Throwing Away the Key
Our Nation’s Penal System Has Abandoned All Pretense of Penitence or Any Notion of Rehabilitation

The Department of Homeland Security, the new cabinet post with the Teutonic inflection, was created last January to assuage Americans’ fears of future terrorist attacks. But while we focus our attention on external threats, we’re ignoring homegrown forces that imperil our nation’s security much more profoundly than suicidal Islamic cults. These forces are being generated by an incarceration epidemic that has earned this country the dubious title of the world’s largest jailer.

Figures released last month by the Justice Department revealed that as of June 30, 2002, the number of inmates in American prisons and jails had exceeded 2 million for the first time in history. There were 1.35 million prisoners in state and federal prisons and an additional 665,000 in local jails, the report noted. The United States not only imprisons more people than any other nation, our incarceration rate of 702 inmates per 100,000 residents is also the highest in the world. “We have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, but we’re only 5 percent of the world’s population,” says Kara Gotsch of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

The most destructive feature of this skyrocketing incarceration rate is its dramatic racial disparity. Among black males 25 to 29, 12.9 percent were in prison or jail; only 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group are incarcerated. The report calculates that at least 29 percent of all black men will have spent some time behind bars over the course of a lifetime. And although the number of black women inmates is much lower than black men, there are five times as many black women inmates than their white counterparts.
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