OUR NATIONAL EPIDEMIC

The United States, the world leader in imprisoning its own people, is in the
midst of an incarceration epidemic. Nearly 1.9 million people are behind
bars here.

This astonishing level of imprisonment is a recent development. For most of
this century, the incarceration rate remained at about 110 inmates per
100,000 people, which is comparable to other industrialized countries. But
in the mid-'70s, the rate began rising, and, by the 180s, it had doubled. In
the '90s, it doubled again. According to the Sentencing Project, a
Washington-based prison watchdog group, the rate is now 645 inmates per
100,000 people-six to 10 times the rate of most European countries. The rate
in Britain, for example, is 100 per 100,000. In Norway and Greece it's 55
per 100,000. In Japan it's 37. Although China has about 10 times the U.S.
population, we imprison nearly half a million more people.

Each year the United States adds another 50,000 to 80,000 inmates to its
prison population. Based on an average growth rate of 6.5 percent since
1990, the inmate population in this country will easily surpass 2 million by
the millennium.

Because crime rates have been falling since incarceration explosion seems
wildly incongruous. It can be explained in three words: war on drugs. The
"get tough" policies of the federal government and nearly every state are
responsible for the inmate boom. Figures from the justice Department reveal
that between 1988 and 1994, the number of prison inmates convicted of drug
offenses increased by 155 percent. Thirty-one states now require mandatory
prison sentences for drug offenses.

While African-Americans make up 12 percent of the total U.S. population,
they comprise 51 percent of the nation's prison population. Black inmates'
dispro-portionate presence in prisons is directly linked to the drug war.
From 1985 to 1996, the proportion of African-Americans busted for drugs shot
up 707 per-cent. Nationally, an estimated 1.4 million African-American males
are disenfranchised from voting as a result of a felony conviction. This
represents 14 percent of the adult black male population.

Although the most reliable studies indicate that African-Americans
constitute about 13 percent of monthly drug users, they make up 35 percent
of arrests, 55 percent of convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences for
drug possession. This is largely a result of a federal law passed in 1986
that established harsher penalties for offenses involving crack cocaine than
for those involving cocaine powder.

Defendants caught with 50 grams of crack are sentenced to a mandatory 10
years-5,000 grams of powder are required for the same sentence. This 100-
to-one sentencing disparity is echoed in many state laws. The U.S.
Sentencing Commission found that African-Americans accounted for 88 percent
of those convicted of federal crack offenses. And although the commission
recommended in 1995 that federal sentences for crack and powder be
equalized, its recommendation was rejected by Congress.

In this issue, we look at two other disastrous aspects of the criminal
justice system: the epidemic of rape inside women's prisons and the shocking
number of innocent people sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit.
Such horrifying stories demand real reforms.

Already, the astounding waste of human resources reflected in these figures
and stories is attracting the attention of human rights groups and sparking
the beginning of a genuine prison reform movement. Increasingly, social
analysts are condemning a criminal justice system that seems to be
fueling--rather than dampening--crime.

Last September, a conference in Berkeley, Calif, brought together leading
activists and experts in an attempt to jump-start a prison movement that's
been moribund since the early '70s. Organized by Angela Davis, a former
political prisoner and current professor at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, the conference sought to publicize the plight of the nation's
nearly two million inmates and jolt the American public into a realization
of its complicity in a self-perpetuating dynamic that severely threatens the
country's traditions of civil liberty.

The expanding prison-industrial complex is a scavenger enterprise feeding on
social decay. Social conditions are channeling large numbers of inner-city
African-Americans into the underground economy of drug commerce and,
consequently, into prison. But instead of focusing on solutions to this
waste of potential, our nation directs resources toward a new growth
industry that depends on inmates as raw material. A society that links its
economic success to its social failures is engaged in cultural cannibalism
and is headed toward a harrowing future.

Checked-by: Don Beck