On American prisons - the situation

New York Time reporter Jason DeParle has an article in the New York Review of Books titled The American Prison Nightmare, reviewing three recent books on incarceration in the United States. He includes information, some from the books, that helps put the current challenge on ministry in prisons in perspective. I will have three posts in total in regard to this review and the books DeParle examines.

He starts with some background to our current situation:

For much of the twentieth century, about one American in a thousand was confined to a cell. The proportion of Americans behind bars started rising in the mid-Seventies, and by 2003 had done so for twenty-eight consecutive years. Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.

The penal population grew because crime increased; because the number of police and prosecutors grew (which raised the odds of punishment); and because policymakers, disillusioned with the ethos of rehabilitation, imposed tougher penalties. The increase in severity occurred on the front end with longer sentences and reduced judicial discretion to shorten them, and on the back end by making fewer prisoners eligible for early release.

Meanwhile, the "war on drugs" led to the arrest of growing numbers of small-time users and dealers. By the late 1990s, 60 percent of federal inmates were in for drug offenses. The result is an ever-growing prison system, populated to a significant degree by people who need not be there. It was no liberal advocate but Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who offered a damning view of criminal justice in the United States: "Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

Despite the crackdown, white men with college degrees are only slightly more likely than previously to end up in prison. Among black men with college degrees, the odds of imprisonment have fallen. But by 2000, high school dropouts of either race were being locked up three times as often as they had been two decades before. And racial disparities have become immense. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts are now prisoners or ex-cons. This, Western warns, has resulted in "a collective experience for young black men that is wholly different from the rest of American society."

The three books reviewed are:

• Punishment and Inequality in America by Bruce Western(Russell Sage Foundation)
• Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons by John J. Gibbons and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, co-chairs
  (Vera Institute of Justice, available at www.prisoncommission.org)
• Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (Oxford University Press)
  

A tip of the hat to Grits for Breakfast for this.