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May 16, 2007
KANSAS PRISONS OUTPACING LIBYA'S
KANSAS PRISONS OUTPACING LIBYA'S
BY RONALD FRASER
Posted on Wed, May. 16, 2007, Wichita Eagle
Myths have a way of hiding what we don't want to see.
Americans, for example, are quick to charge Third World dictators with abusive prison policies. But prison incarceration rates tell a different story.
Recent reports show that 45 of the 50 state governments in the United States, including Kansas, imprison their citizens at a faster pace than any of the foreign governments headed by dictators.
Rulers in Libya, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, China and Pakistan made Parade Magazine's 2005 world's worst dictators list. And the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif., has issued a report titled "U.S. Rates of Incarceration: A Global Perspective," showing the incarceration rates for these five dictatorships -- the number of people in prison for every 100,000 of population -- ranging from a low of 57 in Pakistan to a high of 207 in Libya.
By comparison, Kansas locked up 330 state citizens for every 100,000 of its population in 2005. In other words, Kansas imprisons its people at a rate nearly 1 ½ times faster than Moammar Gadhafi's Libya and almost six times faster than Pakistan under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If inmates held in local jails in Kansas were added in, the spread would be even wider.
Why are prisons in America filling at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world? Some say our crime rate is the cause.
But the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., reports that "criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck examined the near-tripling of the prison population during the period 1980-96 and concluded that changes in crime explained only 12 percent of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing policy accounted for 88 percent of the increase."
Legislatively dictated sentences for even minor offenses tie the hands of judges and juries. These mandatory minimum punishments continue to keep hundreds of thousands behind bars for just using or selling tiny amounts of "illicit" substances.
In addition, about one-half of all inmates in the United States are serving time for nonviolent offenses. If prisons were only used to separate dangerous people from the rest of society, the 9,000 state prisoners in Kansas in 2005 could have been drastically cut overnight.
With only 5 percent of the world's people, the United States is home to 23 percent of the world's prisoners. If the rest of the world followed America's prison policies, the worldwide incarcerated population would grow from 9 million to 47 million.
Isn't it time that we stop worrying about the behavior of faraway dictators and start downsizing prisons here at home?
Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a civil liberties organization in Washington, D.C.
http://www.kansas.com/205/story/70895.html
Posted by lois at May 16, 2007 10:15 PM