"America has overtaken Russia as the world’s most aggressive jailer," the August 10 issue of London’s Economist explained. For similar offenses, the big-business magazine noted, a U.S. resident "is more likely to go to prison and draw a longer sentence than his European peer."

The article cited statistics compiled by researchers at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University near Chicago revealing that the percentage of the population incarcerated in state and federal prisons more than quadrupled from 110 people per 100,000 in 1973 to 478 per 100,000 in 2000. When local jails are included in the tally, the imprisonment rate balloons to nearly 700 people per 100,000 in the United States. This compares with 102 in Canada, 85 in France, and 48 in Japan.

With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States claims 25 percent of all inmates.

The greatest expansion of people in jail came during the eight years of the Democratic administration of President William Clinton. With bipartisan support from Congress, the former president signed legislation expanding mandatory prison sentences and increasing their length, reduced protections against arbitrary search and seizure by the cops and courts, and financed a record increase of more police on the streets. Combined with the so-called "war on drugs," this legislation led to the doubling of the U.S. prison population to 2 million people.

The Economist noted the impact of mandatory sentences. In the mid-1970s, three in four U.S. prisoners were released after appearing before a parole board. Now only 30 percent of prisoners appear before a parole board; the rest are released when they have done their time. In the 10 years after 1986 the average time spent in federal prison rose from 39 to 54 months.

The article is a reminder of how the capitalist justice system reinforces the worst dog-eat-dog values of bourgeois society. In some states ex-convicts are barred from certain types of jobs and can be excluded from public housing. In Illinois for example, ex-felons cannot get hired in 57 types of professions.

Many of those behind bars suffer from deteriorating health. In 1997 some 25 percent of the people in the United States with AIDS or the HIV virus had come out of prison that year. The numbers increased for tuberculosis and hepatitis C. In the late 1980s when a resistant strain of TB plagued New York, 80 percent of the cases were traced to prisons.

The Economist also noted the denial of voting rights for U.S. prisoners. Most state governments bar inmates and ex-convicts from participating in elections, disenfranchising 4.7 million U.S. citizens or 2.3 percent of the voting population. The figure is nearly 17 percent for Black men in Kentucky and Virginia.  
 
Lockdowns and solitary confinement
In some states prison authorities have imposed tighter restrictions on inmates by not only curtailing paroles, but reducing family visits and increasing the use of solitary confinement as punishment for "misbehavior." Many "amenities" inside prisons have already been eliminated, including education programs that allowed inmates to obtain college degrees while behind bars.

Fully one-third of all young Black males today are either in prison, on parole, or on probation. According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, at the end of 2001 there were 3,535 Black prisoners per 100,000 Black males in the United States, compared to 1,177 Latino male inmates per 100,000 Latino males, and 462 white male inmates per 100,000 white males. Based on these figures, Blacks are three times as likely to be in prison as Latinos and nearly eight times more likely than whites.

Over the past decade, however, the number of Latino prisoners increased at the fastest annual rate, followed by whites, and then Blacks.

The U.S. Census Bureau figure for prisoners put to death from the years 1930 to 1999 is 4,458, excluding capital punishment by military authorities. Of those executions, 2,201 were of Black inmates, accounting for nearly half of all state-sanctioned murders--although African Americans comprise some 12 percent of the U.S. population.

These executions of Blacks and other working people don’t include those carried out by cops on the streets. Although government officials keep no accurate records on individuals killed by police, a survey based on a search of U.S. newspapers from 1997 turned up accounts of some 2,000 deaths at the hands of cops and prison guards between 1990 and early 1998--just the tip of the iceberg.

On August 26 lawyers for Eddie Joe Lloyd will present DNA evidence to a judge in Detroit exonerating Lloyd in the 1984 rape and killing of a young woman. If agreed to by the court he will be the 110th person released based on DNA evidence. Lloyd, who was in a mental hospital at the time, maintained he was tricked into signing a confession by the cops who said it would be used to help smoke out the real killer. The judge lamented at the time that Lloyd could not be put to death.

The case occurs as federal investigators are conducting an inquiry into the Detroit police department’s systematic violation of civil rights laws. The inquiry includes excessive use of force, death of prisoners in jail, and widespread detention of witnesses.  
 
 
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