In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the
highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the
United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it
houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Corrections cost around $74
billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Prison and jail population Total US incarceration peaked in 2008.
Total correctional population peaked in 2007. If all prisoners are counted, then
in 2008 the USA had around 24.7% of the world's 9.8 million prisoners.
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the
world, at 754 per 100,000. As of December 31, 2010, the International
Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London estimated 2,266,832
prisoners from a total population of 310.64 million as of this date.
This number comprises local jails with a nominal capacity of 866,782 inmates
occupied at 86.4%, state prisons with a nominal capacity of approximately
1,140,500 occupied at approximately 115%, and federal prisons with a nominal
capacity of 126,863 occupied at 136.0%. Of this number, 21.5% are pretrial
detainees, 8.7% are female prisoners, 0.4% are juveniles, and 5.9% are foreign
prisoners. The imprisonment rate varies widely by
state; Louisiana surpasses this by about 100%, but Maine incarcerates at about a
fifth this rate. A report released 28 February 2008, indicates that more than
1 in 100 adults in the United States are in prison.
According to a US Department of Justice report published in 2006, over 7.2
million people were at that time in prison, on probation, or on parole. That
means roughly 1 in every 32 Americans are held by the justice system.
= Growth= The Bureau of Justice Statistics has
released a study which finds that, despite the total number of prisoners
incarcerated for drug-related offenses increasing by 57,000 between 1997 and
2004, the proportion of drug offenders to total prisoners in State prison
populations stayed steady at 21%. The percentage of Federal prisoners serving
time for drug offenses declined from 63% in 1997 to 55% in that same period. In
the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United
States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million.
Between 1986 and 1991, African-American women's incarceration in state prisons
for drug offenses increased by 828 percent.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that U.S. State prison
population growth rate had fallen to its lowest since 2006, but it still had a
0.2% growth-rate compared to the total U.S. prison population. In California,
the US State Prison population fell during 2009 for first time in 38 years.
When looking at specific populations within the criminal justice system the
growth rates are vastly different. In 1977, there were just slightly more than
eleven thousand incarcerated women. By 2004, the number of women under state or
federal prison had increased by 757 percent, to more than 111,000, and the
percentage of women in prison has increased every year, at roughly double
the rate of men, since 2000. The rate of incarcerated women has expanded at about
4.6% annually between 1995 and 2005 with women now accounting for 7% of the
population in state and federal prisons. Comparison with other countries
Comparing some countries with similar percentages of immigrants, Germany has
an incarceration rate of 76 per 100,000 population, Italy is 85 per 100,000, and
Saudi Arabia is 161 per 100,000. Comparing other countries with a zero
tolerance policy for illegal drugs, the rate of Russia is 455 per 100,000,
Kazakhstan is 275 per 100,000, Singapore is 220 per 100,000, and Sweden is 60 per
100,000. Causes
= Increased sentencing laws= A major contributor to the high
incarceration rates is the length of the prison sentences in the United States.
One of the criticisms of the United States system is that it has much longer
sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence
for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to
other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would
warrant at most 6 months in jail. Mandatory sentencing prohibits judges
from using their discretion and forces them to place longer sentences on
nonviolent offenses than they normally would do.
Even though there are other countries that commit more inmates to prison
annually, the fact that the United States keeps their prisoners longer
causes the total rate to become higher. To give an example, the average burglary
sentence in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada
and 7 months in England. Looking at reasons for imprisonment will
further clarify why the incarceration rate and length of sentences are so
high. The practice of imposing longer prison sentences on repeat offenders is
common in many countries but the three-strikes laws in the U.S. with
mandatory 25 year imprisonment — implemented in many states in the 1990s
— are statutes enacted by state governments in the United States which
mandate state courts to impose harsher sentences on habitual offenders who are
previously convicted of two prior serious criminal offenses and then
commit a third. = Drug sentencing laws=
The "War on Drugs" is a policy that was initiated by Richard Nixon with the
Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and vigorously
pursued by Ronald Reagan. By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had
increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges
accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have
been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.
After the passage of Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for
non-violent offenses dramatically increased. The Act imposed the same
five-year mandatory sentence on users of crack as on those possessing 100 times
as much powder cocaine. This had a disproportionate effect on low-level
street dealers and users of crack, who were more commonly poor blacks, Latinos,
the young, and women. Courts were given more discretion in
sentencing by the Kimbrough v. United States decision, and the disparity was
decreased to 18:1 by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. As of 2006, 49.3% of state
prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes. As
of 2008, 90.7% of federal prisoners, or 165,457 individuals, were incarcerated
for non-violent offenses. By 2003, 58% of all women in federal
prison were convicted of drug offenses. Women of color are disproportionately
affected by the War on Drugs. African American women's incarceration rates for
all crimes, largely driven by drug convictions, have increased by 800%
since 1986, compared to an increase of 400% for women of other races. Women of
color are also most negatively impacted by the collateral consequences of
conviction that follow their conviction. According to the American Civil
Liberties Union, "Even when women have minimal or no involvement in the drug
trade, they are increasingly caught in the ever-widening net cast by current
drug laws, through provisions of the criminal law such as those involving
conspiracy, accomplice liability, and constructive possession that expand
criminal liability to reach partners, relatives and bystanders."
These new policies also disproportionately affect
African-American women. According to Dorothy E. Roberts, the explanation is
that poor women, who are disproportionately black, are more
likely to be placed under constant supervision by the State in order to
receive social services. They are then more likely to be caught by officials
who are instructed to look specifically for drug offenses. Roberts argues that
the criminal justice system's creation of new crimes has a direct effect on the
number of women, especially black women, who then become incarcerated.
= Prison privatization= In the 1980s, the rising number of
people incarcerated as a result of the War on Drugs and the wave of
privatization that occurred under the Reagan Administration saw the emergence
of the for-profit prison industry. Prior to the 1980s, private prisons did not
exist in the US. In a 2011 report by the ACLU, it is
claimed that the rise of the for-profit prison industry is a "major contributor"
to mass incarceration, along with bloated state budgets. Louisiana, for
example, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world with the
majority of its prisoners being housed in privatized, for-profit facilities.
Such institutions could face bankruptcy without a steady influx of prisoners. A
2013 Bloomberg report states that in the past decade the number of inmates in
for-profit prisons throughout the U.S. rose 44 percent.
Corporations who operate prisons, such as the Corrections Corporation of
America and The GEO Group, spend significant amounts of money lobbying
the federal government along with state governments. The two aforementioned
companies, the largest in the industry, have been contributors to the American
Legislative Exchange Council, which seeks to expand the privatization of
corrections and lobbies for policies that would increase incarceration, such
as three-strike laws and “truth-in-sentencing” legislation.
Prison companies also sign contracts with states that guarantee at least 90
percent of prison beds be filled. If these "lockup quotas" aren't met, the
state must reimburse the prison company for the unused beds. Prison companies
use the profits to expand and put pressure on lawmakers to incarcerate a
certain number of people. This influence on the government by the private prison
industry has been referred to as the Prison–industrial complex.
The industry is well aware of what reduced crime rates could mean to their
bottom line. This from the CCA's SEC report in 2010:
Our growth … depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including
crime rates …[R]eductions in crime rates … could lead to reductions in arrests,
convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional
facilities. = Editorial policies of major media=
Gallop polling since 1989 has found that in most years in which there was a
decline in the U.S. crime rate, a majority of Americans said that violent
crime was getting worse. A substantial body of research claims
that incarceration rates are primarily a function of media editorial policies,
largely unrelated to the actual crime rate. Constructing Crime: Perspectives
on Making News and Social Problems is a book collecting together papers on this
theme. These researchers say that the jump in incarceration rate from 0.1% to
0.5% of the United States population from 1975 to 2000 was driven by changes
in the editorial policies of the mainstream commercial media and is
unrelated to any actual changes in crime. Media consolidation reduced
competition on content. This allowed media company executives to maintain
substantially the same audience while slashing budgets for investigative
journalism and filling the space from the police blotter. This tended to
increase and stabilize advertising revenue. It's safer, easier and cheaper
to write about crimes committed by poor people than the wealthy. Poor people can
be libeled with impunity, but major advertisers can materially impact the
profitability of a commercial media organization by reducing their purchases
of advertising space with that organization.
News media thrive on feeding frenzies because they tend to reduce production
costs while simultaneously building an audience interested in the latest
development in a particular story. It takes a long time for a reporter to
learn enough to write intelligently about a specific issue. Once a reporter
has achieved that level of knowledge, it's easier to write subsequent stories.
However, major advertisers have been known to spend their advertising budgets
through different channels when they don't like the editorial policies.
Therefore, a media feeding frenzy focusing on an issue of concern to an
advertiser may reduce revenue and profits.
Sacco described how "competing news organizations responded to each other's
coverage [while] the police, in their role as gatekeepers of crime news,
reacted to the increased media interest by making available more stories that
reflected and reinforced" a particular theme. "[T]he dynamics of competitive
journalism created a media feeding frenzy that found news workers
'snatching at shocking numbers' and 'smothering reports of stable or
decreasing use under more ominous headlines.'"
The reasons cited above for increased incarcerations have been described as
consequences of the shift in editorial policies of the mainstream media.
See also List of U.S. states by incarceration
rate Incarceration in the United States
Youth incarceration in the United States Race and the War on Drugs
Prison–industrial complex Mentally ill people in United States
jails and prisons External Links
U. S. Crime and Imprisonment Statistics Total and by State from 1960 - Current
References Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press. ISBN
1595586431 Gottschalk, Marie. Caught: The Prison
State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton University Press.
Book Hardcover ISBN 9780691164052, eBook ISBN 9781400852147.
Harcourt, Bernard. The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of
Natural Order. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674066162
McChesney, Robert W.. The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communications Politics in
the 21st Century. Monthly Review Press. ISBN 1-58367-105-6.
Potter, Gary W.; Kappeler, Victor E., eds.. Constructing Crime: Perspectives
on Making News and Social Problems. Waveland press. ISBN 0-88133-984-9.
Selman, Donna and Paul Leighton. Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons,
Big Business, and the Incarceration Binge. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
ISBN 1442201738 Notes