Some of you know I've been threatening to put together a substantial piece covering Philadelphia's incarceration problem for a while. This probably won't be it but Karen Heller's Inquirer piece today is such a strongly worded piece, I had to put this up just to echo the seriousness of the problem.

"If the United States leads the world in incarceration," says civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, "Philadelphia leads the United States."

We have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than anybody else, 3.5 times more than New York City.

We're No. 1!

Prisoners are a growth industry. "Booming," says prison commissioner Lou Giorla.

It's not hard to see why. When so many of the city's population are woefully uneducated - almost 30 percent lack high-school degrees - decent jobs are hard to come by.

The drug-dealing business, however, is always hiring.

The criminal division heard 15,000 felony cases last year, 80 percent of them related to drugs.

"We're not doing the things that would prevent the market from growing," says Judge Pamela P. Dembe, chief of the criminal trial division. "We operate a justice system that is based on a very old model, a punitive model."

Amazingly even though Philadelphia is almost 1 million smaller in population than it was 50 years ago, we have never incarcerated as many as we do now and the costs aren't cheap.

This spring, Philadelphia's prisons made history - by having more prisoners in jail than at any time in the last three centuries, 9,334 prisoners, at an annual cost of $30,000 each. The facilities were designed to hold 6,433.

Two-thirds of inmates are awaiting trial, half for minimum drug charges. Some wait as long as two years for their cases to be heard.

It's an expensive mess. Fifteen percent of prisoners are mentally ill. More than 2,000 are held three to a cell designed for two; one of them has to sleep in a plastic shell on the floor. Due to overcrowding, guard overtime will hit $35 million this month.

A quarter of Philadelphia's budget goes to criminal justice, almost $960 million on cops, courts and prisons. And 80 percent of the criminal justice system deals with the nasty tentacles of drugs. Do the math. That's $767 million to deal with problems at the end of the line, not the beginning, before they all clot the system.

Sorry for all the quotes, but the staggering facts of our local problem have to be addressed in order for people to understand how pressing this problem is, how much it steals from the budget that could be better applied to prevention for youth and reentry services for people coming out of the system so it stops functioning as a revolving door. Philadelphia is facing a crisis of incarceration - literally.

Heller's piece is addressed to civil libertarian David Rudovsky's suit over the fact that our local prison system is unconstitutionally overcrowded. Locally we are currenly triple celling putting 3 into cells designed for two. The majority of those we incarcerate locally are simply awaiting trial - mostly because they can't afford bail for non-violent offenses. The courts are backed up from the crushing load of drug cases and we are using our local jail system increasingly as an expensive and incredibly ineffective mental health holding facility, in turn putting other inmates and employees of the system at risk.

This is a system in dire need of reform. Luckily there are solutions we could be using and Everett Gillison is examining some them. Amazingly besides being more effective, they also can save us money.

More on that in a bit, but folks can get started looking at how Philadelphia could be saving money better invested in prevention and reentry while making the system better by looking at this article - on options Gillison is investigating including GPS ankle bracelets and day reporting.

I have more to add but let me just say that I've been collecting some information resources for this issue over on the Philly ADA forum so please check there as well.