The new untouchables

The current American prison system is a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million people were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with one-twentieth of the world’s population—houses one-quarter of the world’s inmates. The US incarceration rate (now at 714 prisoners per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 per cent greater than the nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, some with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: The US incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. The US spends some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of Government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.