2.3 million behind bars

America's incarceration population and rate continue to increase. At a cost of about $60 billion per year, we hold 2.3 million people behind bars. Details in the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletins Prison Inmates at Midyear 2007 and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2007.

ABC news reports:

The report provides a breakdown, noting "of the 2.3 million inmates in custody, 2.1 million were men and 208,300 were women. Black males represented the largest percentage (35.4 percent) of inmates held in custody, followed by white males (32.9 percent) and Hispanic males (17.9 percent)."

The United States leads the industrialized world in incarceration. In fact, the U.S. rate of incarceration (762 per 100,000) is five to eight times that of other highly developed countries, according to The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice think tank.

What's wrong with this picture?

I heard Harvard Professor Bruce Western speak tonight at New York University. A short while back I heard him speak at John Jay College and he was nice enough to give me his powerpoint presentation. I use some of it in my class.

This is one of those slides:

We now lock up 730 people per 100,000. And this rate is still going up. That's more than any country in the world. More than North Korea. More than China. More than Russia. And remember that "rate" takes population into account. Hell, in pure numbers we lock up more people than China. And there are more than a billion of them.

This massive incarceration only started in the mid-1970s with the war on drugs. Mostly affected are young black male high-school drop outs. Among this cohort, the majority will be incarcerated at some point in their lives. Now I know this stuff and even I find it hard to believe. I asked Prof. Western if his data on incarceration included prison and jail and arrests? Nope. Just prison.

Doesn't anybody care?

Shocks the conscience

One-in-a-hundred adult Americans is behind bars. This figure has shocked some people since it made the headlines the other day.

The Times quoted a Professor Cassell as saying that our rate of imprisonment has “very tangible benefits: lower crime rates.” But this isn’t true. The prison rate has been increasing since 1970, so why didn’t crime go down until the mid 1990s? Why should prison get credit for the crime drop of the past 10 years but the not the crime rise for the previous 20?

There is plenty of research on this matter. Granted, if we locked everybody up, we’d cut all crime outside of prison. But we’re locking up lots of people who aren’t or didn’t have to be hard-core criminals. The link between increased incarceration and lower crime isn’t clear. Even if it exists, it is inefficient.

Professor Cassell goes on: “it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.” I don’t like Professor Cassell’s attitude.

We will release virtually everybody in prison. The only question is when, and whether we'll refill up the beds as quickly as we empty them.

Economist Steven Levitt (Freakonomics), who promotes the idea that increased incarceration lowers crime, estimates that the increase in prison population since 1990 accounts for only about 1/3rd of the crime drop. I don’t know if it's worth it.

Given the money it takes to lock somebody up, about $24,000 a year per person (and much more in New York), couldn’t we do something better with this money to prevent crime? Like hire more cops and pay them better?

Others point out that economists' number-crunching based logic is flawed. Some people are pretty bad and best behind bars. But most criminal work doesn't disappear when somebody is locked up. Lock up a corner dealer and somebody else will fill the role. Locking up the “bad guys” won’t have any impact when all it does is create new “bad guys.” This is the drug market at work. While we can police our way out of the crime problem, we can’t arrest our way out of it.

The real factor is the war on drugs. Prison rates don’t (just) reflect crime and violence. They reflect our desire to incarcerate people.

Our prison rate was more or less steady from 1900 until the war on the drugs at 100 per 100,000 people. This is a little high compared to other nations like ours, but in the same ballpark. Now it’s over 700 per 100,000. It is shocking.

We’ve got more people behind bars than China. And they’ve got over four times the population. And we call them repressive. We’re so quick to see prison as the answer. We lock up people now we never would have locked up 35 years ago. Drunken drivers go to jail. My friend Bob just told me his neighbor got locked up for writing bad checks. She wouldn't have been locked up in 1970. And just think, for the money we pay to lock her up, all her debts could have been paid off. What do you think the people she owed money to would have wanted? Why are we so willing to spend money to punish people but not to right wrongs?

If one-in-a-hundred behind bars is so shocking, where is the shock for one-in-fifteen black men behind bars? And this doesn’t count the much larger figure of people on probation and parole. There are more black men in the criminal justice system today (jail, prison, probation, and parole) then there were black men enslaved in 1860.