AMERICA'S PRISON BLUES

The U.S. jail population is five times the world average - one in
every 31 adult Americans is either in prison or on parole

The world's tallest building is now in Dubai rather than New York. Its
largest shopping mall is in Beijing, and its biggest Ferris wheel in
Singapore. Once-mighty General Motors is suspended in a limbo between
bailout and bankruptcy; and the "war on terror" has demonstrated the
limits of American military might.

But in one area the United States is going from strength to strength -
the incarceration of its population.

The U.S. has less than five per cent of the world's people but almost
25 per cent of its prisoners. It imprisons 756 people per 100,000
residents, a rate nearly five times the world average. About one in
every 31 adults is either in prison or on parole. Black men have a
one-in-three chance of being imprisoned at some point in their lives.

Conditions can be brutal. More than 20 per cent of inmates report that
they have been sexually assaulted by guards or fellow inmates. Federal
prisons are operating at more than 130 per cent of capacity.

A sixth of prisoners suffer from mental illness of one sort or
another. There are four times as many mentally ill people in prison as
in mental hospitals.

As well as being brutal, prisons are ineffective. They might keep
offenders off the streets, but they fail to discourage them from
offending. Two-thirds of ex-prisoners are re-arrested within three
years of being released.

The punishment extends to prisoners' families, too. America's 1.7
million "prison orphans" are six times more likely than their peers to
end up in prison themselves.

America is one of only a handful of countries that bar prisoners from
voting, and in some states that ban is lifelong: two per cent of
American adults and 14 per cent of black men are disfranchised because
they had had criminal convictions.

It is possible to pick holes in these figures. Some of the world's
most repressive regimes do not own up to their addiction to
imprisonment (does anyone really believe that Cuba imprisons only five
in every 1,000 of its citizens?). No sane person would rather be
locked up in Russia or China than in America.

A country as large and diverse as the U.S. boasts plenty of model
prisons and exemplary training programs. But all that said, the
conclusion remains stark: America's incarceration habit is a disgrace,
wasting resources at home and damaging the country abroad.

Few mainstream politicians have had the courage to denounce any of
this. People who embrace prison reform usually end up in the political
graveyard. There is no organized lobby for prison reform. The press
ignores the subject.

Which makes Jim Webb all the more remarkable. Webb is far from being a
lion of the Senate, roaring from the comfort of a safe seat. He is a
first-term senator for Virginia who barely squeaked into Congress.

The state he represents also has a long history of being tough on
crime: Virginia abolished parole in 1994 and is second only to Texas
in the number of people it executes.

But Webb is now America's leading advocate of prison reform. He has
co-sponsored a bill to create a blue-ribbon commission to report on
U.S. prisons. And he has spoken out in every possible venue, from the
Senate to local political meetings.

Webb is not content with incremental reform. He is willing to tackle
what he calls "the elephant in the bedroom": America's willingness to
imprison people for drug offences.

Does Webb have any chance of diminishing America's addiction to
incarceration? History is hardly on his side. For most of the 20th
century the U.S. imprisoned roughly the same proportion of its
population as many other countries - a hundred people for every
100,000 citizens. But while other countries stayed where they were,
the U.S. incarceration rate then took off - to 313 per 100,000 in 1985
and 648 in 1997.

Webb also has some powerful forces ranged against him. The
prison-industrial complex (which includes private prisons as well as
public ones) employs thousands of people and armies of lobbyists.

Twenty-six states plus the federal government have passed "three
strikes and you're out" laws that put repeat offenders in prison for
life without parole. And the war on drugs has pushed the incarceration
business into overdrive.

The number of people serving time for drugs has increased from 41,000
in 1980 to 500,000 today, or 55 per cent of the population of federal
prisons and 21 per cent of those in state prisons. An astonishing
three-quarters of prisoners locked up on drug-related charges are black.

But Webb is no ordinary politician. He packed several distinguished
careers into his life before becoming a senator - as a Marine in
Vietnam, a lawyer, a much-published author and secretary of the Navy
in the Reagan administration.

Some signs suggest that the tide is turning in Webb's direction.
Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003. Barack
Obama's Justice Department has hinted that it wants to do something
about the disparity in sentencing between blacks and whites for drug
crimes. Support for both the death penalty and the war on drugs is
softening: A dozen states have legalized the use of marijuana for
medical purposes.

If Webb can transform these glimmers of discontent with America's
prison-industrial complex into a fully-fledged reform movement, then
he will go down in history as a great senator.