“We’re number one! We’re number one!”

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, the United States has the largest prison population and highest rate of incarceration in the world. A US Justice Department report released late last month revealed that one in every 32 American adults was either in jail, on probation, or on parole.

America has a total of 2.2 million people in prison. There are 15 American states with smaller populations than that. Also ranking high on the list, but not close to the US, were China and Russia. Even though China has about 4.5 times as many people as the United States, it only has 1.5 million in prison. Russia came in third with 870,000.

Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, who supports alternatives in the “war on drugs” said, “The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens.”

America’s incarceration rate is also appalling. The US incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people is the highest in the world, followed by 611 in Russia. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people. Nadelmann also remarked that, “We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses.”

Around 7 million Americans are either in prison, on probation, or on parole. Drug offenders account for 2 million of that figure. Ryan King, a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project, a group advocating sentencing reform, said, “We send more people to prison, for more different offenses, for longer periods of time than anybody else.” King says various social programs, including those dealing with education, poverty, urban development, health care and child care, have failed. Groups which have studied the Justice Department’s report claim that nonviolent drug offenders are being made to serve mandatory sentences, filling prisons. Figures also show more people being sent to penitentiaries than are being released.

Holding on to the logic that a police-state is a happy state, Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the high prison numbers are a proper response to the crime “problem” in the US. Logically, locking up large numbers of people the state considers “criminals” lowers crime rates. “We have more crime. More crime gets you more prisoners.” Problem solved. However, Scheidegger and the report fail to mention that the US has a higher percentage of its black population in prison than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Not to mention, that the increasing number of penitentiaries being privatized creates a modern form of slave labor.

Personally, I think renaming prisons to freedom camps would solve everything.

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