2 LETTERS / A COUNTRY BEHIND BARS

The horrific news that the United States now has more than 2m
prisoners means that 1 in every 137 Americans is now in jail or,
assuming a family unit of 4, that 1 in every 34 Americans belongs to a
family with an immediate member in jail - and this is not counting
those who have been in jail or are on parole (US jails two millionth
inmate, February 17). There are strong vested economic profits in such
incarceration. The privatisation of the prison system bears this out -
and surely future generations will condemn those making money out of
jailing people with as much disgust as we now condemn slave owners.
Can we honestly approve a society where the second largest employer in
that country is engaged in locking people up? More sinister, though,
is the fact that it has developed into a method of large-scale social
control.

It may be difficult to see a justice system, involved in individual
decision-making, as a form of general social control, though Western
history has a number of examples, from the deportations of 18th and
19th century Britain to the gulags. But consider just two aspects of
the situation in the US, leaving aside the potent question of the
disproportion of people of colour in the jails.

More than 2m adults are disenfranchised, conveniently, as they are a
group likely to vote against the status quo. Then imagine releasing,
say, 1m of them, almost all adults of working age with few specialised
skills. The unemployment rate would leap; the dollar would fall;
interest rates would jump to compensate; inflation would follow; and
the whole basis of the current economic prosperity would collapse into
recession.

Or consider this: if we translated these figures globally, more than
46m people would be in jail, and 11.5m would be employed in the prison
industry, at a cost of $771bn a year.

(Dr) Mark Morris
Wetaskiwin, Alberta, Canada