There are about 1,400 prisoners at any given time. About 300 of them are mental patients and should not be there. The 300 beds used by mental patients in the Virginia Beach jail is more beds than the state of Virginia has across the entire state. Our Sheriff, former state senator Ken Stolle, believes incarceration of mental patients in jails reflects poorly on our society. I think he is right.
I was also struck by the large number of “gang” prisoners. Gang violence is something I’ve associated with larger cities, not Virginia Beach (even though we are the largest city in the state). Gang members tend to be the most violent and are the primary occupants of “the Shoe.”
Sheriff Stolle said the two primary contributing factors to becoming a prisoner are (1) drugs and (2) the lack of a high school education. The sooner you leave school, the more likely you are to end up in jail. I hate cuts in education spending but, at the same time, hate to keep funding the status quo, which is obviously not working.
Lastly, I asked the Sheriff about a recent article in Bloomberg magazine that pointed out that the U.S. has more people in prison as the rest of the world combined. As a percent of population, we are twenty times more likely to put our citizens in jail than Japan. Bloomberg asked the question, is the U.S. twenty times more evil than Japan? I put the question to the Sheriff, and his response was that we are twenty times more free and therefore more likely to make bad decisions on our own. While I don’t believe this is correct, I greatly respect and do appreciate Sheriff Stolle for all that he does!
Don’t miss an opportunity to study this problem up close. With costs estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars each year, it will be subject to the cuts in discretionary spending if Congress cannot pass the report of the Super Committee by year-end. It is chilling, indeed!