Pronouncing Our Own Doom

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:



Pronouncing Our Own Doom

When will the United States wake up to the problem of our growing prison population?

Thomas Geoghegan | December 26, 2007



One fine day, a candidate for president may say the country's goal should be to have only the world's second-highest prison rate, and let Russia or China be No. 1. In terms of incarceration, the U.S. leads the world. The U.S. has a prison rate of 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. Russia, in second place, has a rate of only 628 per 100,000. The world average is a pitiful 166 per 100,000.

It's no coincidence that in both the U.S. and Russia, prison is a hot spot for epidemics. In October, a Virginia teen died from MRSA, a staph infection that has been raging in jails and prisons. Even the nice kids are getting sick. In Chicago, my city, MRSA has been percolating for years in the county jail, where we lock up over 110,000 people every year, men piled on top of men.

The current MRSA is pretty gruesome: First come boils, and then it starts to eat the flesh. And the current epidemic came in major part from the overcrowding of U.S. jails and prisons, just as drug-resistant TB comes out of the lock-ups in Russia. MRSA is an epidemic that has spilled not just out of Chicago jails, but out of those of Los Angeles, Dallas, and elsewhere, according to Dr. Robert Daum, a specialist in what he calls the "pandemic." The Chicago Tribune has run stories; so has the Chicago Reader. But far from being alarmed, the county board has actually cut medical staff at the county jail.

Recently, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia convened a hearing on the alarming size of the U.S. prison rate. Since the hearing was being held by the Joint Economic Committee, its pretext was the economic cost -- $200 billion a year. But Webb, not just a senator but a writer, a novelist, might have been doing what more writers in America should be doing -- raising our astonishing rate of imprisonment as a moral concern. Indeed, why is it not a bigger moral issue, even with writers on the left? About 2.1 million Americans are now in prison. Perhaps up to another 5 ...

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=pronouncing_our_own_doom

[acmavm]

1. This won't get any attention. So many in this country think that

prison is the answer to so many social problems. Practically all of them if they involve minorities.

And once in prison it gets worse. I mean a person wouldn't be there if they weren't the scum of the Earth now, would they? The less than humans that belong in a cage and forgotten, right?

The light has gone out in this country. Instead of being a beacon for the whole world it's now just a deep, dark, cold, place where greed and what really can be described as 'evil' rule.

[pretzel4gore]

2. all ready for mr pig!

at least 2 million reactionarkys have to be buried alive SOMEWHERE in USA, forever, so these jails/prisions are gonna come in awful handy...250 thousand mediawhores alone!
darn. We'll have to hire the Iraqis jails for some of the repuke overflow...
btw john gibson get '5 in the noggin' i hope :) no one's a goddam liberal when it comes to punishing reactionarkies!

[ThomWV]

3. Maybe the moral concern should be why we break so many laws, not why so many are locked up for it.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. Well, when you have shit like 'three strikes' putting people in prison

for life for stealing a television set, and draconian 'war on drugs' laws incarcerating hundreds of thousands, and there being no rehabilitation of convicts so that once a convict, always unemployed guarantees a continual reliance on crime to make a living...

maybe it's not the morality of the criminals but the morality of the vindictive system that should be in question.