There has been a drastic increase of prisoners in our jail system the past few years. There have been several complaints of overcrowding nationwide due to the high number of nonviolent drug offenders and high number of offenders in general returning back to prison.

According to the Department of Justice (2016), 67 percent of prisoners return to jail. This must mean our prison system is not working effectively to protect the community at large. These offenders don’t know where to go or whom to turn to get off of drugs and to find social support needed to stay away from it.

The price of the entire prison system is unnecessarily expensive, and there are other alternatives that can be more effective in reducing the number of drug abusing crime while reducing some of the $39 billion tax dollars per year on the prison system. According to the Bureau of Prisons, 46 percent of prisoners are nonviolent drug users, which is about 85,363 offenders in 2015.

The United States needs to be more compassionate about the issue of nonviolent drug offenders in prison and needs to come up with a better solution, which would be to put them into rehab instead. Putting nonviolent drug offenders in jail is not going to work with every crime that occurs in jail, the goal is to reduce the number of nonviolent crime by turning to counseling and rehab to get the nonviolent drug offender’s life back together instead of resorting to bigger crimes because they never were able to get their lives together.

I would think of putting nonviolent drug abusers in a similar concept with people how we treat people who get speeding tickets. People get speeding tickets when they are driving on the road a couple times; if it doesn’t happen often or if it happens the first time, they are sent to traffic school. The concept of putting prisoners to rehab means we give someone a second chance to get their lives together to get them off of drugs and to help them return to society in a more functional manner.

Even though this has not been tried, putting prisoners into rehab instead of prison would even reduce the number of people returning back to rehab instead of returning back to jail, especially when the social services are available and are also much cheaper than putting them into prison.

According to the VERA Institute of Justice (2012), it costs about $31,286 per year for every person in jail. According to Brande (2012), it also costs about $2,000 to $25,000 per month to put someone in rehab.

In the chart, Prison vs Rehab, there is a statistical analysis about the number of people who are in prison and for how long, according to the Bureau of Prisons. The statistics from the Bureau of Prisons show that 46 percent of offenders in jail are nonviolent drug offenders, the third column shows that the number of people who are in prison as a nonviolent drug offender. The fourth and fifth column show the cost to put someone in prison in comparison to someone who is in rehab for nonviolent drug offense. The calculation is for individuals who are currently in prison is based on the number of drug offense offenders times the minimum number of years sentenced in prison times the annual cost of being in jail.

The calculation in the fifth column is the number of drug offenders times the maximum cost of rehab for 90 days, which is $75,000. The cost of putting 2,465 federal prisoners who were nonviolent drug offenders who were put in prison for life, there was an estimate that they would be in jail for about 30 years in the analysis (even though they are really there for life).

The overall cost difference between putting a nonviolent drug offender in jail in comparison to putting them in rehab is significantly huge. If you put someone in jail or rehab, assuming that the nonviolent drug offender does not come back to either place, would cost about $23.8 billion. If we put those same nonviolent drug offenders in the most expensive rehab facility for 90 days, it could cost the United States about $6.4 billion. Putting nonviolent prisoners in rehab instead of jail could save $17.4 billion.

The annual cost of the prison system is about $39 billion per year; the United States can save about $21.6 billion in tax dollars if we decide to purse prison reform.

Enaya Hanbali is a native Southern Californian of Arab American descent. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and master’s degree in public policy and administration from California State University, Long Beach.