Imprisonment Embarrassment - The World Record America is Ashamed Of
Posted: Monday, August 25, 2008
by Mogama
http://www.mogama.info
A recent report on National Public Radio has once
again forced me to ponder the daunting problem of the growing prison
population in the United States. The report says for every 100
Americans, 1 person is in jail or prison.
According to Pew Center on the States, America now has one adult inmate for every 99.1 American adults. Of a total of 230 million American adults, our prison population stands at 2,319,258. Only America holds this distasteful record. We incarcerate more of our citizens than Russia, than even communist China, which has a billion people, but only 1.5 million Chinese inmates.
So, while we rightly spew human rights lectures
at China, the Chinese government only needs to throw it back at us that
we have 1 percent of our adult population behind bars.
People, that's a whole lot of our precious human resources wasting away in jails, prisons, and half-way houses all across this land of the free. And it costs billions of dollars to keep those Americans locked up. The 50 states of the USA spend a total of $49 billion a year on incarceration. Twenty years ago, the cost was less than $11 billion.
In a recent town hall meeting, Governor Steve Beshear said it costs the state of Kentucky $20,000 a year to incarcerate just one person. In 2007, Kentucky led the nation in the increase of inmate population. Governor Beshear points out that though Kentucky's crime rate has increased by only 3 percent in the past 30 years, the state's inmate population has soared a whopping 600 percent.
Actually, the actual number is higher than the Governor's estimate of $20,000 per inmate. Kentucky, which had 3,000 inmates in 1973, now has 22,000 inmates as of 2008, and the state has been spending $500 million each year to house those inmates. If you do the math, it's costing Kentucky taxpayers about $22,727 to incarcerate one inmate for one year.
Here is another sad finding by researchers: the number of women inmates continues to swell. The female prison population increased 2.5 percent from 2006 to mid 2007, for a total of 115,308 ladies in America's jails and prisons. Doesn't seem that high? It's growing by leaps and bounds.
One female prison, the Ohio Women Reformatory, houses 2,300 women, many of them mothers. Don't you like that name, "Reformatory"? The truth is very little reformation is going on behind the walls of American jails. The recidivism rate seems to still be stuck at around 85 percent; that means for every 100 persons who are released from jail, 85 of them will be re-incarcerated. Those giant revolving doors across the prison industry just keep swinging back and forth.
To their credit, the overcrowded Ohio Women Reformatory, in order to meet the demand of more female offenders, is building a 1,000-bed facility. They say 1,000 beds, but we know that "beds" really mean "women". So this jail expects another 1,000 women to come knocking to enter Prison Institute.
Our choice of euphemism for the prison industry reveals there is something that really disturbs us about having so many of our fellow citizens locked up. The ballooning jail population shows something of our nakedness as a society, and we find ways to blush away this embarrassment by resorting to figurative language: reformatory, department of corrections, correctional facility, detention center, etc.
Are we embarrassed to call them what they are? Why do we hesitate to say them jails, prisons? What's this "corrections" stuff, like the incarcerated are students getting their tests graded (corrected) by their instructors? We somehow prefer to lessen the impact on our collective social psyche by minimizing the punishment aspect of our prison business. But no matter how tender the language we employ for crime and punishment system, we will do nothing significantly meaningful to reverse the trend towards more and more of our fellow citizens headed into prison cells.
It's high time started calling America's jail houses what they really are - hell holes of the world's greatest country. With the correct semantics, we may start seeing the seriousness of the problem that an ever increasing numbers of prisoners present to this civilized society. Let us call prisons by the punitive names they deserve. Perhaps by doing so, we may just prick our social consciousness into taking the necessary steps to reduce the population explosion of those dark halls of squandered human resources.
According to Pew Center on the States, America now has one adult inmate for every 99.1 American adults. Of a total of 230 million American adults, our prison population stands at 2,319,258. Only America holds this distasteful record. We incarcerate more of our citizens than Russia, than even communist China, which has a billion people, but only 1.5 million Chinese inmates.
People, that's a whole lot of our precious human resources wasting away in jails, prisons, and half-way houses all across this land of the free. And it costs billions of dollars to keep those Americans locked up. The 50 states of the USA spend a total of $49 billion a year on incarceration. Twenty years ago, the cost was less than $11 billion.
In a recent town hall meeting, Governor Steve Beshear said it costs the state of Kentucky $20,000 a year to incarcerate just one person. In 2007, Kentucky led the nation in the increase of inmate population. Governor Beshear points out that though Kentucky's crime rate has increased by only 3 percent in the past 30 years, the state's inmate population has soared a whopping 600 percent.
Actually, the actual number is higher than the Governor's estimate of $20,000 per inmate. Kentucky, which had 3,000 inmates in 1973, now has 22,000 inmates as of 2008, and the state has been spending $500 million each year to house those inmates. If you do the math, it's costing Kentucky taxpayers about $22,727 to incarcerate one inmate for one year.
Here is another sad finding by researchers: the number of women inmates continues to swell. The female prison population increased 2.5 percent from 2006 to mid 2007, for a total of 115,308 ladies in America's jails and prisons. Doesn't seem that high? It's growing by leaps and bounds.
One female prison, the Ohio Women Reformatory, houses 2,300 women, many of them mothers. Don't you like that name, "Reformatory"? The truth is very little reformation is going on behind the walls of American jails. The recidivism rate seems to still be stuck at around 85 percent; that means for every 100 persons who are released from jail, 85 of them will be re-incarcerated. Those giant revolving doors across the prison industry just keep swinging back and forth.
To their credit, the overcrowded Ohio Women Reformatory, in order to meet the demand of more female offenders, is building a 1,000-bed facility. They say 1,000 beds, but we know that "beds" really mean "women". So this jail expects another 1,000 women to come knocking to enter Prison Institute.
Our choice of euphemism for the prison industry reveals there is something that really disturbs us about having so many of our fellow citizens locked up. The ballooning jail population shows something of our nakedness as a society, and we find ways to blush away this embarrassment by resorting to figurative language: reformatory, department of corrections, correctional facility, detention center, etc.
Are we embarrassed to call them what they are? Why do we hesitate to say them jails, prisons? What's this "corrections" stuff, like the incarcerated are students getting their tests graded (corrected) by their instructors? We somehow prefer to lessen the impact on our collective social psyche by minimizing the punishment aspect of our prison business. But no matter how tender the language we employ for crime and punishment system, we will do nothing significantly meaningful to reverse the trend towards more and more of our fellow citizens headed into prison cells.
It's high time started calling America's jail houses what they really are - hell holes of the world's greatest country. With the correct semantics, we may start seeing the seriousness of the problem that an ever increasing numbers of prisoners present to this civilized society. Let us call prisons by the punitive names they deserve. Perhaps by doing so, we may just prick our social consciousness into taking the necessary steps to reduce the population explosion of those dark halls of squandered human resources.
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