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The cost of US mass incarceration
For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America's now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens.
Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States "has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits," and that mass incarceration itself is "a source of injustice.". That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study [nap.edu] prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others
The report highlights many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation's prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world's biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.
On closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every nine, or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences — nearly a third of them without the possibility of parole.
All of this has come at an astounding economic cost [nytimes.com], as tallied by a report from the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project [hamiltonproject.org] — $80 billion a year in direct corrections expenses alone, and more than a quarter-trillion dollars when factoring in police, judicial and legal services.
The editorial brings arguments and makes a convincing case for all of this seems to stems from the unwillingness of the politicians to appear "soft on crime". Which, by nature, I think is a stance no different from the "war on terror" and the "airport security theatre".
If I'm right, I wonder just how much the US citizens are actually willing to pay for their everyday dose of "feeling secure"?
