Why America Has the World's Largest Prison Population

The dollar doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to. Even using NBA players, the United States hasn’t won a basketball championship of note since the 2000 Olympics. We’re not even the largest producers of CO2 anymore—that dubious distinction now belongs to China.

But there is one equally dubious category where we are still king of the hill, top of the heap: “the United States leads the world in producing prisoners.”

That’s how the New York Times put it in a recent article entitled “Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’.” And they’re not exaggerating when they use the word “dwarfs.” The United States “has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”

That “quarter” amounts to approximately 2.3 million prisoners. The U.S. has an incarceration rate of 751 prisoners for every 100,000 people. As a recent Pew Center on the States survey estimated, that means that one in every 99 American adults is behind bars.

No Western democracy is even close to those figures: Germany has 88 prisoners per 100,000 people; Britain has 151. For that matter, less-than-fully-democratic Russia “only” has 627.  Even  China, which has four times as many people as the U.S. and which no one would ever mistake for a democracy, “only” has 1.6 million prisoners.

Even if that figure grossly understates the number of Chinese prisoners, China would have to have nearly six times as many prisoners as reported to match the American incarceration rate and that would still leave the U.S. in less-than-stellar company.

According to the Times, the world-beating numbers are the result 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.”

Once again, the Times isn’t exaggerating when it says “relatively recent.” This year, more people will leave Americans prisons—an estimated 700,000—than were incarcerated only twenty years ago. What Brown University economist Glenn Loury calls our turn towards the punitive has largely occurred during those same two decades.

An obvious question is whether being the world’s leading jailer has made us safer. Intuitively, the answer should be “yes.” Incapacitating a man for a longer period of time reduces the numbers of crimes he commits (at least outside of prison)—incapacitate enough men and crime rates should go down, especially since the majority of crimes are committed by a very small percentage of the population.

And that seems to have happened. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, political scientist James Q. Wilson noted that in “1976, Britain had a lower robbery rate than did California. But then California got tough on crime as judges began handing out more prison sentences, and Britain became soft as laws were passed encouraging judges to avoid prison sentences.” Thus, “by 1996, Britain's robbery rate was one-quarter higher than California’s” and “Britain’s burglary and assault rates are twice as high” as the United States’.

Case closed? Not really. As Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project told the Times, “the assault rate in New York and London is not that much different.” And, of course, assault and burglary aren’t the only crimes—just ones where the comparison favors the United States.

One comparison that doesn’t favor the United States is murder rates: “Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe” is how the Times correctly sums it up.

While, as Loury writes, “increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat,” there’s still the question, “By how much?” The answer? “Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent.”

The other 75 to 95 percent can be attributed to factors such as better policing, demographic changes and what criminologist have called the “maturing of drug markets,” i.e., the end of the turf wars that was behind the high homicide rates of the 1980s.

Then there’s the matter of who was being locked up while the prison population tripled. The lion’s share of the increase in prison populations had little, if anything, to do with incapacitating violent or dangerous offenders—it’s an artifact of the way we fight the “war on drugs.” (Yes, those are scare quotes.)

What Wilson wrote about California—it “does not handle drug offenders wisely”—is true of most states and the federal system as well. By one estimate, 76 percent of the increase between 1986 and 1996 came from locking up drug and non-violent offenders. By the end of 2004 (the last year for which I could find complete data), more than 530,000, or one quarter, of the nation’s prisoners were drug offenders.

By “drug offenders,” I don’t mean Pablo Escobar or Frank Lucas wannabes. A Department of Justice study found that 21 percent of all federal prisoners could be classified as “low level drug offenders,” who prior to being incarcerated had no history of violence, no “involvement in sophisticated criminal activity and no prior commitment.” Five percent of federal inmates are serving time for possession.

To call this wasteful would be an understatement. A recent Washington Post article described how “cash-strapped” states “are embracing a view once dismissed as dangerously naive: It costs far less to let some felons go free than to keep them locked up.”

Thus, governor Schwarzenegger has proposed releasing 22,000 prisoners in California and South Carolina is considering abolishing parole—not so much to keep men in prison longer, as Virginia did, but, at least in part, to reduce the number of offenders returned to prison for parole violations. (“Alice, this is the White Rabbit, check your email!”)

While I won’t begrudge anyone what Marshall Wittman calls their “come to Jesus moment,” a fair question would be: If it’s okay to let them go now, why did you lock them up in the first place? The cost of incarcerating these men and women, which includes a prison-building boom from the late 1980s through the 1990s, is part of the reason that these states are “cash-strapped.”

But there’s an even greater cost associated with the “war on drugs” and mass incarceration: the damage to our social fabric. When the Times said that the high incarceration rate among African-Americans “is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon,” it glossed over the injustice behind much of the disparity.

In 1975, African-Americans were twice as likely as Whites to be arrested for drug offenses. By 1989, when the “war on drugs” had kicked into high gear, they were four times as likely.

What had changed? Certainly not the rate at which Americans were using drugs. As Loury points out, drug use was declining during that time. Nor was it that African-Americans were more likely to use drugs. In fact, among the group on whose behalf we ostensibly fought the “war on drugs,” i.e., our kids, the opposite was true: “white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors.”

No, what had changed was the perception of the threat posed by drugs to suburban (read: white) kids, including the children of New York Times readers. So, as Loury puts it, “to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids.”

In the process, we took communities that were already hanging by the proverbial thread  and helped finish them off. Loury’s summary of how this happened is worth quoting at length:

The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.

So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year . . .  Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished . . . They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

It’s bad enough if the men in question committed violent offenses. But for many of them, their entry into the “nether caste” is for the kind of offense that gets their suburban counterparts, at most, a suspended sentence, probation, or even a stint in rehab.

While this disparity may be news to you, it isn’t news to most African-Americans, hence the cost to the social fabric. The fact that the Times deemed it not “particularly distinctive” tells us more about the way we become inured to injustice than we care to admit. Call it another cost of being Number One.

Roberto Rivera is a senior writer for BreakPoint and a contributor to The Point.