Project for Opportunity and Safety

Originally published by Missoulian
By: Bruce Meyers

Native American girls face the highest rates of incarceration of any ethnic group. They are five times as likely as white girls to be sentenced to do time in a juvenile detention facility. Incarceration rates for Native American women are also disproportionately high.

For you this is probably just a startling statistic – for me it hits very close to home. My daughter is currently in her 12th year of a 20-year sentence for drug possession.

It’s an all-too-common story on the reservation: our young people making serious mistakes with drugs and being sentenced to lengthy stretches in federal prison. When they go away, they leave behind their families and their culture. Sometimes they leave behind their own children, creating a cycle that is incredibly difficult to break.

There is no doubt the drug epidemic on our reservations is one of the greatest challenges we face. But it has also become clear that the main thing we’ve done to combat that epidemic – lock away the people who use drugs for decades – has not accomplished what we need it to.

Native Americans make up a disproportionate population in our prisons. Because crimes on the reservation are prosecuted in federal court, this is especially true for the percentage of Native Americans in federal prison.

Read more here.