Incarceration in America

According to two recently released reports incarcerating Americans, mainly black Americans is becoming a sport.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia).

Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections.

In December, 2006 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.


Another report by the Sentencing Project makes this abundantly clear.

• African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.
• Hispanics are incarcerated at nearly double the rate of whites.
• New Jersey has the third highest ratio, 12.4-to-1, of black-to-white incarceration, after Vermont and Iowa.
• States exhibit substantial variation in the ratio of black-to-white incarceration, ranging from a high of 13.6-to-1 in Iowa to a low of 1.9-to-1 in Hawaii.
• States with the highest black-to-white ratio are disproportionately located in the Northeast and Midwest, including the leading states of Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. This geographic concentration is true as well for the Hispanic-to-white ratio, with the most disproportionate states being Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
• States including New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island maintain black rates of incarceration that are near or below the national average, but have white rates of incarceration that are less than half the national average.

What is so alarming about this is the disproportionate rate this occurs to black Americans and their communities (hispanic rates are increasing, but are not at the stratospheric rate of black Americans). Of the 2.2 million people in jail, 900,000 are black. One in three black men can expect to spend time in prison in their lifetime if statistics hold true. While the increase in incarceration of our nation's citizens has had modest success in public safety, it has increased family disruption in nearly every facet of a person's life. The geographic concentration of incarceration is also shocking. One researcher found that three percent of a single Ohio census block comprised of 20 percent of the prison population. The same alarming statistics are true of Camden and Newark, New Jersey.

The evidence is there, however that this whole process is not by accident, but is an intended consequence of a more punitive society and an intolerance especially for black crime. Violent crime has plummeted while rates of incarceration have skyrocketed.

Glenn Loury:

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence.

The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime.

This is no longer an argument. All the researchers, public policy advocates and legislators know about it. We choose not to do anything about it. That could be the greatest crime of all.