Incarceration's Impact on Society is Shameful

Bob Ray Sanders
McCatchy News

You won't need a calculator, but get ready to decipher a bunch of numbers — data that ought to make Americans feel both sadness and shame.

For those of us who've kept up with our criminal justice system the past three decades, these numbers I'm about to share are neither surprising nor shocking, but they do paint a startling picture of the impact our high incarceration rate is having on individuals, families and our society as a whole.

In a report issued last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts, researchers document the scale of incarceration in the United States and its direct effect on the earning power of former inmates and their children.


Collateral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility, a collaborative effort between Pew's Economic Mobility Project and its Public Safety Performance Project, also breaks down the impact imprisonment has on those of different races. Again, while that news isn't amazing unto itself, it should sound an alarm that will awaken us from our deep sleep of complacency.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with 2.3 million Americans behind bars, a 300 percent increase since 1980, the report states. This country has more inmates than the top 35 European countries combined.

While the costs of housing prisoners -- $50 billion annually for state correctional costs alone -- should be enough to cause us to rethink our way of doing things, the overall societal and human costs should be even more convincing.

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Congress looks at laws that criminalize non-criminal behavior

Lesley Clark
McClatchy News

WASHINGTON — Abner Schoenwetter, a Miami seafood importer, spent six years in prison, paid tens of thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees and is at risk of losing his home.

His crime? Agreeing to purchase lobster tails that federal prosecutors said violated harvest regulations — in Honduras.

Now Schoenwetter, 64, is a convicted felon with an ailing wife, no job or right to vote and three years of supervised release ahead of him. But he's also a star witness for congressional efforts aimed at stemming what a growing number of legal experts and lawmakers consider "overcriminalization" — the federal government's penchant for writing new laws to criminalize conduct that could be addressed with fines or other remedies.

"We must put an end to the notion that we need to prosecute every individual for every perceived offense," said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee that last week held its second hearing on overcriminalization. "We continue to lock up people for offenses that should not even require incarceration."

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The Prison Industry: Big Business or New Form of Slavery

Vicky Pelaez
NORML

HUMAN rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, "no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens." The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world's prison population, but only 5% of the world's people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

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