1st day issue (v.3): 1 in 99 adults behind bars in the Land of the Free (also new text)

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Make t-shirts. e-mail it around. Photocopy it and tape it to light poles and windows. Make it into a tattoo.

If you get called for jury duty on a drug crime case, nullify. Let the defendant skate. That's the best way anyone's come up with so far to reduce these grotesque numbers. Just vote to acquit and hang the jury or convince the other 11 people to acquit with you.

Resurrected and modified from a February 2000 (Bill Clinton administration) stamp commemorating 2,000,000 children, women and men behind bars in the Land of the Free, and the USA's surpassing Russia (they let about 100,000 prisoners out of the old Gulag system) as the world's largest prison.

Since that time the USA has had more prisoners than Russia, and has had more prisoners than the Peoples Republic of China. We lead the world both in raw numbers of prisoners, and in the ratio of prisoners to population.

Now 1 in 99.1 men and women are in a prison or jail in the USA. As of the beginning of 2008, 2,319,258 human beings are behind bars in the USA.

Are you safer? Do you feel safer?

Not a single presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, wanted to talk about this as if it were an important issue; and no journalist or YouTube "Ask the Candidate" Question Submitter raised this Mother Of All Bathtub Elephants as an important issue. So the next president is essentially politically free to Keep On Imprisoning and not do or even suggest a future in which America becomes the World's 2nd Largest Prison.

In the 1970s, most public psychiatric hospitals in the USA were closed. Prisons and jails now house our mentally ill. Though the War on Drugs claims to target drug kingpins, most drug prisoners are low-level street addicts. About 53 percent of America's prisoners are non-violent.

In 2006, 1 in 30 men of all races age 20-34 were behind bars.

In 2006, 1 in 9 black men age 20-34 were behind bars.

Women are currently the fastest-growing prisoner group.

The likelihood of contracting the bloodborne diseases HIV/AIDS or hepatitis in prison is 10 times greater than contracting these diseases in the community. Prisons and jails are institutional pressure cookers of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, and most prisoners are released back into the community. A recent study by The Center for the Obvious said that prisoners are 10 times likelier to die in the two weeks after their release than they are normally. Because the first thing a lot of them want after 6 years in prison is to do a lot of drugs and fuck a lot. But even if they don't die, they return their prison-acquired bloodborne diseases to the community, most of whom have never been or never will be prisoners.

Pew Center for the States
Public Safety Performance Project
"One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008"

section from "One in 100" -- Pew report on Gulag America -- state education spending vs. corrections spending

Yeah, click for larger, easier to read.

Pew Center for the States
Public Safety Performance Project
"One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008"

Crowding Out Other Priorities

Year by year, corrections budgets are consuming an ever larger chunk of state general funds, leaving less and less in the pot for other needs. Collectively, correctional agencies now consume 6.8 percent of state general funds, 2007 data show. [24] That means one in every 15 dollars in the states’ main pool of discretionary money goes to corrections.

Considering all types of funds, corrections had the second fastest rate of growth in FY 2006. With a 9.2 percent jump, it trailed transportation but outpaced increases in spending on education and Medicaid. [25]

Some states spend an even larger proportion of their budgets on corrections. Oregon, for example, directed one in every 10 dollars to corrections, while Florida and Vermont spent one in 11. Minnesota and Alabama are at the other extreme, spending less than 3 percent of their general fund dollars on corrections. Over the past 20 years, corrections spending took up a larger share of overall general fund expenditures in 42 states.

Some policy makers are questioning the wisdom of devoting an increasingly large slice of the budget pie to incarceration, especially when recidivism rates have remained discouragingly high. Are we getting our money’s worth? Is our investment in this system returning sufficient dividends for victims, taxpayers and society at large?

On average, corrections is the fifth-largest state budget category, behind health, elementary and secondary education, higher education and transportation. But nearly all corrections dollars come from the states’ own coffers; healthcare, by contrast, draws a majority of funding from the federal government, primarily through Medicaid.

For some public officials, that distinction highlights the effect of corrections spending on other priorities. Pre-K, Higher Ed Funding Lags Higher education is of particular concern. Higher education spending accounts for a roughly comparable portion of state expenditures as corrections, and other than tuition is paid for almost ntirely out of state rather than federal funds. States don’t necessarily make explicit choices between higher education and corrections funding, but they do have to balance their budgets.

So, unlike the federal government, a dollar spent in one area is unavailable for another. In 1987, states collectively spent $33 billion of their general funds on higher education. By 2007, they were spending $72.88 billion, an increase of 121 percent. Adjusted to 2007 dollars, the increase was 21 percent. Over the same timeframe, inflation-adjusted corrections spending rose 127 percent, from $10.6 billion ($19.4 billion in 2007 dollars) to more than $44 billion.

Some regional differences were more dramatic. While inflation-adjusted prison spending rose 61 percent in the Northeast in the last 20 years, higher education spending went the other way, dropping by 5.5 percent. In the West, meanwhile, the number of dollars allocated to prisons skyrocketed by 205 percent. At the same time, higher education spending rose just 28 percent.

Corrections spending also competes with the funding many states want to devote to early childhood education, one of the most proven crime prevention strategies. Research shows that attending a high-quality pre-kindergarten influences a child’s success both in school and in life. One rigorous study that followed severely disadvantaged children into adulthood showed that participation in pre-kindergarten dramatically reduced participation in juvenile and adult crime, and increased high school graduation, employment and earnings, with a total benefit-cost ratio of 16 to 1. [26]

Backed with such evidence of success, states have substantially increased support for high-quality, voluntary pre-kindergarten. New state pre-k funding exceeded $525 million in FY 2008, an increase of more than 12 percent over FY07 expenditures, bringing total state investments in early education across the country to $4.8 billion. [27]

Increasingly, state policy makers are finding that a dollar spent for pre-k classes now can forestall many more dollars for prison beds down the road.