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Long-term isolation builds "uncontrollable rage....A disproportionate number of prisoners with serious mental illness wind up in punitive segregation." The effect is "to exacerbate the general level of pandemonium." Frustrated staff become more insensitive, lose their tempers, and take it out on inmates. "The bottom line is that we seem to have reproduced some of the worst aspects of an earlier epoch's snake pit mental asylums in the isolation units of our modern prisons."
Prison mismanagement is the cause, using Supermax facilities punitively, not for rehabilitation, and in conventional institutions, creating harmful overcrowding that produces violence and harsher punishments. "We need to stop blaming the victim's innate 'badness' for failed" prison policies.
The Shame of America's Prison System
America has the largest prison population in the world, greater than China with four times as many people, and 22% of all those incarcerated globally. At 738 in 2006, it has the highest rate per 100,000. Most Western European nations have under 100. Japan has 62. Canada 107. Bolivia under Evo Morales 83, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez 74.
Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics show over 2.4 million imprisoned Americans at yearend 2008. They include inmates in federal and state facilities, local jails, Indian, juvenile, and military ones, US territories, and numbers held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In addition, another 7.3 million are under correctional supervision, and 13 million pass through US jails annually. Half of them are for non-violent offenses. Half of those are drug-related. In 1980, 40,000 drug offenders were in prison. Today, it's over 500,000, the result of the "war on drugs," that's part of the war on civil liberties.
Since 1970, the prison population exploded from under 300,000 to eight times that number now. In the December 1998 Atlantic, Eric Schlosser called it "The Prison-Industrial Complex," a recent phenomenon with about 1,000 new prisons and jails built in the 1980s and 90s, and the trend continues in the new millennium, not because of more crime, because of getting "tough" on it against more people getting longer sentences under harsher conditions.
Marc Mauer, author of "Race to Incarcerate," says America locks up people at five to eight times the rate of other industrialized nations, including many who shouldn't be there in the first place. Nearly two-thirds are blacks and Latinos. The vast majority are poor and disadvantaged. One in three black males and one in six Latino males will be imprisoned at some point in their lives. Black males are imprisoned at nine times the rate for whites, and in some states up to 26 times. Penalties include "mandatory minimums, one size fits all (and) three strikes and you're out."
Yet from 1970 - 1994, violent crime rates were stable, and the overall rate fell. The murder rate is the lowest since 1966, and from 1980 - 2000 it dropped 43%. It costs as much or more to imprison someone as send them to college and for older inmates three times as much. Higher incarceration rates for longer periods is unrelated to the crime rate. The prison-industrial complex is one of America's biggest growth industries, exceeding $60 billion annually, and private security adds another $100 billion. Crime fighters and prisoners comprise around 4% of the workforce.
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