by Joe Snyder
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I hope this column upsets you because the information in it surely shocked me when I ran across it a few days ago. It’s this: America has more people behind bars than any other nation, and our prisons are now bursting at the seams. Why?
The numbers are startling. Over 2.3 million Americans are in prison while another 5.1 million are on probation or parole. Altogether, the 7.4 million people in the criminal justice system outnumber the individual population of 38 states. Prior to the1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was similar to that of other nations. But the U.S. prison population has nearly tripled in the past quarter-century, making the U.S. incarceration rate the highest in the world – almost five times the world average, surpassing even China and Russia.
With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25% of the world’s prisoners in its jails. "The current American prison system," said Brown University’s Glenn Loury, "is a leviathan unmatched in human history."
Rising crime rates in the 1960’s led to decades of rough-on-crime politics, with legislators passing mandatory minimum sentences, "three strike" laws that impose lengthy sentences on three time offenders, and "zero-tolerance" drug laws. Nationally, one quarter of all inmates are serving time for drug offenses. Politicians at all levels are extremely reluctant to take anything but the hardest line on crime, and at the same time, seek to spend as little as possible on the prisons that warehouse all those inmates.
The record shows that crime has declined significantly across the nation since peaking in the early 1990’s. One of the reasons why crime rates are so low is because we changed federal and state systems to make sure that people who commit crimes actually have to serve significant sentences. The reality is that when anti-social people are in jail, they can’t commit crimes. But reformers say that even if tough policies helped bring down the crime rate, such efforts long ago passed a point of diminishing returns.
Overcrowded prisons, strained budgets, and the growing likelihood that prisons will become powder kegs. In California, for example, after a decade of court orders demanding improvements in jail conditions, the state’s prison system still houses twice as many inmates as it was built to hold. Racial tension, gang activity, and prison violence are rampant.
Reformers emphasize punishment that is swift, certain, and limited in duration, in contrast to drawn-out court appearances. They advocate stricter out-of-jail supervision to rapid result drug tests to keeping close tabs on parolees.
"Today two-thirds of those who leave prison will be back within three years," says UCLA law professor Mark Kleiman. "The exit from prison is a revolving door." By monitoring parolees and probationers more aggressively, Kleiman argues, both the crime rate and the incarceration rate can be cut.
It costs roughly $29,000 to house a single inmate for a year. With budgets so low, Sen. Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat, has introduced legislation that would create a national commission to study criminal-justice reform. Webb said that either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States, or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.