Florida Sheriff Influencing Change By Working To Keep People Out Of Prison

Florida is one state in the U.S. with the highest percentage of residents who are incarcerated.

There are currently tens of thousands of inmates in Florida that are being held behind bars and that makes it a very costly prison system to maintain.

One sheriff in the Florida, Morris Young, has been looking to make some big changes by attempting to reduce recidivism and keep people out of jail, and he's doing that in a number of ways.

There are many difficulties that prisoners must deal with when they attempt to re-enter society, after they've been locked away behind bars for so many years for either a violent or a non-violent action. Young says that he believes in giving people multiple chances to try and get it right, to turn their life around.

Throughout Young's career he has allegedly pushed for low-level offenders to be given less jail time when possible, and opted for a different approach when dealing with drug users rather than rushing to arrest and charge them.

Young has reportedly been looking to offer offenders a new way of life and one of the ways that he's done that is not only by dealing with offenders differently, but by also committing to foster a program that links children of offenders with life coaches and professional counselors.

Since his time in his position of authority, the stats show that juvenile arrests in the area are down by 75 percent, violent crime rates have reduced by roughly 50 percent, and there are at least 65 percent fewer inmates being shipped off to state prison.

Fewer People Behind Bars Is A Good Thing!

The prison industry is big business for some though and Young admits that there has been push-back against his efforts to try and reduce the prison population, which he admits might be motivated by financial incentives.

There are some individuals who are serving life sentences over non-violent crimes, and each person that is held behind bars for such an extended period of time is going to cost taxpayers potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. That money doesn't seem justified to be spent on such endeavors and even the Florida Senate Criminal Justice Committee has concluded that they are essentially wasting people's money on their overburdened criminal justice system.

Officials have been looking to address the failure and make some changes in recent years which includes getting rid of minimum mandatory sentences and more. If officials would look to re-examine their approach to the war on drugs at the very least, and seek to change the way that they deal with non-violent “offenders,” and pardon offenders that are currently being held on non-violent drug-related offenses, then they could inevitably save millions of taxpayer dollars.

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