As the new penology grew in influence, the number of inmates in state and federal prisons increased from 196,000 in 1972 to 1,159,000 in 1997—a nearly six-fold increase in 25 years. A similar explosion in local jail populations has brought the total number of Americans behind bars to more than 2,000,000. In the decade from 1985 to 1995, federal and state governments opened an average of one new prison each week. Our current rate of incarceration—roughly 1 of every 150 Americans—is 6 to 10 times the rate of other Western industrialized countries. It is higher than that of every other nation whose rate we can approximate except Russia's. This difference between the United States and other industrialized nations is explained more by our penal policies than by our not-very-different crime rates. The United States not only incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than other Western democracies; it is also the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty, and the number of executions has been rising. David Garland writes:
Imprisonment becomes mass imprisonment when it ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population. In the case of the USA, the group concerned is, of course, young black males in large urban centres. For these sections of the population, imprisonment has become normalized. It has come to be a regular, predictable part of experience, rather than a rare and infrequent event.
(Albert W. Alschuler, "The Changing Purposes of Criminal Punishment: A Retrospective on the Past Century and Some Thoughts About the Next," The University of Chicago Law Review 70 [winter 2003]: 1-22, at 14 [footnotes omitted])
Note from KBJ: The criminal law demands very little of us. Don't murder; don't steal; don't rob; don't burgle; don't rape; don't kidnap; don't burn buildings; don't deal drugs. I have no sympathy for individuals who cannot abide by these simple rules, which are essential to civilized life. Those who break the rules forfeit their right to move freely among us. By the way, I have yet to see a group commit a crime, so I have no idea what Garland is talking about. Individuals commit crimes.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 