The caging of America
“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then.
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.”
This is an extract from an article in “The New Yorker” magazine earlier this year.
To compare prison rates in the USA with other countries in the world, go here.
April 14th, 2012 at 10:07 am
Thanks to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, prison officials may strip-search anyone arrested even for the most minor offenses before admitting them to a jail or prison, even in the absence of any suspicion that they are carrying weapons or contraband.