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Michael Niman refers to our "Prison Industrial Complex", which he ascribes to Reagan: the "war on drugs" and "three strikes you're out".
When historians look back at the end of the 20th century they'll write about "the era of incarceration." Prisons, like consumerism and suburban sprawl, have emerged as defining features of the American cultural landscape. Building and running prisons is one of the fastest growing industries in America, supported by a subservient judiciary eager to keep them filled….
In 1998 the US surpassed the former Soviet Union and won the crown as the globe's foremost jailer with an incarceration rate of approximately 690 prisoners per 100,000 citizens [his numbers differ just slightly from the ones I used]. By comparison, that is almost 6 times Canada's incarceration rate (115), over 12 times Greece's rate (55), 19 times Japan's rate (37) and 29 times India's rate of 24 prisoners per 100,000 citizens.
Niman points out that all this growth involves enormous cost to the taxpayers. It's estimated that maintaining a prisoner costs anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 a year. Though it's hard to see what we get for all that, it's easy to see that the billions "come at the cost of cuts to education, the arts, parks, environmental programs and social programs". The prison system is also, notoriously, a "war on African Americans". After presenting more statistics, Niman concludes: "Put simply, this means that if a white man in Amherst and a Black man in Buffalo both personally consume illicit drugs, the Black man is over 20 times more likley to wind up in jail." To meet rising prison costs, state and local governments turn increasingly to prison labor which they "lease" to private corporations.
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