ONE IN 32 AMERICANS CAUGHT
UP IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

The numbers are from the annual report from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report breaks down inmate populations for state and federal prisons and local jails.

Racial disparities among prisoners persist. In the 25-29 age group, 8.1 percent of black men — about one in 13 — are incarcerated, compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of white men. And it's not much different among women. By the end of 2005, black women were more than twice as likely as Hispanics and over three times as likely as white women to be in prison.

Click here for the rest.

So much for "land of the free." There's something really sick and twisted about this. What can it possibly say about our nation that, in order for it to function, we have to imprison so many people? Nothing good, I'm sure. The article observes that the US now has some seven million people in prison, jail, on probation, or parole--that's nearly the size of New York City. Locking people up has become such an enormous enterprise that a literal prison-industrial complex has become an economic and political player on the American power landscape, which means that there is much more driving this criminal justice boom than simply crime. The foolish "war on drugs" obviously has a great deal to do with the boom as well, and, as noted in the above excerpt, locking up African-Americans, a longtime national tradition, also feeds the ranks of the imprisoned. Meanwhile, crime rates have increased over the last few years.

What the fuck is going on here? We're putting more and more people into the system, but crime is going up: it's clear to anybody who thinks about the issue for about two seconds that "get tough on crime" is an abysmal failure. Making matters worse, the US has essentially abandoned any real attempts to rehabilitate; we're all about punishment now, but to what avail?

This is a really twisted Gordian knot. The bottom line is that, while society certainly needs to get threats off the streets, we're dealing with it in a really retarded way. I know it makes a certain right-wing fundamentalist crowd feel warm all over when criminals "pay" for their misdeeds, but the reality is that this generally does nothing to stop crime. All the while it fucks up severely the people who are caught in America's vast crime net, often making minor offenders into real criminals later in life. Probably the quickest and most effective reform we can enact is to decriminalize drug use and roll all that enforcement money into prevention and treatment, but, like I said, there's a lot of money being made from the status quo right now, so that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Expect the prison population to continue to expand for the foreseeable future.

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