The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

In an extensive analysis on his city’s situation, written with a sincerity that is unusual among U.S. politicians and published in the newspaper The Star-Ledger, Mayor Booker said, moreover, that every day, more guns and more technology are appearing; more cameras scanning the streets, while more is spent on prisons, penitentiaries and juvenile facilities.

The way that the country has chosen to deal with crime is taking the nation away from its most noble ideals and creating an outcome that totally contradicts what the country is supposed to be, the mayor said, alluding mostly to the failure of the so-called war on drugs.

“In the land of the free, we lock up a greater percentage of our population than any nation. The U.S. prison population has increased 91 percent in the past 15 years,” he wrote, noting the exorbitant number if citizens who are, one way or another, under control of the legal system.

The costs are, of course, out of proportion. The city of Newark alone spends one quarter of its budget on the police, courts and prisons, Booker revealed.

One out of every three African Americans between the ages of 20 and 30 live under some form of prison supervision, he noted, adding that while only 14 percent of New Jersey’s population is Black, more than 60 percent of its prison population is.

The United States is the “worst” country in the world with respect to recidivism, Booker said.

“After spending billions incarcerating people, we release them only to see one in every two ex-offenders return in three years.

“Ex-offenders are ineligible for numerous public assistance programs. They are stripped of their driving privileges, which might allow them to get to work; even if their driving privileges have not been revoked, they cannot obtain a commercial driver's license.”

LARGE INCREASE SINCE 2000

The most recent report by the U.S. Justice Department’s statistics office showed that the prison population has shot up since 2000.

Bush’s government maintains 2.24 million people locked up, the highest rate in the world both in prison population and in per capita imprisonment, according to The Star Ledger.

In New Jersey 81 percent of those incarcerated are black or Latino.

State spending to imprison its citizens has grown three times more than the budget for higher education. The U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has further frightening information.

The Justice Department is headed by Alberto Gonzales, the advisor to Bush who is in charge of justifying the torture of people held in the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo prisons.

The following figures give an idea of the seriousness of the veritable human crisis underway in the United States:

• 3,524 prisoners condemned to the death penalty (1,372 are Black) are awaiting the death penalty in 36 state and federal prisons; in comparison, in 1980, there were 692.

• 53 individuals have been executed in 2006, double that of 1980.

• A total of 4,580 prisoners have died behind bars, both in federal and other prisons.

• In indigenous areas, 68 prisons hold more than 2,000 people

• African-Americans are three times more likely to end up in a prison that Hispanics, and five times more likely than people designated “white.”

• More than 140,000 veterans of the U.S. armed forces are serving sentences in federal or state prisons; 57 percent are imprisoned for violent crimes.

• More than 2,000 cases of sexual aggression are confirmed every year, more than 40% involving prison personnel.

And the list could be much longer.

Of course, the George W. Bush government, very ready to attack other nations on the question of human rights, is keeping quiet about such a catastrophic situation in international forums where, nevertheless, it does not lose any opportunity to “demonize” those who oppose its imperialist policies.

With the complicity of the big-business media that deliberately omits those realities about a nation where every day, in the name of the so-called war on terrorism, laws are enacted that are gradually taking away citizens’ rights.
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/agosto/vier17/33preso.html