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.
Spend a day inside one of the Court of Common Pleas' four jury-waiver courtrooms and the parade of criminals never stops. One defendant, aged 41, had three trials scheduled simultaneously last Wednesday, from three drug-selling arrests in six weeks. He'd kept out of trouble for 10 years, then fell back because he couldn't find work.
Nonviolent defendants such as he, charged with petty drug dealing, constitute the majority of cases in these courts. If convicted, felons face mandatory minimum sentencing: one to two years for selling two grams or more of cocaine or heroin for the first offense, three to six years for subsequent offenses.
A packet of sugar is four grams.
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."
Punishment is not where we should put money or manpower.
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.
Who says we don't make anything anymore? We make prisoners.
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.
