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.
