Alex Friedmann is the Managing Editor of Prison Legal News a project of the Human Rights Defense Center. This piece is republished with the author’s permission. It was originally published in the January 2012 edition of Prison Legal News and was also featured as a chapter in the book, And the Criminals with Him: Essays in Honor of Will D. Campbell and All the Reconciled, edited by William D. Campbell and Richard C. Goode.
At the beginning of the 1980s there were no privately-operated adult correctional facilities in the United States. As of 2009, more than 129,300 state and federal prisoners were housed in for-profit lock-ups. Prison privatization has become an acceptable practice and the private prison industry is now a multi-billion dollar business. How did this drastic expansion of incarceration-for-profit occur, and more importantly how has it rearranged the criminal justice landscape?
The prison and jail population in the United States has increased exponentially over the past several decades, from 648,000 in 1983 to more than 2.3 million as of 2010. That doesn’t include another 5 million people on parole and probation, plus millions more who were formerly incarcerated and are no longer under correctional supervision. Spending on prisons has outstripped expenditures on higher education in at least five states, including Michigan, Connecticut and California, as lawmakers engage in one-upmanship to prove who’s tougher on crime.
Why has our nation’s prison population grown to epic proportions, until the U.S. – with only 5 percent of the world’s population – now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners? The succinct answer is because imprisonment has become enormously profitable as a result of politically-influenced decisions as to who should be locked up and for how long. In the 1980s and 90s a series of tough-on-crime laws were enacted, spurred by the so-called War on Drugs and the corporate media’s steady and often sensationalistic coverage of violent offenses. Such laws included mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing statutes and three-strikes laws, which required lengthy prison terms or life sentences for certain offenders.
Consequently, more and more people were arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison where they served longer periods of time under harsher sentencing statutes. Concurrently, prison release policies became more restrictive; for example, parole in the federal prison system was abolished in 1987. With more people entering the prison system to serve longer sentences and fewer leaving, the U.S. prison population grew rapidly – increasing over 350 percent from 1983 to the present.
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| Overcrowded prison in El Salvador |
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