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Locked Up in Land of the Free
By Scott Shane
Inmates: The United States has surpassed
Russia as the nation with the highest percentage of citizens behind bars.
Sun Journal
With a record-setting 2 million people locked
up in American jails and prisons, the United States has
overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens
behind bars than any other country.
Those are the latest dreary milestones
resulting from a two-decade imprisonment boom that experts say
has probably helped reduce crime but has also created ballooning
costs and stark racial inequities.
Overseas, U.S. imprisonment policy is widely
seen as a blot on a society that prides itself on valuing
liberty and just went to war to overturn Saddam Hussein's
despotic rule in Iraq. . . .
The latest statistics:
The
new high of 2,019,234, announced by the Justice Department in
April, underscores the extraordinary scale of imprisonment in
the United States compared with that in most of the world.
During the 1990s, the United States and
Russia vied for the dubious position of the highest
incarceration rate on the planet.
But in the past few years, Russian
authorities have carried out large-scale amnesties to ease
crowding in disease-infested prisons, and the United States has
emerged unchallenged into first place, at 702 prisoners per
100,000 population. Russia has 665 prisoners per 100,000.
Today the United States imprisons at a far
greater rate not only than other developed Western nations do,
but also than impoverished and authoritarian countries do.
On a per capita basis, according to the best
available figures, the United States has three times more
prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times
more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany. Maryland
has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than
all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times
greater. . . .
Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton
University, says sentencing policies have had a glaringly
disproportionate impact on black men. The Justice Department
reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s
were behind bars last year, compared with one in 63 white men. A
black man has a one-in-three chance of going to prison, the
department says.
For black male high school dropouts, Western
says, the numbers are higher: 41 percent of black dropouts
between ages 22 and 30 were locked up in 1999.
"I think this is one of the most
important developments in race relations in the last 30
years," he says.
Some conservative analysts say that however
regrettable the prison boom has been, it's working. It's no
anomaly that the prison population is still rising despite a
decade-long fall in the national crime rate, they say, but
rather cause and effect.
"If you put someone in prison, you can
be sure they're not going to rob you," says David B.
Muhlhausen, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
"Quality research shows that ... increasing incarceration
decreases crime." Considering that there are still about 12
million serious crimes a year, Muhlhausen says, "maybe
we're not incarcerating enough people."
Miscreants have been locked up for centuries,
but today's prisons are the legacy of 19th-century reformers'
desire to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than punish them with
whipping, dunking in water or being displayed in public stocks.
Quaker influence was behind the creation in
1829 of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, often
considered the first modern American prison. It took a century
and a half, until 1980, to reach 500,000 inmates. Then, in
slightly more than 20 years, the prison and jail population grew
by 1.5 million.
A major cause of the increase is the war on
drugs. In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the
Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were
locked up solely for drug offenses. Now the number is 450,000,
three-fourths of them black or Hispanic, although drug use is no
higher in those groups than among whites.
"Drug abuse cuts across class and
race," says Mauer, author of
Race to Incarcerate. "But
drug law enforcement is focused on low-income
neighborhoods."
Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at
Carnegie-Mellon University, says locking up drug dealers does
not necessarily reduce their number, because new recruits
quickly take their place.
The well-established penal theory of
"incapacitation," Blumstein says, dictates that
"if a guy's committing 10 crimes a year and you lock him up
for two years, you've prevented 20 crimes," Blumstein says.
"That works for rape and robbery. But with drugs, there's a
resilient market out there. The incarceration of drug offenders
is largely an exercise in futility."
A second major reason for the rise in
imprisonment is the politically popular shift to longer
sentences with mandatory minimums, "three-strikes"
laws and "truth-in-sentencing" measures to eliminate
early parole.
"Since the 1970s, there's been a growing
politicization of punishment policy," Blumstein says.
"It's the 30-second sound bite of the prison door slamming,
with the implicit promise, 'Vote for me and I'll slam the
door.'" A tough stance on sentencing usually wins votes,
whether or not it ultimately reduces crime.
Blumstein says the most rigorous recent
studies suggest that about 25 percent of the drop in crime in
recent years resulted from locking up more criminals. The rest
resulted from other factors, among them the ebbing of the crack
cocaine epidemic, changed policing strategies and the strong
economy of the 1990s.Now, with many state budgets in crisis,
there are hints of a turnaround. Justice Department figures show
that nine states reduced their prison populations last year,
including Texas, Illinois and New York.
The number of prisoners was still rising in
far more states, including Maryland, where the prison population
- excluding jails - has more than tripled since 1980, to about
24,000.
But many governors and legislators are
wondering whether they can afford to house more and more
offenders at an average of $25,000 a year apiece.
"Even some of your more right-wing
people are saying, 'Let's see what we can do to get some people
out of prison to save some money,'" says Reginald A.
Wilkinson, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and
Correction and president of the association of state prison
chiefs.
Like many prison professionals, Wilkinson
says, "I always thought we locked up too many people."
He says he's taking advantage of the budget squeeze to push for
cheaper alternatives. Ohio's state prison population has fallen
from its 1998 high of 49,000 to 45,000, and two prisons have
been closed, he says.
In Maryland, there's no talk of closing
prisons. Major expansions are planned or under way at North
Branch Correctional Institution near Cumberland and Eastern
Correctional Institution on the Eastern Shore to add 396 beds to
the crowded system.
"Maryland would seem to be stuck in
neutral," says Judith A. Greene, a senior fellow at the
Justice Policy Institute who has tracked the beginning of a
turnaround in other states.
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and his secretary
of public safety and correctional services, Mary Ann Saar, have
said they want to use drug treatment and closer supervision of
parolees to keep former offenders from returning to prison.
Saar's planned programs "all have the
goal of getting people out of prison and keeping them out,"
says Mark A. Vernarelli, director of public information for the
department of public safety. Still, he adds, given the steady
flow of prisoners sent by the courts, "we maintain a
constant vigil for land for new prisons."
Source: www.BaltimoreSun.com
June 1, 2003 If you like this article
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updated 28 March 2008 |
