1 in 100 American adults are in prison. And people of color have it even worse:
Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.
The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women.
And the excuses are astounding:
But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the “very tangible benefits: lower crime rates.”
In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rates of violent crimes fell by 25 percent, to 464 per 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987.
“While we certainly want to be smart about who we put into prisons,” Professor Cassell said, “it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.”
This guy is a law professor?
First, an incarceration rate of 1 in 100 does not mean that 1 in 100 adults has committed a serious crime. And considering how many people go to jail for non-violent drug offenses, I question how we’re defining the word “serious.” Further, throwing people in jail is not necessarily the best way to lower the crime rate. Sure, it works to a point — so does a total police state. But there has to be a balance, and I think it’s pretty clear that we’ve tipped it.
The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. China is second, with 1.5 million people behind bars. The gap is even wider in percentage terms.
Germany imprisons 93 out of every 100,000 people, according to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London. The comparable number for the United States is roughly eight times that, or 750 out of 100,000.
I don’t have German crime rates on hand, but based solely on my experience living there for a few months, I feel relatively confident guessing that their crime rates are lower than ours. Shockingly, factors other than the threat of incarceration (or the reality of mass incarceration) deter people from committing crimes.
It’s also expensive to incarcerate people at such an enormous rate:
On average, states spend almost 7 percent of their budgets on corrections, trailing only health care, education and transportation.
In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 percent increase when adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the Pew report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.
It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.
“Getting tough on crime has gotten tough on taxpayers,” said Adam Gelb, the director of the public safety performance project at the Pew center. “They don’t want to spend $23,000 on a prison cell for a minor violation any more than they want a bridge to nowhere.”
The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.
About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.
So why do it? If tax payers are unhappy, if imprisonment doesn’t deter crime all that effectively, and if this is costing a ridiculous amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere, why are we expanding this system?
Because the system is highly profitable and extremely beneficial for powerful people.
Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation’s criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains the thinking: “If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it’s because we built more prisons—and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower.”
The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a wide assortment of violent sociopaths. About 70 percent of the prison inmates in the United States are illiterate. Perhaps 200,000 of the country’s inmates suffer from a serious mental illness. A generation ago such people were handled primarily by the mental-health, not the criminal-justice, system. Sixty to 80 percent of the American inmate population has a history of substance abuse. Meanwhile, the number of drug-treatment slots in American prisons has declined by more than half since 1993. Drug treatment is now available to just one in ten of the inmates who need it. Among those arrested for violent crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty years. Among those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense. As a result, about half the inmates in the United States are African-American. One out of every fourteen black men is now in prison or jail. One out of every four black men is likely to be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime. The number of women sentenced to a year or more of prison has grown twelvefold since 1970. Of the 80,000 women now imprisoned, about 70 percent are nonviolent offenders. About 75 percent have children.
And that article is from 10 years ago — the numbers have only gotten worse.
Prisons are a great way for big corporations to make money — and it’s your tax dollars that are paying them. The increasing privatization of the prison system further enables companies to feed off of the prison “market,” with little public oversight. Someone has to build the new prisons that are going up every year, provide prison food, make prison clothing, and create an ever-growing list of incarceration “tools” to better control inmates — and our government is happy to pay private corporations to do it, even if those corporations routinely cut corners to the detriment of prisoners, prison employees and American taxpayers. Billions of tax dollars every year go to prison corporations, churches, investment banks, defense industry giants and other groups that exploit the prison population for economic gain. All of those groups have good reason to want to maintain our insanely high incarceration rates.
Corporations are also funding politicians to the tune of millions — $33 million in 44 states in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles. In other words, there are a lot of extremely wealthy and influential people who have a vested economic interest in maintaining a bloated, racist prison system.
And entire communities depend on prisons for their economic stability. They have disproportionate political power — prison inmates count as residents, meaning that the areas are allocated greater resources that the inmates don’t benefit from and they’re counted in the population of Congressional districts. And inmates, of course, can’t vote — and in many states, they can’t vote once they get out, either.
I have some sympathy for rural Americans who see that prison reform threatens their employment and their economic well-being — there are a great many rural pockets that are economically sustained entirely by the prisons in their communities. But that simply isn’t a good argument for our astonishing incarceration rates. Prison labor drives down wages for non-incarcerated Americans, which disproportionately affects low-wage workers. And the money we spend on corporate prison welfare could be better directed towards stimulating economic growth in rural areas.
We’re all getting screwed by the prison industrial complex — or at least, all of us except for those who work for the big corporations and lobbying groups, whose pockets are lined with prison dollars. But some of us — prisoners, for example, and people of color — are getting screwed a whole lot worse than others. Prison reform is one of the most crucial social justice issues in the United States, and yet even in an election year, candidates from all parties are silent about it.
When 1 in 100 adult Americans are behind bars, this should be a major issue. But because it impacts the least powerful people in society, everyone avoids it — including the progressive candidates.
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We should just ship ‘em all off to Australia like the British. (/snark)
No, but honestly. I live in the sunshine state, and we are all about incarceration and capital punishment here. It’s sad really. It’s extremely rural here (despite what you might think) and I blame all the inland counties on our republican situation.
The racial disproportionality and disparity are really mind blowing. Any discussion of contributing factors can often get bogged down by the argument that even though people of color are overrepresented compared to population levels (disproportionality) there is no disparity in that they really are commiting more criminal acts – b/c of overrepresentation in poverty, or the more idiotic will say b/c of innate differences in criminality. Evidence for disparities even in arrests would suggest that it can’t all be explained away by higher rates of poverty producing more criminal behavior, but we can even just set that argument aside and still see dramatic disparities in the system. If we just stipulate that it is hard to disentangle what true base rates of crime look like and even harder to control for the extent to which SES is a factor, we can still easily demonstrate that the system is stacked against people of color and gets worse at every stage in the game. For example, if rather than going back to proportions of races in the population at large and we just use the actual proportions of those arrested, we see that people of color are again over-represented among those who are detained following arrest. This increases again when you look at who is formally charged, and yet again when you see who is convicted. I.e., If you just look at the population of those charged with crime x, you see a shift in racial representation when you look at who is convicted, and it grows again for sentencing, and even for who is released sooner given similar sentences. At every step in the judicial decision tree structural/institutional racism plays out in decision making at the individual level. And this impacts women in ways that we are only beginning to examine, but an area ripe for study would be the likelihood of a DA to make a deal on a comparable drug offense for a mother of a young child dependant on the race of the mother. Likely an important contributor to another system where we see gross disparities – the child welfare system. How many would be surprised to know that only 3-4% of children in foster care in NYC are white? Poverty can explain away part of that disproportionality, but even after taking that into account there are clear effects of child race on decision making processes.
All of those years running Congress and still no answer. I’m sure Hillary or Barack will come up with some great social program to solve all the poor minorities problems.
35 years of experience and Hillary still can’t fix it. Her husband could have been jailed for lying in court.
I can see that mike but I’d really be interested in controlling all the stats/phenomena you mention solely for income and not race at all until we have the income numbers and then see how the overall numbers come out. also there are some areas of the country, large swatchs of maine, new hampshire and vermont, that are 98+% white, would be interesting to compare their numbers, at each step of the process, to areas with more ethnicities or areas that are 90%+ minorities.
35 years of experience and Hillary still can’t fix it. Her husband could have been jailed for lying in court.
And you could get a clue, but I don’t see that happening either.
“And you could get a clue, but I don’t see that happening either.”
Here are a couple of clues.
1. It wouldn’t involve making marriage obsolete, and thereby making the family of no value. I wonder how many of those rotting in prison didn’t have a daddy?
2. It wouldn’t involve me standing on a stage telling everyone they are never going to succeed in life unless the government facilitates it. I wonder if Barack and Hillary tell their kids they can’t succeed in America without the governments help, that is what they have been telling me?
3. It wouldn’t involve me raising taxes for anyone. These poor people need jobs, and the tax increases will be for those who create jobs for these people.
Yes, because the last 7 years have demonstrated just how much cutting taxes for the wealthy have created jobs. I must live on Silver Age Earth-2, where cutting taxes and pandering to the wealthy has only cut jobs and sent them overseas to increase the profit margins of greedy superwealthy jerkwads.
Oh, you mean like how the very white middle-class ideal we all are supposed to want was facilitated by the GI Bill and other government assistance that made it possible for huge swathes of the white population to attend college and own a home for the first time.
Yep, it is a new and unique situation that the US government can use entitlements to create a more stable, taxpaying middle-class by having higher marginal tax rates for the rich. Certainly, the highest tax bracket in the mighty 1950s had to be lower than now.
Wait…no…the top marginal income rate in the perfect 1950s was 92%
It would be nice if your ilk of ill-prepared traditional values “not a racist” racists ever actually looked up some facts when spewing out your facile solutions, but then you might not be able to judge!
…I mean, I love to judge, too, but at least I try to make sure I’m not spewing easily demolished crap that anyone with access to “the google” can smack down as inane nonsense.
Continue to ignore 1 & 2.
3. So, lets give the lower class a refund, even when they don’t pay any taxes to speak of and lets see how many jobs we get out of the deal.
Google this, I can find as many opinions about tax cuts that support this view as you can.
I am happy to see you cover such an important issue as prisons. Yet it’s really sad to see that even amongst progressives, the need to “divide and conquer” the conquered–MEN in prison–is so strong. In this case it feels like the sordid and sundry women of Rome picking through slaves in a marketplace.
Every time I hear this issue, it strikes me as a pity that although *white men comprise 50% of the prison population*, they are routinely dismissed thoughthey share the same troubles as other men, so even amongst progressives, racism thrives, in this case in two forms: race and class based racism.
But even worse,those talking about “people in prison” always leave out the fact that rates of incarceration for females is near the statistical margin of error of 5% of the population, meaning that prison is largely still all about defining “male” as “criminal”.
Worse, I don’t hear many female voices activating for true equality–women on the front lines of our nations superfluous imperialuist wars, but women from all other nations have done their time with arms and armor.
Case in point: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080309/ap_on_re_as/afghan_silver_star
Also not surprisingly, no progressive wants to mention the fact that prisons were invented to diffuse the political voice of lower income white men for the last 2 thousand years or so. The black men there today then, embody the inheritance of the “white mans burden” in that it is up to them to speak for inequality–and not surprisingly, they, and those who speak for them are as racist as white men ever were.
So we now find that instead of historic oppression (in the case of white males) we have the same division fostering rhetoric of voices of power (today, white women) , and more men in prison than ever.
Jack Henry Abbot wrote that men of all colors were chained side by side ion American prisons for all of the time he was in them–his entire life, from boyhood to adulthood until death–and it wasn’t until the power structure elite figured out a way to divide them in the prisons that the prisons became the rape factories, and violence universities that they are today.
Shame on the progressives for continuing this sort of pseudo liberation.
And GNOC, I have an idea: why don’t you give up some of your white privilege ( no longer confined to just *white people*) and the tax cuts that came with it for the last two centuries and then talk about a job creation program?
But you are right about Hillaryious–she defines family as “father in prison, mother with next donor”, but you fail to see the long term objective of that plan: these women want to create an army of the fatherless to go fight the wars that matrilineal, matrilocal societies are notorious for.
Boys fight and kill for mom ( mom is scared, it’s dads fault–dad is not home–too busy fighting for basic rights in prison), while girls produce more girls (wombs) to fill the ranks of the dying men who are at battle.
Vini Vida vici–and mom always knows best, right?
Ah the classic “if everyone can have it, it’s worthless and I don’t want it.” American logic at its finest.
Every time I read about this I want to do something, but I don’t know where to start. Does anybody know any organizations that deal with this problem?
jamesPi you missed my point. Income and other SES measures should only be a potential issue in the first layer – the actual base rates of commiting crimes. I stipulated that that is a complicated question to answer (although the evidence seems to suggest that SES accounts for part of the disproportionality, but not all), but even setting that aside if we just look at what happens after arrest race continues to be a factor at each stage from conviction through sentencing and parole decisions.
GNOC,
1. the trend towards fewer people marrying/more divorces is a worldwide one, not just in the USA. So why is it only in the USA that rising incarceration rates can be blamed on having no daddy around, do you think? Why is it in other countries that the incarceration rate is falling as unmarried families are increasing in number? (and what about all the unmarried people who still have both parents living in the home raising the kids anyway?)
2. You were answered on that one, even though you pretend you weren’t. The period of maximum government assistance in giving people a leg up the socioeconomic ladder coincided exactly with the period of greatest relative American prosperity in the 1950s, and it was all funded by your bugbear number 3, higher tax rates.
One such organization is Critical Resistance.
GNOC- 1.) everyone in prison had a daddy, that is an inescapable fact. Marriage alone does not make a family functional or ensure that children are raised with respect, civility or options. A bad marriage is as likely to leave a child anti-social and desperate as a single parent home.
2) Early intervention helps to identify potential problems in school and society and helps to facilitate programs that will help families, communities and individuals deal with continuing problems. This CAN be done privately but is more consistently done by putting support personal like social workers, nurses and phsychologists into the schools and communities. For smaller communities or those with a low tax base the best way to do so is through government-run programs that can spread the load out throughout society.
3) If you have already been missed in childhood the chances are that you haven’t learned the necessary skills required to hold and maintain a job. If you have already spent time in the private or public prison system, or medical/psychiatric systems then you are likely to be routinely passed over for a job. Most people want to work but getting thrown in jail for not having a job doesn’t solve the problem.
And just to be clear, it is ultimately cheaper to solve the problems early by finding them out with tax-payer monies than it is to wait and toss someone into a for-profit prison system later, especially when the profit is coming out of tax-payer monies.
Now let’s stop feeding the trolls.
Jill –
I can’t figure out trackbacks, or even if the blog I write for enables them, but I just wanted to let you know that I posted a little something about your recent articles that I feel are especially pertinent to Kentuckians. Our previous governor put up immoral roadblocks to civil rights restoration including a de facto literacy test for ex-felons. Our new governor has eliminated these road blocks and many people are working very hard to make sure that civil rights for ex-felons do not come and go at the whim of the executive branch. Kentucky is one of only two states that still permanently disenfranchise felons.
I find it disgusting that I, a person who pays her taxes, has a good job she works hard at, and is in every way a responsible adult, can go to jail for a very long time … for smoking pot.
my cousin was a recent HS graduate on his way to college. Good kid, football player, made good grades. He’s been in jail for nearly 10 years b/c unbeknownst to him, his new “friend” wanted rob a store with a gun and used him as the get away. He had never so much as received a speeding ticket before.
Straight from the NY Times
“The top 1 percent of income earners paid about 36.7 percent of federal income taxes and 25.3 percent of all federal taxes in 2004. The top 20 percent of income earners paid 67.1 percent of all federal taxes, up from 66.1 percent in 2000, according to the budget office.
By contrast, families in the bottom 40 percent of income earners, those with incomes below $36,300, typically paid no federal income tax and received money back from the government. That so-called negative income tax stemmed mainly from the earned-income tax credit, a program that benefits low-income parents who are employed.
Put another way: rich families were the undisputed winners from President Bush’s tax cuts, but people in the bottom half of the earnings scale were not paying much in taxes anyway.”
“also there are some areas of the country, large swatchs of maine, new hampshire and vermont, that are 98+% white, would be interesting to compare their numbers, at each step of the process, to areas with more ethnicities or areas that are 90%+ minorities”.
The Justice Policy Institute did a study comparing the per capita rates of state prisons admissons on drug offenses between whites and blacks of 198 counties with (I think) populations of 250,000 and above.
Cumberland County, Maine- 1.6% black population:
Overall admission rate- 7.43
White admission rate- 4.21
Black admission rate- 45.16
Hillsborough County, NH- 2.0% black population:
Overall- 11.21
White- 9.86
Black- 63.87
Rockingham County, NH- 0.9% black population:
Overall- 5.21
White- 4.97
Black- 0
One more:
Utah County, UT- 1.6% black population
Overall- 36.77
White- 33.32
Black- 251.64
CCA, aka
Whack-n-FuckWackenhut, is gleefully reaping the profits of destroying the lives of disadvantaged people. Capitalism has reached the point that people themselves are now just raw material for the corporate money machine.CCA and its pals in the prison-industrial complex hav a very powerful incentive to support / encourage / foment anything that increases their supply of human fodder, including the development of a totalitarian police state. They’d be very happy to see the last faint traces of democracy that we have now, fade completely. They’d be very happy to build concentration camps for dissidents, queer and trans people, Jews, etc. They’d be very happy to build mass-killing chambers – it’s just a matter of the fascists in government paying them enough to make up for the loss of long-term income they’d get by keeping the human fodder alive (and yes, I realize I’m invoking Godwin’s Law, but CCA and their ilk are the face of fascism). The CCA execs don’t think of prisoners even as animals – they think of them as meat.
Unless we rein in these companies and tear down the prison-industrial complex, and soon, I will fear greatly for this country, even if the Democrats regain power – they are just as beholden to the CCA gang as the rethuglicans.
mike, i got what youre saying but im not sure any stats fully encapsulate what happens after arrest as there are just a ton of possibilities and the reporting of what happens after an arrest is often flawed. if we are to really mostly look only at what happens after arrest, because what happens before it is too complicated, id still like to see it only from the economic side or at the very least see the process and stats for each step compared between majority white vs majority minority areas, say eastern washington state vs the miss delta.
ill never be able to fully internalize why the arrest and incarceration rates in the poorest county in maine (which puts it among the poorest counties in the country) are so much lower than the poorest counties here in georgia.
thanks acan,
I’m originally from cumberland county maine, hard to belive its about 250k now, the numbers from the 2000 census show 1.06% black and 1.40% asian, did the study have asian incarceration info? the admission rates are per/1000 right?
The study only looked at black/white rates, per 100,000.
And I might add, the study defines “admission” as incarceration in a state prison only. It looks at what happens to blacks as opposed to whites after they have been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced on drug charged.
Good morning all,
When a person (male or female, white, black,brown or red) does a crime,
they KNOW what they do is wrong. Period! Simple, if you can’t do the time,
then don’t do the crime. Jail is made too easy. Road gangs, jail farms to
grow their own food, work not tv, movies & work out rooms is the answer.
Those that ar MR or MH – give the help but those who think it is easy to just
rob, than work, well they need a huge attitude change. Those the rape
(childred or anyone) need to be put to death, period. Same goes for those
the kill (no matter how it was done, crashed your car into another car &
someone died. You were drunk!. No problem – death – now for you.)
Till you make it hurt the bad person, he/she will keep on. Otherwise you
are in a world far far far away from this one. Decent, honor, do unto others
as you want them to do unto you is our way then expect child rape or a Gov
enor purchase sex ’cause he is rich & got away with it. Or have a President
of the USA LIE and got away with it. Till justice is done, what you have will
be the rule not the execption.
peace,
George
Great article. The racial disparities in incarceration rates are sickening.
I have a real problem with private companies being involved in running prisons. the only way for that to be a growth industry for them is to keep individual prisoners in their longer and to increase the number of prisoners. Oh, and to cut corners, of course. There are many areas where making a profit does not work in anyone’s favor except for the companies, and this is definitely one of them.
This article doesn’t even take into consideration the outrageous costs billed to parolees and probationers following their release, or even those only sentenced to probation, all to justify the jobs of the probation department and correctional departments. First offenders are often fined heavily and assessed court costs. Whatever happened to the idea everyone gets one mistake? The most minor crimes by first offenders are being prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, all to justify the jobs of the judiciary, the court system, etc. etc. I’m a person who does not believe drug users should be imprisoned, but treated. I’m ashamed of our system. Land of the free, harumph.
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