WHY DOES AMERICA IMPRISON SO MANY PEOPLE?

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GLENN C. LOURY BOSTON REVIEW - 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 at all levels of government, a fourfold
increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so
many of its citizens. . . How did it come to this? One argument is that
the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational
public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by
imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument
is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have
reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the
1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison
boom range from five percent to 25 percent. . .

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to
rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively
more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn't),
not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a
collective decision to increase the rate of punishment. . .

Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated
urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis.
Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the
sellers - at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares
on street corners and in public vestibules - come predominantly from the
poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest
quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. . .

In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the
Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the
scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds
that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater
than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one,
the black-white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio
of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital
childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and
one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were
incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black
male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state
prison than a state college. The scandalous truth is that the police and
penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American
men and the American state. . .

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.4/loury.html

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