A new report released last week by the Pew Center for States reported that more than 1 in 100 american adults is incarcerated. From a New York Times article about the report:
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing
it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.
The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in
every 99.1 adults is behind bars.
Incarceration rates are even
higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based
on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too,
as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.
The
report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in
355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that
one in 100 black women are.
Susan Uhran, director of the Pew Center on the States is quoted as saying, "we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration."
Some interesting statistics about prison spending from the report were listed in the article:
- In 2007, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127% increase once adjusted for inflation. This accounts for about 7% of states' budgets.
- It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available.
- About one in nine state government employees works in corrections.
Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah is also quoted in the article and links the higher incarceration rates to lower violent crime rates in the last 20 years. He says, "one out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.”
I find this analysis troubling because, even if there is a direct link between violent crime rates and incarceration rates, the idea that 1 out of every 100 U.S. adults has "comitted a serious criminal offense" does not ring as a shining endorsement for the success of incarceration. I find it deeply unsatisfying that we live in a culture where so many can be considered serious criminals. The pervasiveness of incarceration suggests that the cause of incarceration is not isolated acts of criminal intent, but the culture itself, in the way it chooses to criminalize certain actions and looks to incarceration as a solution instead of looking at apparent social needs that have been linked to crime.
Link to New York Times article.
March 4's edition of Free Speech Radio news also included coverage of the Pew report.
Link to Free Speech Radio News report.
