Part II of Michelle Alexander's Interview at Democracy Now

Don't miss this Part 2, which includes a discussion of Privatization of Prisons .

We're Number One!

While China has just barely passed us in carbon emissions tonnage, we hold solidly to first place in citizens locked away in prisons. From International Herald Tribune:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. . . .

More Spent for Prisons in 5 States Than Higher Ed

From Inside Higher Ed:

For years now, educators have been warning that U.S. society might soon be spending more on prisons than colleges. In five states, that moment has arrived, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Those states are (in order of spending the most proportionally on prisons in 2007): Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware. The state spending the least on prisons relative to higher education was Minnesota, where for every dollar spent on higher education only 17 cents was spent on corrections. The average for all states was 60 cents, nearly double the 32 cents spent 20 years earlier. Only three states saw gains in spending on higher education, relative to corrections: Alabama, Nevada and Virginia.

The report, by the Pew Project on the States, urges state legislators to reconsider policies — such as mandatory sentences — that force states to devote funds to building and managing prisons. The period over the last 20 years in which many states imposed new sentencing rules and saw their prison populations swell has seen a growing gap between spending rates on corrections and higher ed. During the last 20 years, corrections spending has increased by 127 percent on top of inflation, while spending on higher ed has increased only 21 percent.

Some regional variations are present — although higher ed spending appears to be always falling behind prison spending. In the Northeast, inflation adjusted spending increased 61 percent on corrections and dropped 6 percent on higher education over the last 20 years. In the West, spending on both increased, but by 205 percent for prisons and 28 percent for higher education. . . .

With 2,300,000 Americans in Prison, Will MS-NBC Develop An Incarcerated American Idol?

Truly a shame. But what a business opportunity!

And then there is the exploitative MS-NBC with its hours and hours each week of prison desensitzation programming. What's next? Televised waterboarding? How about an Incarcerated American Idol? I know of a ready-made audience of 2.3 million viewers. Sponsored by Honeybuns? I know I shouldn't give them ideas.

From WaPo:

More than one in 100 adult Americans is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The ballooning prison population is largely the result of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been hit particularly hard: One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women age 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 white women in the same age group. . . .

. . . .Florida, which nearly doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level. . . .

America's Prison-Industrial Complex

From Common Dreams:

. . . .The United States does not provide a level playing field for all children and does not protect all young lives equally, says a recent report by the Children’s Defense Fund. Poor children and children of color, in particular, “already are in the pipeline to prison before taking a single step or uttering a word,” the report states. Many youth in juvenile detention facilities have never been on the track to college or a successful life. “They were not derailed from the right track; they never got on it,” the organization says.

Much of the problem is due to poverty, and children of color are more likely to be afflicted. One-quarter of Latino children and one-third of black children are poor. Black children are more than three times as likely as white children to be born into poverty, and are more than four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, according to the report.

For millions of poor children - failed by their families and by the child-welfare and juvenile-justice systems - a life of prison awaits them. Prison is the only universally guaranteed program for children in America, the study notes, as America increasingly criminalizes its youth and spends nearly three times as much per prisoner as it does per student - this in a country with 2.3 million prisoners, the world’s largest inmate population, more prisoners than in China, a nation that has four times as many people as the United States.

And those who are incarcerated are disproportionately of color, products of a society that has neglected and marginalized them. Children of color are more likely to be placed in programs for mental retardation and in foster care, and are more likely to be suspended from school, or left back a grade or to drop out. And youth of color, 39 percent of the juvenile population, are 60 percent of incarcerated juveniles, according to the report.

A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. A Latino boy has a one in six chance. Today, as a result of unfair drug laws and draconian sentencing, failing schools, and a lack of opportunity, 580,000 black men - many of them fathers - are doing time in state and federal prisons, while only 40,000 graduate from college each year, an astonishing statistic.

All of this comes down to a lack of commitment by our society, misplaced priorities and squandered resources. The Children’s Defense Fund makes a number of recommendations for dismantling the cradle-to-prison pipeline, including full funding of Head Start, making sure that children can read by the fourth grade, ensuring health insurance for all pregnant women, eradicating child poverty by 2015, eliminating hunger, and providing jobs with a living wage.

The money is available. These and other recommendations are estimated to cost around $75 billion, with $55 billion to eradicate child poverty, the Children’s Defense Fund says. Repealing the tax cuts for the top 1 percent richest people would provide $57 billion. And, to put things in perspective, the war in Iraq has cost more than $450 billion through 2007, about $100 billion a year. . . .