Locked Up in Land of the Free Inmates: The United States has surpassed Russia as
the nation with the highest percentage of citizens behind bars.
(Note: whynot? We can afford it! -Bruce)

by Scott Shane

Published on Sunday, June 1, 2003 by the Baltimore Sun
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0601-01.htm


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.


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

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.

"Why, in the land of the free, should 2 million men, women and
children be locked up?" asks Andrew Coyle, director of the
International Centre for Prison Studies at the University of London
and a leading authority on incarceration.

When he discusses crime and punishment with foreign colleagues,
Coyle says, the United States is such an anomaly that it must often be
left out of the discussion. "People say, 'Well, that's the United
States.' They see the U.S. as standing entirely on its own," he says.

The latest statistics support that view. 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.

"This is a pretty serious experiment we've been engaged in," says
Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a
Washington think tank that supports alternatives to prison. "I don't
think history will judge us kindly."

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."

Copyright (c) 2003, The Baltimore Sun