For the past few years I've written rather frequently about prisons. Our prison statistics are now so ludicrous, so out of proportion, that one can do nothing but laugh--or cry--or do both.
Here's a good statistic to open with: Federal and state jails are packed with almost 1.5 million inmates, more than double the total in 1988." We are not yet a decade later--and we have twice the number of people in prison that we used to have nine years ago.
That is not really the joke: here's the punch line. "Drug offenders now account for almost two thirds of the federal prison population" Say what? Drug offenders? I'd feel a lot better if I knew that violent people were the vast majority of the people we lock up. Drug offenders? Drug offenders? Is that what we are packing our jails with? Is this a joke?
As the article goes on to say: "There is a widespread consensus among penologists that America is locking up the wrong people." You don't need to be no penologist to figure out we are locking up the wrong people. I want violent people behind bars--not business people who simply are in the wrong business. That is what they are--business people. And we are building jail after jail after jail to house these people.
Here are some more fun statistics. C'mon, you gotta laugh when you read that the governor of Washington said that "if his state continues to build prisons at the rate it is going, every Washingtonian will either be working in a jail or held in one by 2056."
I like that: you'll either be in a prison--or one of the people watching the people who are in a prison. Insiders & outsiders, those are nice, clearly demarcated lines.
Need some more yucks? "For the first time last year California spent more on its prisons than on higher education....According to a study by the Rand Corporation, California will spend 18 per cent of its state budget on prison by 2000 if it continues to lock up its residents with such zeal. That would leave just 1 per cent for Universities."
I like that ratio--18% of your budget for locking em up--1 % of your budget to educate them. After all, those you educate will just end up inside prisons or being guards at a prison--how much education do guards need--or is it crooks for crooks that they'll become. Half the country inside prisons--the other half working in some way connected to prisons.
The article I am quoting from appeared in the British newspaper, The Guardian. Here is one final line from the article: "Texas alone has more prisoners than the entire country had in 1948." We have become a country of out-laws and in-laws whose job it is to watch outlaws.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein