"If you build them, we will put them in jail."

by jgr80

The International Centre for Prison Studies released this graphic last week in their annual report. The darker the red, the more citizens incarcerated per capita.

Four regions have more than 500 prisoners per 100,000 people: Bahamas, Belarus, Russia, and the United States.

The first three have political issues that really put them in a different class than the United States. Democratic and human rights are hurting in the first three countries. So much so, that it might not be surprising to see so many people arrested within their borders.

This doesn't explain why the U.S. has so many prisoners.

What the graphic doesn't show is that the U.S. could be in its own category. A year ago, Glenn Loury reported:

"According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia)." (continue...)

Could it be that there is an angry, overly-aggressive, inherently different citizenry south of the border? Unlikely.

Loury continued,

"imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment."

It's fairly well-known that crime rates in the United States have fallen in the last two decades. Not only has it been reported on widely in the news, but incredibly thoughtful analyses have appeared in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and in Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

The rising number of prisoners has also been reported on, but not nearly with the same vigor.

Loury continues,

"We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century."

Money.

The money has given rise to private interests in the corrections system. I first heard about this last year in a documentary, although it's not the newest of developments. The documentary cited the stiff penalties for drug violations as the primary reason for the rise, while also saying that the privatized prison industry is the fastest growing industry in the U.S.

The privatization of U.S. prisons became significant in the early 90s. It's just been kept on the down-lo because of the obvious shady politics involved. (The same process has begun in Canada in the last few years.)

The incarceration system and process is paid for by the federal government in the U.S. The profits are gained by the private sector. No wonder there are more prisoners than ever before.

In December 1998, Eric Schlosser wrote in The Atlantic:

"The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass tough-on-crime legislation -- combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws -- has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties."

Privatized prisons raise concerns about treatment, facilities, and staffing.



I wonder who thought this was a good idea... mixing the public good with private interests. The more jails the U.S. builds, the more people they put behind bars.

Further Reading: The Washington Post