Overcrowding in US prisons

Timon Singh

Here's a disturbing statistic: in 2002, one in 142 Americans were in US prisons - that's a penal population of over 2 million. Not just that, but if you add those that were on probation or parole, then 7.2 million American adults were in the US prison system - that's about 2.4 percent of the US adult population or one in every 42 adults.

According to a report from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 2003, over two-thirds of America's total incarcerated population (1,355,748 prisoners) are held by the federal government in the 50 states, whilst local municipal and county jails hold the remaining 665,475 inmates.

Unsurprisingly, men were imprisoned at much higher rates than the 'gentler sex' with male incarceration occurring at the rate of 1,309 inmates per 100,000 US men, while the female incarceration rate was 113 per 100,000 women residents.

And these numbers are going up...

In 2007, US prisons and jails held 2,299,116 - that's one in every 31 American adults, with another 7.3 million in the penal system.

Large numbers

But why does America have such a large number of people in prison? Why are approximately one in every 18 men in the United States behind bars or being monitored? And why are a greater percentage of the American population in some form of correctional control even though crime rates have declined by about 25 percent from 1988-2008?

The answer is essentially The War on Drugs. Since the 1980s, the US has experienced a surge in its prison population with numbers quadrupling in the past 30 years. This has come about partially as a result of mandated sentences that came about during the 'war on drugs'. Other offences such as violent crime and property crime have actually declined since the early 1990s, but those arrested for drug offences have soared.

 

As a result, the United States has the highest documented per capita rate of incarceration of any country in the world. A report released in February 2008 indicates that more than 738 per 100,000 adults in the United States are in prison. By comparison, the incarceration rate in England and Wales was 148 persons imprisoned per 100,000 residents; the rate for Norway was 66 inmates per 100,000 and the rate in New Zealand was 186 per 100,000.

A system criticised

Due to the high levels of incarceration, as a result of the long sentences mandated under American law for nonviolent crimes such as theft and drug possession, the system is frequently criticised especially as it seems to target America's non-white population. Currently, 70 percent of all US inmates are non-white with 10.4 percent of all black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29 sentenced and in prison, compared to 2.4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.3 percent of white males.

The fact that many are imprisoned for non-violent crimes has led the Human Rights Watch to say that " the extraordinary rate of incarceration in the United States wreaks havoc on individuals, families and communities, and saps the strength of the nation as a whole."

Not just that, but reports have shown that 97 percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offences. Sixteen percent of the country's 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness."

As such, the US prison system has been called a "new form of inhumane exploitation" and one that costs the country USD$60 billion a year, with the average cost of incarceration per prisoner costing $23,876 per year, or $65.41 per day.

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