Photo Credit: Legal Career Path

There are a few hundred things wrong with the parole system as it exists in the U.S. A suite of books rather than one article is needed just to touch lightly on the subject. Some of my readers may think that parole is not necessary at all, 'Hell, keep 'em in prison until their time is up." OK, but who is going to pay for it? Take a state like California which spends over $43,000 per year for each one of its 150,000 inmates and thus costing its taxpayers over $6.45 billion a year. That's a Billion with a big B.

Parole, on the other hand, is 90% cheaper which could save California and other states billions of dollars annually. However, as it currently operates, parole supervision does not reduce crime or ameliorate recidivism rates although Hawaii has made beneficial improvements with its parole system called HOPE, Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement.

Excluding the HOPE model, almost all the other states' forms of post-incarceration supervision actually contribute to crime and increase the size of their prison populations because of policies that force most parolees to end up homeless, jobless, and penniless, and thus unable to treat their illnesses or addictions.

Let me give you an example: My family has businesses located in a number of malls in New Jersey. A few years ago a family friend asked me to hire a parolee, let's call him Hammer Jones, who needed a job. Before we could hire him the probation department required us to install a landline telephone at our kiosk so that they could call to make sure he was working when he was supposed to. Who the hell uses landlines anymore? But we went for the installation and the added monthly charges anyway as a favor to my friend.

An additional unnecessary burden was that he could not work alone. Although we didn't need two people working at the same time on certain days during certain hours, we had to hire an additional person to work alongside Hammer Jones. So I asked the probation officer what was the point of hiring Hammer when I had to hire a second guy to be there as well? She did not have any answer.

Another instance of how probation policies make it almost impossible to hire parolees is forcing them to attend drug or probation meetings during work hours. We needed Hammer to work from 3 pm to 9 pm on Thursday nights at the mall, a period when it was usually busy and so we needed at least two people on the job but he was required to run off to attend a probation meeting from 5 pm to 7 pm effectively leaving a big hole in the middle of his job. So again, I would have to send another employee to fill in the gap or simply not have him work 40 hours a week. When I asked the probation officer what was the point of forcing Hammer to leave a paying job, merely to attend a non-paying probation meeting (where he was probably being taught how to find a job), she did not have any answer.

If not for our mutual friend, I would not have hired him at all - it costs too much and is too much of a hassle.

But I don't think they'll fix that system any time soon.

Pay Parolees to Stay Straight

But here's a solution: forget about the whole parole system of meetings and drug couseling altogether. Pay parolees a monthly stipend to stay out of trouble. Take the average monthly cost of incarceration, in California it's about $3,500; then give each parolee half of that money if they pass their drug tests and avoid committing crimes. California could easily save taxpayers billions of dollars yearly and tremendously reduce crime as well, which cost is in the billions as well.

I believe a pilot program such as this would easily show that paying criminals to stop committing crimes is a much more cost-effective means of crime control than incarceration or parole without endangering public safety.

Forget about putting more people in prison since most prisons in our country already exceed their original design capacity. Forget about parole as it is currently administered since that hasn't either reduced crime or the high recidivism rate.