NYTimes | One area where the United States indisputably leads the world is incarceration.
The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The U.S. prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail.
Proportionally, the United States has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times as many as Canada or China, eight times as many as Germany and 13 times as many as Japan.
With just a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined. Almost all the other nations with high per capita prison rates are in the developing world.
There’s also a national election in the United States soon. This issue isn’t on the agenda. It’s almost never come up with Republican presidential candidates; one of the few exceptions was at a debate in September when the audience cheered the notion of executions in Texas.
Barack Obama, the first black president, rarely mentions this question or how it disproportionately affects minorities. More than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.
“We’ve had a race to incarcerate that has been driven by politics, racially coded, get-tough appeals,” said Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University who wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
The escalating cost of the criminal-justice system is an important factor in the fiscal challenges around the United States. Nowhere is that more evident than in California, which is struggling to obey a court order requiring it to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 40,000 inmates.
Today, there are 140,000 convicts in California’s state prisons, who cost about $50,000 each per year. The state pays more on prisons than it does on higher education.
Yet the prisons are so crowded — as many as 54 inmates have to share one toilet — that Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted in the death of the pop star Michael Jackson, may be able to avoid most prison time. Fist tap Nana.
The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The U.S. prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail.
Proportionally, the United States has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times as many as Canada or China, eight times as many as Germany and 13 times as many as Japan.
With just a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined. Almost all the other nations with high per capita prison rates are in the developing world.
There’s also a national election in the United States soon. This issue isn’t on the agenda. It’s almost never come up with Republican presidential candidates; one of the few exceptions was at a debate in September when the audience cheered the notion of executions in Texas.
Barack Obama, the first black president, rarely mentions this question or how it disproportionately affects minorities. More than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.
“We’ve had a race to incarcerate that has been driven by politics, racially coded, get-tough appeals,” said Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University who wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
The escalating cost of the criminal-justice system is an important factor in the fiscal challenges around the United States. Nowhere is that more evident than in California, which is struggling to obey a court order requiring it to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 40,000 inmates.
Today, there are 140,000 convicts in California’s state prisons, who cost about $50,000 each per year. The state pays more on prisons than it does on higher education.
Yet the prisons are so crowded — as many as 54 inmates have to share one toilet — that Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted in the death of the pop star Michael Jackson, may be able to avoid most prison time. Fist tap Nana.
4 comments:
There I thought you were doing so well BD. Now you come bolting out the lazyboy in the den, all fired up with Faux News anti-Black propaganda and a fully-loaded Depend again....,
Maybe drug policies will change since it is no longer as profitable to incarcerate non-violent offenders.
Well, the gubmint can ill afford to keep it up, California being the poster child for system failure. However, since there are scant few employment opportunities for the surplus labor value pool, and, because many of these folks don't really know how to make honest living wage work for themselves anymore - I'm not sure we'll see either a loosening of the drug policies, i.e., the end to this prohibition, or, status quo with penitentiaries. I can see work camps and debtors prisons and other forms of punitive enslavement around that signpost up ahead.
Thirty percent of states already allow for debtors prisons so that might not be that far down the road.
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