America has the world's largest prison population. It's not exactly news these days to mention this fact. After all, largely because of the way in which the war on drugs has played out here, the country long ago out-incarcerated Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa and all the other traditionally high-imprisonment countries. But a new report out by the London-based International Centre for Prison Studies explores just how extraordinary the numbers really are.
ICPS researchers estimate that close to 2.3 million Americans now live inside jails and prisons, giving the US an incarceration rate of over 750 per 100,000. A Rip van Winkle or Austin Powers character who had gone to sleep 30 years ago and just woken up would read this number and think he'd somehow travelled in his sleep from America to the Soviet Union. Of course then he'd read the history books and realise the Soviet Union no longer existed ... and then the realisation would dawn on him that this is, indeed, his home.
The huge incarceration rate detailed by ICPS makes even cynical prison watchers like myself - I have written three books on America's burgeoning prison-industrial complex - sit up and take note. In 1992, already a decade into the country's prison binge and the year before crime rates began plummeting in the US, 505 per 100,000 Americans were incarcerated - and that was viewed, at the time, as utterly unprecedented. By 2001, after eight years of falling crime rates, it had risen to 685; three years later to 723; and now to 751. And this rise is occurring not during a period when the public is listing crime as a top concern, as it was in the mid-1990s, but rather during years in which few people list fear of crime as their top concern.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2008/05/prison_blues.html
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