ANGER GROWS AS US JAILS ITS TWO MILLIONTH INMATE

Vigils are being mounted today in more than 30 major cities in the United
States to draw attention to the arrival of the two millionth inmate in
American jails. The US comprises 5% of the global population yet it is
responsible for 25% of the world's prisoners. It has a higher proportion of
its citizens in jail than any other country in history, according to the
November Coalition, an alliance of civil rights campaigners, justice policy
workers and drug law reformers.

The coalition is co-ordinating protests across the US to draw attention to
what they feel is a trend for locking up ever more offenders, most of them
non-violent.

"Incarceration should be the last resort of a civilised society, not the
first," said Michael Gelacak, a former vice-chairman of the US sentencing
commission. "We have it backwards and it's time we realised that."

"Two million is too many," said Nora Callahan of the coalition, which is
calling for alternatives to prison for the country's 500,000 non-violent
drug offenders.

"We are calling on state and federal governments to stop breaking up
families and destroying our communities. Prison is not the solution to
every social problem," she said.

In New York city, the Prison Moratorium Project will focus on the fact that
one in three black youths is either in custody or on parole. Kevin Pranis,
of the project, said: "New York state is diverting millions of dollars from
colleges and universities to pay for prisons we can't afford."

Criminal justice is already a campaign issue in the presidential race. The
Republican frontrunner George W Bush, governor of Texas, is a staunch
supporter of both the death penalty and stiffer sentencing for drug offences.

Since he took over in Texas, the prison population there is up from 41,000
to 150,000, much of this as a result of locking up people for drug
possession. This is one of the reasons that commentators have pressed Bush
to be more open about his own alleged drug use in the past.

Second Biggest Employer:

Of those held in federal rather than state prisons, 60% are drug offenders
with no history of violence. Aminah Muhammad, who is organising the Los
Angeles vigil, said: "My husband is doing 23 years for just being present
in a house where drugs were found, so my 10-year-old son doesn't have his
father."

The vigil also coincides with the publication of Lockdown America, a report
by Christian Parenti analysing the US criminal justice system. He notes the
expansion of the private prison sector - dubbed by one investment firm the
"theme stock for the nineties" - which now runs more than 100 facilities in
27 states, holding more than 100,000 inmates.

A total of 18 private firms are involved in the running of local jails,
private prisons and immigration detention centres. It is estimated that
firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch write between $2-3bn in
prison constructions bonds every year.

This has led some commentators to suggest that the United States is
effectively creating a prison-industrial complex in much the same way as
the military-industrial complex operates.

Critics of the system suggest that so much money is invested in
incarceration that politicians would find it difficult to reverse the
trends against the wishes of their financial backers and lobbyists.

In his study Christian Parenti suggests: "In many ways the incarceration
binge is simply the policy byproduct of rightwing electoral rhetoric."

With the economic restructuring of America, politicians found it necessary
to address domestic anxieties, Parenti suggests and this "required
scapegoats, a role usually filled by new immigrants, the poor and people of
colour".

The cost of building jails has averaged $7bn per year for the last decade
and the annual bill for incarcerating prisoners is up to $35bn annually.
The prison industry employs more than 523,000 people, making it the
country's biggest employer after General Motors. Some 5% of the population
growth in rural areas between 1980 and 1990 was as a result of prisoners
being moved into new rural jails.

The national convention of the American Bar Association, held in Dallas,
Texas last weekend, was told there was growing momentum for a moratorium on
the death penalty. This follows the recent announcement by the Illinois
governor, George Ryan, that the state will suspend executions pending an
investigation into the number of death row inmates who turn out to have
been wrongly convicted. There are 3,600 people awaiting execution in the US
- - 463 of them in Texas alone.

Today's vigils are being held near jails, courthouses and prisons and span
the US from Spokane in Washington state to Gainesville in Florida, from
Austin in Texas to Newhaven in Connecticut.

In 1985, the then Chief Justice Warren Burger said: "What business
enterprise could conceivably succeed with the rate of recall of its
products that we see in the 'products' of our prisons?"

The demonstrators today are hoping to make the same point count, if not
with the politicians, then at least with the voters who will be called in
to endorse such penal policies in the coming months.