A NATION BEHIND BARS

IMAGINE THAT the United States locked up the populations of Wyoming,
Vermont and North Dakota and then threw in the nation of Iceland for good
measure. The result would be an inmate population of approximately the same
size as the one currently behind bars in the United States. Last year, for
the first time in American history, the states and the federal government
- -- in jails and in prisons around the country -- had more than 2 million
people behind bars, according to Justice Department statistics. Those
locked up included 1.3 percent of all males in this country, 4.8 percent of
all black males -- and a shocking 11.8 percent of black men between the
ages of 20 and 34. The dramatic rise in the prison population has created a
nation of prisoners within American society.

While hidden from the view, and even the consciousness, of most Americans,
the existence of this nation forces those on the outside to ask, in turn,
what kind of nation they want to live in.

There is no magic "right" number of people to have in prison; that will
properly vary with crime rates and popular attitudes toward criminals.

But there is something breathtaking about the current figure.

The U.S. rate of incarceration is the highest in the world; according to
data from the British Home Office, the only countries with rates close to
it are the Cayman Islands and Russia. It is nearly seven times the rate in
Canada and more than four time the rate in the United Kingdom, which leads
Europe. It also represents an enormous rise by the standards of even recent
American history. According to criminologist Alfred Blumstein, the rate of
imprisonment stayed stable between the 1920s and the 1970s. Since the
1970s, however, it has increased several times over.

The logic of tougher sentencing regimes and extended prison terms for drug
offenders has long since become circular.

When crime persists in the face of tougher sentences, many policymakers
conclude that the sentences need to be tougher still.

The cycle has proven enormously difficult to break, in large measure
because popular sentiment makes the tough-on-crime posture politically
irresistible. But keeping an ever-growing number of people locked up has
huge costs: the financial costs associated with maintaining a nation of
inmates, the human costs in the wrecked lives of those who could have been
rehabilitated under different policies, the costs to society when people
are finally released after years of prison socialization. There are also
moral costs -- hard to define yet real nonetheless. For the incarceration
rate reflects on some level the rate at which a society gives up on its
members.

And 2 million is a huge number to give up on.