Rationally Speaking: The American prison system

So, the stats: at last count cited by Taylor and Perry (2008), 2.5 million Americans were in prison, a number to be compared with 1.5 million in China, particularly once we account for the fact that the Chinese population is four times as large as that of the US! In the Europe Union, a more proper comparison with the United States because of its Western style democracies, the total number of inmates is only 600,000, and yet the 27 nations of the European Union count 200 million more inhabitants than the US. Taylor and Perry continue: between 1987 and 2007 the cost of incarceration for American States has increased by 127% (adjusted for inflation), to a whopping $50 billion (in 2007). And then, of course, there are the ethnicity-specific statistics, according to which African Americans account for 47% of the inmate population, against only 12% of the total population, with Latinos trailing a bit behind (20% of inmates, 13% of the population). The implication, of course, being that whites are less represented than one would expect from their frequency in the general population.

If these numbers don’t disturb you, you might want to pay a visit to your family doctor. To begin with, why exactly are so many more people incarcerated in the US than in all the European Union countries combined? Well, one of the answers could be that those pinko Europeans are soft on crime, which not only is silly on the face of it, but also raises the question of why there are so many violent criminals in the US. Except of course for the additional fact that a large number of US inmates are there for non-violent crimes (500,000 just for drug use, about the same as the total European population of inmates). Either American society is far more violent than its European counterpart, or American politicians are far too happy to lock people away to look tough with their constituencies (which implies that Americans are far too inclined to imprison their fellow citizens). Or both, obviously.

via rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com