a bank account, shop for and prepare food, etc.), and offer faith-based underpinnings require minor investments and promise to save enormous prison/jail construction and other public costs (law enforcement and court costs, lost economic opportunities, health costs, neighborhood deterioration, etc.).
   
3. Smart Reintegration into the Community:It may be time to reconsider the insufficiency of sending the inmate out the gate with a hundred dollars, a bus ticket, what’s left of a thirty day prescription, and a stern warning to not come back. We need a true reintegration effort that would involve the labor market, the faith-based community, mental health and substance abuse treatment services, housing, and others to lessen the probability of either a near or long term return to crime. Merely cutting the recidivism rate of ex-offenders by a fraction would greatly decrease crime and public costs at the same time.

What are your thoughts?  How can these objectives be realized?