Here in the land of the free, we like to lock people up. We imprison a higher percentage of our population than any other country on earth. The difference in incarceration rates is actually quite staggering.

     The United States had more than 2.1 million people locked up in prisons or jails at the end of 2004, which works out to 724 prisoners per 100,000 population. Compare that with the 116 per 100,000 in Canada, and you can see how extreme our system has become. In France, they only imprison 80 per 100,000, while the rate in Finland is 50 per 100,000. Russia, the country with the second highest rate of incarceration at 529 per 100,000, is still substantially below the rate in the United States.

     We have not always been this punitive. During the 20th century, until the beginning of the 1970s, our prisoner population had remained pretty steady at around 200,000. That number has climbed about ten fold in the last 35 years, largely but not entirely due to the war on drugs.

     I am not a Pollyanna about this issue. There are some very dangerous and violent criminals who need to be locked up for long periods of time for their crimes. We are all safer with those people in custody. As long as due process has been observed, I favor keeping those people in jail for their full sentences. But those criminals are not the majority of the people in custody.

     More than half of the people in custody in the United States are there for non-violent drug related offenses. It is both expensive and highly counterproductive to lock up non-violent drug offenders in an effort to deter crime.

     It costs on average over $29,000 per year to lock up just one prisoner. If we conservatively estimate that just one million prisoners (less than half of the total) are locked up for non-violent drug related offenses, it costs more than $29 billion per year just to keep them in prison.

     If that is not bad enough, many of those prisoners come out of prison with no treatment for their drug problems, but with a higher education in crime, courtesy of the hardened criminals they are imprisoned with. Locking up non-violent drug users is one of the most counter-productive things the government could possibly do in the criminal justice arena.

     Racism plays a huge role in deciding who gets locked up. For example, African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population, and their rate of illegal drug use is about the same as the rate for the rest of the population. By some measures, European Americans have a higher rate of drug use. Despite this, 35 percent of those arrested, 54 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of those incarcerated for drug related crimes are African American. At each stage of the criminal justice system, arrest, trial and imprisonment, racism causes the system to fall most heavily on African Americans and other minorities.

     Why do we continue to build more prisons and lock up more people? One answer is the profit motive. Can you say “Wackenhut”, boys and girls? Wackenhut, together with Corrections Corporation of America, holds a 75 percent market share in the private prison industry. This is an industry which is worth billions of dollars per year, and which relies upon government to supply the prisoners. Where there is profit to be made from the government, lobbyists are on the job.

     It’s not just those two corporations making money from the prison industry. Contractors make money building prisons. Private vendors make money supplying goods and services such as food, health care and pay phones to prisons. Prison pay phones alone are a $1 billion per year industry.

     Some corporations also take advantage of cheap prison labor that is supervised at government expense by armed guards. Microsoft, Dell, Motorola and Victoria’s Secret are among the companies using prison labor. The prisoners get a few cents per hour, because they are not protected by the minimum wage laws, and cannot bargain for higher wages. It is not just China who is making goods using prison labor. We do it right here in the good old U.S. of A.

     Mass incarceration does not solve the problems that lead to crime. It is used to cover up the social problems that contribute to crime, such as poverty, lack of health care, unemployment and inadequate education. By soaking up a large part of the domestic budget, mass incarceration diverts resources away from the real solutions to these problems, and makes crime, and the conditions which breed crime, worse. It is a self-reinforcing cycle.

     Other societies have prevented high crime rates while using much lower rates of incarceration. In our system, many of the prisoners return to society more dangerous than when they were first jailed. The prison industry is a crime against society, and causes far more harm than it prevents.

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