United States is the Biggest Police State

In About, The World’s Greatest Prison State, Your Guide to Civil Liberties on civilliberty.about.com, 2005, author Andrew Somers asks the question: which country has the highest incarceration rate per each 100,000 people in the population? "Would you think Russia? China? South Africa? Saudi Arabia?" he asks. The sad truth is that it is the United States. The United States currently incarcerates 718 people per 100,000, according to Somers. England and Canada are in the low to mid-100s per 100,000, he reports, and that violator of human rights, China, incarcerates 103 per 100,000.

The Associated Press recently reported that jails and prisons in the United States held 2.1 million people, or one out of every 138 U.S. residents! (abcnews.go.com, U.S. Prison Population Soars in 2003, 2004, U.S. Prison Population Grew by Some 900 Inmates Per Week Between 2003, 2004 Government Reports, Shiobhan McDonough, Associated Press, April 24, 2005.) In addition, in 2004, 61 percent of the inmates were racial and ethnic minorities. "An estimated 12.6 percent of all black men in their late 20s were in jails or prisons," McDonough reported. While 3.6 percent of Hispanic men of that age group were incarcerated, 1.7 percent of white men in the same age group were locked up.

The reason for the increase, according to McDonough, is the get-tough policies of the 1980’s and 1990’s, such as mandatory drug sentences, three strikes laws, and laws which restrict early releases. Many of the incarcerated are not serious or violent criminals. There are many low-level drug offenders behind bars. Malcolm Young of the Sentencing Project told McDonough that "one way to help lower the number is to introduce drug treatment programs that offer effective ways of changing behavior and to provide appropriate assistance to the mentally ill."

You have to wonder about the possibilities if all the money spent keeping these people behind bars were spent to provide decent jobs. Is this the kind of society we want to live in, where people are locked up in jails and prisons so that we don’t have to do a little extra work and spend a little extra money to provide them a decent living and turn them into productive, taxpaying citizens and residents? What are we doing invading and occupying Iraq, trying to establish democracy there, when we have to lock up 1 out of every 138 of the people living here in the US because we don’t have the money to provide them jobs, training, education, drug treatment, or treatment for mental illness!