Sherry Chandler

This news is so last week but it’s still worth being outraged about. Last Thursday the Pew Center on the States released a report stating that 1 out of every 100 citizens of the United States is in prison. That is 2.3 million people. Guess we’re winning to war on drugs, huh?

That means the U.S. has a larger percentage of its people in jail than any other nation in the world. Any other nation in the world. More than China, that bastion of human rights.

All those mandatory minimums really working out for us, huh?

And guess which state out of the fifty tops the list in prisoners?

Kentucky.

NEW YORK — For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

…

The largest percentage increase - 12 percent - was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state’s crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state’s inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

Wow! a 12% increase in the prison population. That’s almost as much as Governor Steve Beshear wants to cut the budget for higher education. That will amount to 15% over the next 18 months.

I know that’s apples and oranges, but according to the Washington Post:

Five states — Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware — now spend as much as or more on corrections as on higher education. Locally, Maryland is near the top, spending 74 cents on corrections for every dollar it spends on higher education. Virginia spends 60 cents on the dollar.

The national prison population is young. It includes:

• One in 53 adults in their 20s
• One in 30 men aged 20-34
• One in nine black men aged 20-34

Do we really think that 11% of our young black men are criminals?

Are we turning 11% of our young black men into criminals?

This should make us weep, people. We should mourn for our children.

Instead we view their incarceration as an economic opportunity.

Brent DeWeese, consultant to the jail, told the [Bourbon County] Fiscal Court that there was an opportunity to increase dramatically the revenue for housing state prisoners and ultimately cut the cost to the county of jail operations. DeWeese suggested that the county build another facility at a cost of 1.5 million dollars that would house up to 100 inmates. The new facility would be filled with state inmates, low risk Class D felons, and generate up to a million dollars a year in revenue.

In Kentucky, I rather suspect the population is swollen by mountaineers addicted to or dealing in oxycontin. Avendon Carol calls ours The War on Some Drugs:

…but I noticed recently someone referring to it as “The War on Some People Who Use Some Drugs”, which is perhaps more accurate; after all, it’s not as if more blacks than whites are using cocaine, but more blacks are in jail for it. Nevertheless, the drug war affects everyone as the police now have more and more power to assault, arrest, and frame people for any old reason at all, including “respectable” people. Parts of our cities are like occupied territories, but even white, middle-class housewives are starting to complain about an increasingly arrogant and out of control police culture. And yet, few politicians in Washington have the guts to demand that we put a stop to all this. America is not a better place for having become a society where the authorities are at war with the vast majority of the populace.

At first glance, that latter statement seems exaggerated and yet it seems to me that the last three decades have been years of stripping away our civil protections and ramping up punishments. To have a high percentage of the population in prison typifies an oppressive government.

Here are the first two paragraphs of Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles (Vintage, 1978):

When the rooster crowed, the moon had still not left the world but was going down on flushed cheek, one day short of the full. A long thin cloud crossed it slowly, drawing itself out like a name being called. The air changed, as if a mile or so away a wooden door had swung open, and a smell, more of warmth than wet, from the river at low stage, moved upward into the clay hills that stood in darkness.

Then a house appeared on its ridge, like an old man’s silver watch pulled once more out of its pocket. A dog leaped up from where he’d lain like a stone and began barking for today as if he meant never to stop.