PRISONERS

MORE THAN ANY OTHER DEMOCRACY

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE originally travelled to the United States in
1831 to study not the country’s political institutions but its
prisons. These were an object of great curiosity in Europe because the
United States had embarked on a bold experiment: to rehabilitate
criminals through a strict regime of solitary confinement, silence and
hard work in a newly created institution, the “penitentiary”.
Tocqueville was not impressed by what he found. America’s social
reformers, he said, were in the grip of a “monomania” and seemed to
believe that prisons were a “remedy for all the evils of society”.
Over the past two decades that monomania has again gripped America,
and it shows few signs of letting up. This week the Bureau of Justice
Statistics reported that the nation’s prison and jail population has
increased yet again, by 4.4% to 1.8m in the year to June 1998. This
represents slower growth than the annual average of 6.2% since 1990,
or the 5.9% growth in 1997. But it is not much of a slowdown. More
remarkable is the fact that America’s prison population continues to
grow at such a steady pace in the teeth of two other facts: rates of
reported crime have fallen for each of the past six years, and America
has already locked up more people than any country in the world.

The scale of imprisonment in America is now unmatched in any
democracy, and is greater than even most totalitarian governments have
ever attempted. Last year one in every 150 American residents
(children included) was behind bars. The rate of incarceration, at 668
inmates per 100,000 residents, is five to ten times the rates of
countries in Western Europe, six times the rate in Canada and nearly
20 times that in Japan. The number of Americans in prison has nearly
quadrupled since 1980 and more than doubled since 1985. Only Russia
imprisons a larger proportion of its people but, at the current rate
of increase, America should win the top spot in a year or two. Because
of its larger population, America already has more people behind bars.

Is this extraordinary experiment in mass imprisonment working? It
seems to beggar belief that the fall in crime in recent years does not
have something to do with the increase in imprisonment. But so many
factors influence the level of crime—demographic, economic and
cultural—that it is difficult to establish a link between any single
policy and the overall crime rate. What is more, there are reasons to
doubt that mass imprisonment can take the lion ’s share of the credit.
In some places where crime has dropped most, such as New York, the
incarceration rate is not as high and has not risen as fast as the
national average.

Although crime has decreased nationally since 1991, that drop came
after a seven-year rise in crime even though the prison population
expanded by 77% during the same period, points out Alfred Blumstein of
Carnegie Mellon University. Of course, the effect of increased
imprisonment could have been delayed, producing a lower crime rate in
subsequent years. But even today the level of violent crime in America
is still about the same as in the mid-1980s, when 1m fewer people were
in prison or jail. According to a government report published in
January, arrests for murder, rape and robbery declined sharply between
1990 and 1996. The prison and jail populations have soared not because
the police are catching more violent criminals, but because sentences
have been lengthened and probation severely curtailed.

In addition, there is one type of crime where mass imprisonment seems
to have failed abysmally—illegal drug use. Since America panicked over
the crack epidemic ten years ago, toughening drug laws at both the
federal and state level, the number of people imprisoned for illegal
drug use or trafficking has quadrupled, nearly twice the growth rate
for violent criminals. More than 400,000 people are now imprisoned for
drug offences, a larger number than those in prison for all crimes in
England, France, Germany and Japan combined.

Despite such large-scale imprisonment, the number of people abusing
drugs has not changed since 1988, according to the National Household
Survey on Drug Abuse for 1997, the most recent available. The survey
estimated that about 14m people had used illegal drugs, and 600,000
had smoked crack cocaine, in the month before the survey, the same
figures found by the survey a decade earlier.

The costs, both financial and social, of mass imprisonment have been
high. Ballooning prison budgets have squeezed out spending on
education and other social programmes in states throughout the
country. The toll on the black community has been especially heavy.
Blacks comprise 12% of the American population, but represent nearly
half of those in prison or jail.

The incarceration rate for black men, according to figures published
last year, is eight times that for white men. About one in every 12
black men aged between 25 and 29 is currently behind bars, ten times
the rate among whites. Many are there not for violent offences, but
for breaking the drug laws, which seem aimed directly at blacks. For
example the penalty for possessing five grams of crack cocaine, the
form most widely used in black districts, is the same as the penalty
for possessing 100 times as much of the powdered variety, which whites
prefer.

Whether or not prison works as a crime-fighting tool, how much further
down the road of ever more frequent imprisonment can America go?