The land of the free has the biggest prison population in the history of mankind.
And how did that happen?
When I was a kid, there were a few hundred thousand people in prison in the United States.
Governor Ronald Reagan in California was proudly shutting down prisons.
Reagan was responsible for an inmate Bill of Rights and yet, in the last thirty years,
there has been a total transformation of the American prison system.
Today, there are about 2.2 million people behind bars in the United States – more
than in communist China.
I've been going into prisons for the last twenty years and who have I met behind bars?
Well, there are murderers and armed robbers and rapists and child molesters, but the majority
of people behind bars are non-violent offenders.
About two-thirds of them are African American or Latino. They're overwhelmingly poor, substance
abusers, a large number of mental patients, huge rates of illiteracy.
So, whereas thirty years ago in the United States we were building low-income housing,
today we're building prisons as a form of low-income housing.
There's about 200,000 women behind bars, overwhelmingly non-violent and many of them in prison because
their spouses, or their boyfriends, were drug dealers and they wouldn't rat them out, and
there are tens of thousands of people who are in solitary confinement.
Some of them are major gang leaders, some of them are people who are violent and it
makes sense to put them in solitary.
But the majority aren't and they're prey to all kinds of health problems, psychological
problems, being locked away for weeks, months, years by themselves in a cell, only allowed
out for two hours, maybe, a day.
For most of the non-violent offenders there are so many other, less expensive ways to
deal with them in the community.
For example, mental patients. We used to have mental patients in mental hospitals and then
we shut down the mental hospitals. So now they're in prison.
The largest single facility for mental patients in the United States is the LA County Jail.
And it is so much more expensive to incarcerate people with mental illness than to treat them
in the community.
In the United States we're privatising our prisons and giving them to corporations to
make money off of locking people up.
All of this is relevant in Great Britain because Great Britain is the only country in the Western,
industrialised world that's imitating American correctional practices. Great Britain has
one of the largest prison populations in Europe, over-crowded facilities, there have been major
cutbacks in staffing in Great Britain, a rise in private corrections.
And the other thing that's been imitated here is the whole notion of having large prison
facilities. You're building facilities here with a thousand inmates. It's exactly the
wrong way to build and manage a prison.
So why is it so important to look at prisons? Why is it so important what you're doing to
the people who are locked away?
Most of them will walk free one day, most of them will be on the streets, in the malls,
with people, and what you do to them behind bars has consequences.
But beyond that, what motivates my work on prisons and the American prison system is
the notion that if you really want to understand a society, look at how it treats the people
at the very bottom – and that's who you'll find in America's prisons."