Reading Jon Taplin recently reminded me of a sobering milestone reached by our correctional facilities early last month: Slightly more than 1 in 100 US citizens are being warehoused in our nations prisons. From the article:
The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. China is second, with 1.5 million people behind bars. The gap is even wider in percentage terms.
Germany imprisons 93 out of every 100,000 people, according to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London. The comparable number for the United States is roughly eight times that, or 750 out of 100,000.
With a significant fraction of Buena Vista’s workforce employed by the Buena Vista Correctional Complex, I am curious about what our readership thinks of this information. On the one hand, more prisoners = more jobs, more revenue and, ostensibly, more prosperity for our town. On the other, the idea that our country that feels it necessary to imprison eight times as many citizens as the next country may indicate that some of our sentencing policies may need to be revisied. And while our community doesn’t deal with this directly, the continuing privatization of prisons (including in Canyon City) raises questions by tying corporate profits directly to growing inmate populations.
What do you think about the situation? How does it balance with our need for good jobs locally?
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2 responses so far ↓
1 The Drug War and the Prison Population « Let Your Life Speak // Apr 7, 2008 at 9:35 am
[...] 7, 2008 by dustinheron The following is a post I wrote on channelbv.net. It was in response to an entry by AlexT. Please feel free to join in on the discussion at the channelBV Forums [...]
2 Alex T // Apr 7, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Dustin’s response raises some valid points. Certainly the drug war is a, if not the, major factor in our ever expanding prison roles. Recently there has been some activity to ‘normalize’ sentencing between crack and cocaine offenders - see this article -
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/04/06/20080406sentencing0406.html
The question I would ask after this would be what do those other countries do with their drug offenders? And does it work?
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