Vol. 81/No. 4      January 23, 2017

 

US prison population drops to 10-year low

 
The United States prison population in 2015 declined to its lowest level in a decade, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported last month. There were 35,500 fewer workers held behind bars, 2.3 percent less than 2014. The drop reflected the impact of inmate protests and growing outrage over severe overcrowding and decrepit living conditions for those behind bars as the numbers caught up in the web of the capitalist “justice” system has skyrocketed over the past several decades.

The U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Some 1.5 million people were held in federal or state prisons in 2015, up from about 200,000 in 1970; another 750,000 are incarcerated in local jails; and 4.8 million are on parole or probation. A disproportionate number are African-American, some 40 percent of those behind bars.

The number of workers thrown into prison had soared over the past 25 years. During the eight years of the Bill Clinton presidency, between 1993 and 2001, the number of people locked behind bars jumped by nearly 60 percent. Clinton expanded funds for cops and their armaments, crack cocaine possession sentences, established mandatory minimum sentences and other steps that filled the prisons, signing the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” and the grotesquely named “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.”

Use of the death penalty fell last year, as well as public support for the anti-working-class practice. Thirty death sentences were handed down in 2016, a 40 percent drop from the previous year and fewer than at any time since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Only five states carried out executions in 2016.

The biggest decline of prisoners in 2015 — 40 percent of the total — was in federal penitentiaries. State facilities, which hold more than 85 percent of the country’s prisoners, also saw cuts, including in Alaska, Colorado, Kentucky, Maryland and South Carolina. In California, tens of thousands of inmates have been freed over the past few years, since a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordered the state to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of institutional capacity.
 
 
Related articles:
Attica censorship ‘a danger to all who care about freedom’
Fight prison censorship
Prisoners in UK protest inhuman conditions
Mumia Abu-Jamal wins fight for medical care behind bars
Oppose rulers’ use of death penalty!
 
 
 
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