To the editor:

We should not expand the jail. Not because of waste; adequacy of facilities is a public responsibility. Deeply thoughtful friends favor jail expansion for sound reasons. Nor is “if you build it they will come” a fair reply. The jail initiative fills a current need, serving people who are suffering immediate harm.

My reasons are different. I have not heard an explanation for our disproportionately large jail populations. There are only two good reasons for jails: public safety and obedience of court orders. Based upon my experience, too many people are incarcerated without either justification, at great public expense and, worse, at incalculable personal cost.

For decades, at least since the beginning of the war on drugs, the United States has had the largest number of people behind bars in the history of the world. I do not believe it is because Americans are inherently more lawless. I believe our system needs reform and that we will be better served to explore ways to minimize the tragedy of jails.

Just one factor is our chronic underfunding of public defenders. Because accused criminals evoke little sympathy and few of us want to spend money paying for lawyers to defend them, carving out public funds for that purpose has never been popular. But have we thought carefully about the cost we bear when criminal defendants are underrepresented? Obvious is the problem of punishing the innocent, but how about the purely pragmatic comparative cost of paying for adequate lawyers versus the cost of jailing innocent people?

We should go back to the drawing boards.