Most of us here already realize that the US has about 1/4 of the world's incarcerated prisoners, about 2.8 million people total.
But imagine you treated that population as its own country. That helps put some of the data in context, as you can see in this piece at Alternet.
The article has a map with the intensity of the color of the state matching the rate of incarceration. No surprise, the states with the highest rate of incarceration are in the Deep South - Louisiana and Alabama - with the addition of Oklahoma.
Consider this
Population size: As a country – as opposed to a prison system – Incarceration Nation is on the small side. Nonetheless, a population of 2.4 million is perfectly respectable: Incarceration Nation has a larger population than about 50 other countries, including Namibia, Qatar, Gambia, Bahrain and Iceland.
But there is so much more. . . .
Allow me to offer a few additional facts highlighted by this piece
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consider:
as many as 70 percent of children with an incarcerated parent end up incarcerated themselves at some point.
Combine that with the fact that often prisoners are housed well away from their families, and thus any possible family continuity is tenuous at best
men outnumber women by a ratio of about 12 to 1
which should not surprise anyone, given the history of crime and punishment, in this nation and around the world. But consider this:
Racial and ethnic makeup: If Incarceration Nation were located in a geographical region matching its racial and ethnic makeup, it would probably be somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps near Brazil. Roughly 40 percent of the incarcerated population is of African descent, another 20 percent is of Hispanic descent, and the remaining 40 percent are Caucasian or mixed. For the average American, this means that one’s odds of spending time in Incarceration Nation depend greatly on gender and race: a white woman has only a one in 111 lifetime chance of ending up incarcerated, while a black man has a whopping one in three chance.
let's examine that last sentence again:
a white woman has only a one in 111 lifetime chance of ending up incarcerated, while a black man has a whopping one in three chance
remember that convictions of crimes can lead to loss of rights and privileges
many states make it hard for one convicted of a felony to regain voting rights, to obtain certain licenses
we have a policy that any drug conviction, even as a juvenile, can lead to a permanent bar to certain federal benefits.
Somehow we seem to be viewing certain kinds of crime as having what are effectively lifetime punishments, while other crimes do not even get punished - the Jamie Dimons of the world for example.
This is big business - there are 800,000 employed as guards, etc in the nation's 4,500 places of incarceration. As the piece points out, that is more than are employed in the auto industry.
The piece points out that the average cost of incarceration is $31,000, that only one national government, that of Luxemburg, spends that much on its citizens out of its national budget - we certainly do not. Compare that cost to the average expenditure on public education, which nationally is less than 1/3 of that.
Why does this continue? Last night I posted a piece about a column by Krugman which among other things talks about how employers benefit from unemployment as a means of keeping wages low so their profits are higher.
Keep that in mind as I offer two paragraphs from near the end of the powerful piece:
Labor Standards: If you think low labor costs in countries such as China and Bangladesh are a threat to U.S. workers and businesses, labor conditions in Incarceration Nation will dangerously raise your blood pressure. UNICOR, a.k.a. Federal Prison Industries, employs 8 percent of “work eligible” federal prisoners. Hourly wages range from 23 cents an hour – about on a par with garment workers in Bangladesh – to a princely $1.35 for “premium” prisoners, comparable to the hourly wage of Chinese garment workers.
Who benefits from these low wages? The U.S. Department of Defense, for one. The DOD is UNICOR’s largest customer; in fiscal year 2011 it accounted for $357 million of UNICOR’s annual sales. UNICOR makes everything from Patriot missile components to body armor for the DOD.
We already knew that proprietors of private prisons had a strong economic interest in pushing for harsher punishments to keep their prisons filled.
Too many of those are the poor and minorities or both.
Is is possible that the profit motive in its many forms, along with the political agenda to dispossess certain groups (especially African-American men) of political power, perverting our criminal justice system?
What do you think?