US Has the Most Prisoners in the World WASHINGTON - Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crime rates have contributed to the United States having the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal justice experts. A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed that a record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000. The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people in the highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. "The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. Copyright © Reuters 2006
Private Prison Corporation Offers Cash In Exchange For State Prisons As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact. Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for "challenging corrections budgets." The move reflects a significant shift in strategy for the private prison industry, which until now has expanded by building prisons of its own or managing state-controlled prisons. Corrections Corporation has been a swiftly growing business, with revenues expanding more than fivefold since the mid-1990s. And Corrections Corporation's offer of $250 million toward purchasing existing state prisons is yet another avenue for potential growth. A series of studies has also cast doubt on the private prison industry's main selling point: efficiency.
Private Prisons Conflict With The Values of a Democracy « Nisqually Jail Impact The Issues of locking up inmates for profit examined in the academic study Prisons, Privatization, and Public Values. The critical decision to transfer jail management from public to private hands has been done very quietly in Thurston County. It is a big decision with the following issues. Opponents of private prisons argue that their incentive to cut costs to maximize profits presents a threat to the safety of prisoners, prison staff, and the public at large. JUSTICE the industry has the incentive and the wherewithal to extend the amount of time convicts will remain in prison, and that this presents a threat to justice. Rehabilitation The profit motive, opponents of privatization say, distorts the function of prisons towards incapacitation and away from the provision of rehabilitative services that would help prisoners rejoin society productively, and curb recidivism. Legitimacy For-profit private prisons, jails or detention centers have no place in a democratic society. Like this:
Private Prisons Private Prisons, Politics & Profits By Edwin Bender Early the morning of Aug. 12, 1999, Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist took the podium at the 26th annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Councilto welcome attendees to Nashville. It was an intimate affair of some 2,700 in total, including a large number of lawmakers, state and national, gathered to discuss governing and public policy. Following Sundquist in an afternoon session the next day, J. It is fitting that Sundquist, an ardent proponent of prison privatization, and Quinlan, whose company is the largest private-prison corporation in the United States, should be addressing lawmakers and staff about public policy at a conference funded in part by private-prison corporations and held in Nashville, home to CCA. A standard-bearer for prison privatization, Sundquist's early efforts supporting CCA and its proposal to take over the Tennessee state prison system were met by stiff opposition. The total? In Alabama, Hal W. Gov. Sen.
America Has Become Incarceration Nation | Civil Liberties December 21, 2006 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Two remarkable developments in Washington in the past week highlight the extent to which the United States has become the land of mass incarceration. First, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Weldon Angelos for a first-time drug offense. The Angelos decision came on the heels of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report finding that there are now a record 2.2 million Americans incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails. The composition of the prison population reflects the socioeconomic inequalities in society. While the United States has a higher rate of violent crime than comparable nations, the substantial prison buildup since 1980 has resulted from changes in policy, not changes in crime. With a new Democratic Congress in place, there is hope that long-festering criminal justice policy inequities can finally be addressed.
The Return Of Debtor's Prisons: Thousands Of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Their Bills By Marie Diamond on December 13, 2011 at 5:20 pm "The Return Of Debtor’s Prisons: Thousands Of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Their Bills" Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It’s a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. NPR reports that it’s becoming increasingly common for people to serve jail time as a result of their debt. Take, for example, what happened to Robin Sanders in Illinois. More than a third of all states now allow borrowers who don’t pay their bills to be jailed, even when debtor’s prisons have been explicitly banned by state constitutions. Sean Matthews, a homeless New Orleans construction worker, was incarcerated for five months for $498 of legal debt, while his jail time cost the city six times that much. Stories of surprise arrests for unpaid debt have been reported in states including Indiana, Tennessee and Washington.
Raise the Crime Rate Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone. Hacker focuses on hazards like cancer and credit exposure, but these are not the only perils we face. When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent. It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble. America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe.
The Economics of Incarceration Nile BowieActivist Post For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected. While miserable statistics illustrate some measure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring in the detainment centers inside the land of the free, only a partial picture of the broader situation is painted. By allowing a profit-driven capitalist-enterprise model to operate over institutions that should rightfully be focused on rehabilitation, America has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial complex. The political action committees assembled by private prison enterprises have also wielded incredible influence with respect to administering harsher immigration legislation.