Home of the Free, U.S. Is Also the World’s Leading Jailer

No other nation on Earth makes more prisons than America, leader of the free world.

America’s booming penal system adds the equivalent of 1,000 beds each week, more than $2-billion worth over the year. Projections set an outlay of more than $70 billion over the next 30 years.

The industry of building and running prisons has become the nation’s fastest-growing consumer of state revenues, eating up more money than schools, highways or police. Virtually every state is building bigger prisons.

In oil-battered Texas, the corrections department’s biennial budget mushroomed 34% while the general budget rose 6.8%. In Ohio, the corrections budget rose 16%, contrasted with 4% for the general budget. California, the nation’s biggest and fastest-growing jailer, expects to lavish $6 billion on 13 new facilities. New York spends $1 billion a year.

Too Many Inmates

But the building is not enough.

There are still far too many inmates to house. Each year an additional 40,000 prisoners are funneled into the overburdened network, adding the equivalent of a new prison each four days. Federal penitentiaries are bulging at the seams and the states are equally stressed; only 10 state systems operate below design capacities.

California, overseer of more than 70,000 inmates, has technical capacity for only 42,000.

Texas, with 39,000 inmates, is so overloaded it must release a criminal for each one it imprisons.

Because of abuses associated with overcrowding, 37 states and the District of Columbia are operating prisons under the watchful eye of the federal bench.

The result: Ghetto properties, failed hotels and tent cities are packed with felons who have no other place to serve their time. More than 250,000 prisoners are parked in “temporary” holding tanks, often ill-prepared county jails.

‘Saturation Point’

“We’ve not only reached the saturation point,” said Larry Meachum, director of Connecticut’s prison system and former Oklahoma chief, “we’ve long since exploded.”

Today, America’s 618 federal and state prisons, hundreds of jails and youth facilities enclose about 900,000 men, women and children, enough citizenry to fill a city the size of San Francisco. Not only are more Americans behind bars, but the rate of imprisonment is soaring. In the 1850s, when statistics were first gathered, America locked away 29 inmates for each 100,000 citizens. This year, the rate is 230 inmates per 100,000, an eightfold jump, the steepest upsurge coming in the last five years. By 1995, the male prison population of California alone is expected to top 100,000.

It is difficult to find international comparisons. Prison systems with grim reputations, places like Turkey, Argentina and Northern Ireland, incarcerate at half the rate of America. Most European nations are a fraction of that rate. Only the Soviet gulags and Afrikaner race camps, with their political internees, compare.

“The world thinks we’re crazy,” said Al Bronstein, director of the national prison project for the American Civil Liberties Union. “They think we’re on some kind of binge.”

The binge is largely self-manufactured, the result of a tidal wave of crime fulminating through the early 1980s, and vigorous legislative efforts to combat it. A growing body of anti-crime statutes removed discretion from judges and created mandatory sentences for gun and drug possession and certain sex offenses. In the last half-decade, conviction rates crept higher and sentences longer.

The quick-fix reaction was visceral and understandable. Crime in America has been a nightmare.

America’s rate is highest in the industrial world, in some cases worse than the Third World: A man is twice as likely to be killed on the streets of Chicago than Belfast, according to Interpol; a woman is four times more likely to be raped here than in drug-torn Colombia or the Philippines.

Of course, good numbers on U.S. crime and punishment are hard to come by. A study trumpeted by the Justice Department this summer reported that locking up 1,000 additional offenders would avert 187,000 crimes, 187 per offender. The study indicated that it was far cheaper to lock up potential offenders than release them and pay the costs later. But other criminologists quickly noted that crime in America would have been eradicated between 1986 and 1987 based on the number of people locked up during the period, assuming 187 offenses per head. “Basically the thing wasn’t good math,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

One thing that always adds up however is anti-crime rhetoric; it is a no-lose proposition.

“No judge or prosecutor was ever kicked out of office because he was too tough on crime,” said William Kime, research division chief for Michigan’s prisons. “Talking tough has always been an easy out.”

But the hatchlings of hard-line justice have come home to roost. America now operates a huge unwanted welfare state, the prison system itself. Taxpayers shell out an estimated $25,000 to $45,000 a year to house, feed and maintain each state and federal inmate. Each new cell costs upward of $85,000 a year to build, $1 million over 30 years including debt service.

But the benefits, namely reducing crime, have been scant. Although the rate of certain felonies--burglary, robbery, murder--has dropped somewhat since 1982, violent crime is far worse today than before the spate of jailings began in the mid-70s. Rape and robbery have increased threefold since the 1960s, and murder has rocketed by 60%.

‘Overwhelming Barbarity’

“We have created an overstuffed and volatile penal system of overwhelming barbarity,” said Elliot Currie, a Berkeley crime scholar, “yet we endure extraordinarily high levels of violence.”

Although some people argue that prisons deter crime, few maintain that prisons rehabilitate. “Who the hell is better off from going to jail?” said Bronstein.

Will more jailings eventually turn crime around?

Unlikely, said Jim Austin, research chief at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

“Prisons today are being filled with people who’re no longer active criminals, long past the peak crime age of 15 to 23,” he said. “The impact of imprisonment is negated.”

Younger, active criminals are taking their place, he said, thrown into the same cycle of violence by shattered homes, poor education, joblessness and an effervescent drug trade.

But today’s prison crisis was scarcely anticipated when the fever for mandatory sentencing swept the nation.

Draconian Penalties

Perhaps the first major program to catch the wave was New York’s Rockefeller drug law model, introduced in 1973. It established a Draconian set of penalties for drug dealers: minimum sentences for possession of as little as 2 ounces of heroin were 15 to 25 years; the maximum, life.

The second, enacted in 1977, was Michigan’s “felony firearm” law that added years to the sentences of criminals convicted of using guns during other felonies.

Although these and measures in other states did much to fill the prisons, they did little to blunt the long-term trajectory of gun- and drug-related crime.

“When people read about a horrible crime, they say, ‘How long can we put that man away?’ ” said Charles Terrell, chairman of the Texas board of prisons. “But nobody really thinks about what to do with all those people afterward. It is a kind of out-of-mind, out-of-sight mentality.”

The mentality has brought about violence of another kind: prison riot.

Late on the night of May 13, Oklahoma’s medium-security prison in Stringtown exploded. The wire-rimmed prison was jammed to overflowing. Men were sleeping on cots in hallways and the floor. Race friction, a new warden and the stultifying heat of a false summer combined to erupt into a three-day destructive frenzy.

In the end, $5 million in precious dorm space was torched.

Months earlier at New York’s Rikers Island, crowded prisoners went on a rampage, incinerating space for 600 inmates.

Drumbeat of Unrest

Sometimes there is no explosion, only a steady drumbeat of unrest. Between January, 1984, and September, 1985, 52 Texas prisoners kept in close, unsupervised quarters were fatally shivved, one at a time, week after week. Eventually officials were forced to issue monthly mortality reports.

Paradoxically, the momentum to pack prisons has helped serious offenders. Since space is limited and lesser criminals are pouring in, a number of violent individuals are assured early release. California, for instance, controls or supervises more than 45,000 parolees, a record level. New York watches 25,000. In Texas, 50,000 parolees have been linked to a detonation of crime in Dallas and other cities.

“Parole boards are releasing men they know they shouldn’t,” said Leo Samaniego, sheriff of El Paso. “They say these men are nonviolent. But there’s no such animal.”

Probation numbers also have grown--Texas has 300,000--largely because courts are as overloaded as prisons, and plea bargaining is favored to clear the dockets of the logjam caused by tough laws. Again, criminals are the beneficiaries. In Massachusetts, half of gun-violation defendants were released without conviction a year before a vigorous anti-gun law went into effect. Two years after the tough new law was enacted, four-fifths of the defendants got off free.

Overcrowding stirs trouble elsewhere.

Transient Prisoners

Transient prisoners--those moving from trial to prison or prison to prison--have no cell places. The U.S. Marshals Service handles the nation’s federal transient population. Efforts to secure jail space has proved a crushing burden, cutting into other vital services.

Consider the case of Rhode Island, where no prison cells are available. Federal deputies must take their charges across two neighboring states each day to bring them to trial in Rhode Island.

There also are no available cells in San Francisco, not even rentable county jail space, said Steve Boyce, congressional affairs chief for the agency. Deputies must drive each day from Los Angeles.

Burnout Factor

“There’s a tremendous burnout factor,” he said. “One team gets up at 2 a.m., picks up the prisoner and takes him to San Francisco. Another team takes the prisoner back to his jail cell in L.A.” after the trial day concludes. “We burn up a lot of manpower and overtime to do our duty.”

Two years ago, the Marshals Service handled 6,000 transient prisoners a day. Today the figure is 8,000.

“We’re in a major crisis,” Boyce said. “When policymakers tried to fix crime, they loaded the front end, cracked down on enforcement, improved detection. But they did nothing about the back end of the service, providing the space we need.

“Now we’re scratching and clawing for anything we can get.”