Ezekiel Edwards
Welcome to America, Home to the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, and 2.2 Million Incarcerated Individuals
If you thought that our country could not possibly incarcerate more people in 2005 than it did in 2004, you thought wrong. The most recent numbers (as of the summer of 2005) from the U.S. Department of Justice came out last week regarding the size and makeup of America's prison population, and the results were not promising.
The following is a summary of some of the key statistics from the DOJ:
1) 1 out of every 136 Americans is incarcerated, for a total prison population of around 2.2 million people.
2) From mid-2004 to mid-2005, incarceration rates jumped to an average of 1,085 more people each week, resulting in 56,428 more people in prison by summer 2005 than at the same time in 2004, an increase of 2.6 percent.
3) The most dramatic increase --- 4.7 percent --- occurred in jails (as opposed to state and federal prisons), where many people are held awaiting trial.
4) The percentage of incarcerated women has risen more sharply than the percentage of incarcerated men.
5) The racial disparities of our prison population remain alarming, with around 12 percent of black men between the ages of 25 and 29 behind bars, compared to around 4 percent of Hispanic men and 1.7 percent of white men. Given those statistics, it should not be surprising that the five states with the highest percentage of their population in prison were Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma, while the five states with the lowest percentage are were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.
These disturbing numbers are not solely of concern for criminologists, but to economists as well. The costs to American taxpayers of building and maintaining prisons, and holding people inside them, are astounding. Our country's prisons cost us around $50 billion a year; it is not surprising, then, that the federal government's budget for its prisons is much higher than for welfare or childcare. In New York alone, where approximately $32,000 is spent every year on each of its 15,500 drug offenders, state prison operating expenses weigh in at over $2.5 billion annually.
America's incarceration rates stands shamefully alone in the world. How can we tout our democracy and love of freedom when there are more "un-free", officially disenfranchised people here than anywhere else on the globe? It is not only an issue involving criminal justice, economics, race, and human rights, it is an ethical dilemma that raises serious questions about our national character. Each year, we enlarge the force and urgency of those questions by incarcerating even more people.
We are long overdue for coming up with a different answer, an answer at once more humane (end the war on drugs, reallocate our resources away from prisons and towards drug treatment, improving schools, and economic revitalization), more democratic (demand that the Census Bureau desist using the usual residence rule, allow inmates to vote, intensifying voter education projects in lower- and middle-class communities), more color and class blind (end racial profiling, apply laws evenly to all races and incomes), and more cost-efficient? Judging by the most recent numbers, a different answer is going to have to wait, again, for another year.
Ezekiel Edwards: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 7:00 AM, May 30, 2006 in
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