Report: 1 in every 100 Americans behind bars
Total is far more than any other country in the world

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.

The report, released today by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," said the report.

And

"For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety," said the project's director, Adam Gelb. "More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers."

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.

"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."

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One in nine African-American men between 20 and 34 are in prison and some people dare to suggest that racism is a thing of the past? Typical, so so typical.

As I've written before on several occasions, US prisons are extraordinarily fucked up places. In addition to all the rape, murder, and violence there, prisons are also bursting at the seams and sucking public coffers dry. Meanwhile, as the article observes, society isn't getting "a clear and convincing return" on its expense. It's insane.

Years of tough-on-crime political dogma combined with the relentless but stupid War on Drugs, with poverty inducing "free trade" policies thrown in for good measure, have brought us to this nationally embarrassing state of affairs. It's looking like we're finally getting to the point that the public's lust for abstract vengeance disguised as "punishment" is encountering diminishing returns. That is, you can only keep locking 'em up and throwing away the key for so long before the general society is affected. And it's not just about how much it all costs: the fact that we don't even try to rehabilitate offenders means that prisons are essentially big universities of crime, turning people with "a bachelors in marijuana" into people with "a Ph.d in cocaine," to quote the movie Blow. Ph.d's in murder, extortion, robbery and you name it, too. Our approach to incarceration is, to say the absolute least, counterproductive.

We need to end the War on Drugs. We need to reshape the entire economy so that it serves citizens' basic needs rather than chasing the dragon known as "growth." We need to turn prisons into institutions of radical social intervention, instead of the macabre houses of rape and gang racism that they are today. We need to be honest with ourselves as to who we really are, that, but for the grace of God, or just good luck, we'd be in prison, too.

Eugene Debs said it best, which is why I've got these words permanently posted on Real Art: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Indeed, as long as there is a soul in prison, none of us are free.

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