Incarceration in the United States in comparison to other countries.

If I lived in Alabama and gave a ride to an illegal immigrant, or if I rented them a room, or invited them to worship, or married them, or baptized their children, I could be arrested and sent to jail. That is the way their new law reads. [based on an article by Campbell Robertson reporting in the New York Times Aug. 31, 2011.]

Many of us remember President Eisenhower’s warnings about the Military-Industrial Complex and the abuse it could and has inflicted upon our society. I recently ran into this information that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has spoken about, the Prision-Industrial Complex.

I think you might find this paper published by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in 2006 dealing with how we incarcerate people in this country in comparison to other countries in the world.

In the past 30 years, the United States has come to rely on imprisonment as its response to all types of crime. Even minor violations of parole or probation often lead to a return to prison. This has created a prison system holding 2,200,000 people - an unprecedented size in this country.

The US incarcerates the largest number of people in the world, with a rate four times the World average. The US has less than 5% of the world's population but over 23% of the world's incarcerated people. The 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in the US is 75% higher than China, 153% higher than Russia, 505% higher than Brazil, 550% higher than India. Our rate is 4 to 7% higher than other western nations such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

Some individual US states imprison up to six times as many people as nations of comparable size. New York State has 92,769 people in prison, Australia has 25,353; Massachusetts has 22,778, Hong Kong 11,521; Illinois has 64,735, Ecuador has 12,261; Florida has 148,521, Sri Lanka 23,163; California has 246,317, Poland 86,820; Texas 223,195, Malaysia has 35, 644. If the rest of the world followed the US lead on incarceration policies and practices, the total number of people imprisoned worldwide would increase fivefold from the present 9.2 million to 47.6 million.

The nationwide bill for incarceration in the US today is $42 billion annually. Yet many federal prisons and state jail systems have been sued for failure to meet minimum health and safety requirements and prisoner rehabilitation and reentry services are seriously underfunded.

In the US today, African Americans are six times as likely to be incarcerated as whites; Latinos over twice as likely. If the US enacted the reforms necessary to reduce this disproportionate minority confinement by just 50%, the incarceration rate would drop to put the US fifth in the world instead of first.

If we are looking for ways to save the country money this is an area that seems overlooked and under-thought. It seems to me as another example of where we as a nation need to look at programs with proven and better records than our own in order to improve our society.