I posed a question to my seminar students the other day:

We've been examining the corrections system as a social institution for some five weeks now, examining the impacts of an ever-expanding incarcerated population.

I asked, "How do you make people care about this problem?" "Tell them about how much it costs," urged some. "Tell them how it affects people personally," said others.

A student expressed discouragement: "How do you make people care about inmates and the prisons when most people here don't even vote?"

Indeed.

Over the nearly 10-year period that saw our state becoming the nation's largest exporter of inmates, our corrections system has become badly dysfunctional. But what happens inside our prisons and jails isn't the entire problem. Ironically, our badly overcrowded facilities are themselves a sort of prisoner, held hostage by the mandates of politicians and interest groups who see incarceration as the answer to a range of social problems, from addiction to poverty.

Overwhelmed by these ceaseless demands for harsher sentences, the correctional system began deporting our citizens to private prisons far from Hawai'i. There was no significant public debate. There should have been.

Nor did the public really comprehend the cost we would all pay for mass incarceration. As other jurisdictions have found, once embarked upon this road, it's painfully difficult to turn back.

So what do we know?

My students are coming to understand that increasing incarceration rates are tied only loosely to increases in crime. In fact, a relatively small part of the national increase in incarceration (perhaps 12 to 14 percent) is related to any real growth in crime. The rest is largely attributable to longer sentences coupled with high rates of recidivism that inflate prison populations.

The "get tough on crime" point of view argues in favor of deterrence and incapacitation for law breakers. And for some serious offenders, long prison sentences may provide a deterrent. However, experts feel that this is a small group indeed.

Further, criminologists see little deterrent for crimes related to drug use. Nor are the crime-control benefits of incarcerating drug offenders likely to be very large due to substitute effects by other "offenders" — the growing pool of people struggling with addiction.

Whereas intervention programs are widely expected to demonstrate that they work, our mass incarceration "program" seems exempted from proving its worth.

My class knows that increasing the length of prison terms, as in mandatory minimums, has no relationship to reducing recidivism. But we do know, thanks to a recent study of Hawai'i's policies by the Alliance for Children and Families, that imprisoning drug offenders places a significant burden on us all.

The number of Hawai'i inmates serving mandatory minimum sentences for drugs grew nearly 40 percent over the past 26 months. According to the same study, the "downstream" costs of incarceration may be one to three times that of the price of incarceration.

These costs involve pre-incarceration judiciary costs, child welfare inputs including child support payments, post-incarceration supervision costs and others. Even when weighing the benefits of the reduction in crime due to incapacitation, the state experiences a net loss.

The nonmonetary impact of incarceration on individuals and families must be considered. With more than 6,000 behind bars, including pretrial detainees and others in jails and all the Mainland transfers, this is an issue that touches many of our families. This means a direct impact on spouses, grandparents, other relatives and foster parents caring for an estimated 6,500 children of inmates.

This spreads the burden of these ineffective policies upon our most vulnerable citizens — children and caregivers.

Much of the impact of Hawai'i's increasingly punitive sentencing has fallen on women. Women, whose rate of incarceration has climbed substantially in recent years, have been disproportionately affected by making incarceration our response of first resort to problems in our communities.

Nearly 13 percent of our inmates are female — a greater proportion than in any other state. Harsher drug sentences are primarily responsible for this. These harsher policies produced a 69 percent increase in the adult female population.

And, this is just for Class-C felonies, the lowest level of offense.

My students also know this: There are alternatives to using long prison terms to deal with our social problems. And we are doing many of these things already in Hawai'i, albeit on a small scale.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, treatment does work, but it must conform to best-practices models. This means treating drug addiction in the community on a much larger scale. For those who are incarcerated, treatment should also replicate best practices and be followed up with aftercare in the community.

This combination has been shown to be very effective in reducing recidivism. Greater use of community-based approaches to corrections could make it possible to reduce our prison population to acceptable levels — and to end the practice of exporting our inmates to other states.

What is needed is a broader vision of what corrections can and cannot do — and a courageous leadership with the will to make it happen. But the public must demand a more thoughtful crime-control approach, from sentencing to re-entry.

This is the only way to create the political will necessary to transform something broken into something that works well for Hawai'i.

Marilyn Brown, of Volcano, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawai'i-Hilo. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.