America loves locking people up, the land of the free is the land of the prison too. The so-called Prison-Industrial Complex has become a matter of national concern to rival President Eisenhower’s original warning about a Military-Industrial Complex becoming too influential in the world’s most powerful nation.
There are horror stories in almost every prison system. It’s in the nature of incarceration that inmates will suffer from poor conditions, that they will commit further crimes whilst inside, and try to escape or riot in frustration. But in America it’s the raw data that’s astonishing.
According to some analysts, the Prison-Industrial Complex can be dated back to the start of the War on Drugs. In 1973, New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller signed off on harsh new drug laws that set tough sentences for selling or even just holding drugs. It’s reckoned that the profit made by prison supply businesses has created an insatiable demand for prisoners as the raw materials of a giant industry. Prisoners are also a huge supply of very very cheap labor and as parts of the prison system have been privatized so another commercial imperative has entered the picture.
Here are 10 facts on the truth about American prisons.
1 – The most incarcerated in the world
The American prison population is proportionally the highest in the world. In 2009, of every 100,000 Americans 743 were locked up. In 2008 one in 31 adults were either imprisoned or under some sort of legal supervision like probation or parole. In 2009 that figure was 7.2 million people. In 2013, the prison population alone was said to be more than 2.4 million, more than 1 percent of Americans.
2 – Rocketing upwards
From 1980 to 2009 the prison population in America quadrupled. According to the Pew Centre it tripled between 1987 and 2007.
3 – Does prison work?
In a similar time frame to the rocketing upwards of the prison population, crime has been falling. Between 1988 and 2008, the crime rate in the States fell by about 25%. Could this mean that putting all those people behind bars is actually cutting crime? That’s something that will always be hard to prove and experts say much of the rise in incarceration is down to strict mandatory sentences brought in as part of the War on Drugs.
4 – Race plays its part
America has certainly had a history of troubled race relations and many campaigners suggest the racial make-up of the prison population is a reflection of continued racism. In 2008 one in 11 African Americans were either in prison or under supervision. Latinos were also in the prison system at a high rate of around 3.7 percent.
5 – Value for money?
Keeping people in prison is expensive. The average cost varies depending on which state is doing the locking up. New York prisoners cost about $60,000-a-year. Indiana is one of the cheapest at close to $14,000-a-year. A minimum security federal prison inmate costs, on average, $21,000, when it comes to high-security that rises to about $33,000. Parole is much cheaper, costing under $8-a-day, whereas prison costs around $80-a-day. Taxpayers are reckoned to pay $39 billion-a-year to fund America’s prisons with the total budget for incarceration being $60.3 billion. By 2020, the Department of Justice reckons it will be spending 30 percent of its budgets on federal prisons.
6 – The drugs don’t work…
Much of the massive growth in the US prison population has been driven by one of the longest-running wars in history, the war on drugs. Since the early 1970s that’s meant tough minimum sentences for all sorts of drug offences. On December 31, 2011 of the 197,050 prisoners in federal hands, 94,600 were drug offenders, dwarfing any other group of inmate. The picture is slightly different at a state level, where on the same date there were quarter-of-a-million drug offenders out of 1,341,804 offenders in total. Around a quarter of adults on probation are drug offenders and a third of those on parole. The Justice Policy Institute says that a quarter of the US’s prison population are drug offenders and 6.8 million Americans are drug abusers or drug dependent.
7 – Fostering resentment?
While the racial make-up of America’s prison population is controversial, all ethnic groups are dwarfed in size inside by another group of Americans, those who have been through the foster care system. In California as many as 70% of prisoners had had some experience of fostering.
8 – A labor market
There are plenty of people ready to argue that America’s ever growing prison population is benefiting someone, and it’s not the victims of crime. They see the prison business as an enormous racket producing gigantic profits and a huge pool of incredibly cheap labor. Thirty-seven of the states allow private companies to use prisoner labor and some of the biggest and best-known businesses in the world ‘employ’ prisoners – IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Intel are just a few. From 1980 to 1994 profits from prisons went up to $1.31 billion from $392 million. Some prisoners are paid the minimum wage, but many are not. Some privately-run prisons pay 17 cents an hour. This cheap labor is seen as an alternative to outsourcing American jobs to low-wage economies.
9 – Profits
With many prisons privatized, there’s money to be made in the system. Between 2002 and 2009, the number of privatized prison places rose by 27 percent. Some private prisons have come under harsh criticism, profit is generally made by cutting costs and this can mean poor conditions. Private prisons get around $200 a night for each prisoner they keep. Understandably, the prison companies are quite keen to keep people coming through the door and were reported to have laid out $45 million in lobbying to keep harsh sentences on the statute books.
10 – A matter of life and death
America’s use of the death penalty means that it has to keep many prisoners on death row awaiting execution. This costs a fortune, New Jersey spent $253 million-a-year at $11 million for each inmate. At the start of 2013 3,125 inmates were on death row. Many prisoners spend many years on death row, most prisoners spend at least a decade on death row and some more than 20, the longest time between a conviction and execution was 36 years.
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