Land of the free, home of the jailed

If you’re not familiar with America’s reputation as the world’s largest jailer, you’re about to be.

There are 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total number of prisoners in the world. Of all prisoners worldwide, the U.S. jails 25 percent of them.

There is also widespread racial disparity among the prison population in the U.S. One in three black men will be imprisoned at some point in his lifetime, compared to one in six Latino men and only one in 17 white men.

In Indiana, the black to white prisoner ratio is 5.5 to one.

Recently, a report written by Christopher Petrella, a University of California, Berkeley graduate student, adds another depressing layer of detail to the complex prison system in the U.S. Petrella found that, among the private prison population, young racial minorities are overrepresented.

Monetizing and incentivizing locking people up sounds like a crazy idea. But some ideas are never crazy enough for our legislators to back it up, on both the state and federal levels.

According to an ACLU report, private prisons house “six percent of state prisoners, 16 percent of federal prisoners ... and nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government.” “In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million,” according to the ACLU.

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that putting a profit motive behind locking people up is a bad idea. If all people currently behind bars today were indeed violent offenders or real criminals, it would be more justified.

However, today’s drug laws and overreaching mandatory minimum sentences lead me to believe that a substantial number of people behind bars today should be set free.

Not only does mass incarceration ruin the lives and families of each individual prisoner, it also destroys communities and towns. There are countless ways to reform the prison system we have today. For one thing, we could get rid of mandatory minimum drug sentences and re-examine the war on drugs mentality.

Removing the financial incentive behind incarceration that comes with for-profit prisons would also be a big step in the right direction of de-incentivizing locking people up.
I don’t really care how the reform starts, but I do care that it happens now.

 As someone who cares about the reputation and stature of our country, I see this issue as a critical one in our ability to stand as a moral beacon for the rest of the world.

The U.S. cannot rightfully be both the “Land of the Free” and the largest jailer in the world.

sydhoffe@indiana.edu
@squidhoff10