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How a nation uses its power to deny a person’s freedom has always
been a critical measure of authoritarian rule. Massive incarceration based
on race, ethnic origin or nationality, political beliefs, class, sexual
orientation, age or other inherent characteristics is a form of tyranny.
Yet few people realize that this is happening on an enormous scale
here, in the United States of America. Immigrants make up the latest
market for a booming private prison industry.
The U.S. locks up the highest percentage of its population in the
world—730 per 100,000, nearly two and a half million people. Although it
has only 5% of the population, 25% of the world’s prison population is
behind bars in the U.S.
It wasn’t always like this. This huge growth in the prison population
has taken place just over the past two decades, when the imprisonment
rate per capita surged by 45%.
It’s not that the U.S. experienced a major crime wave. The opposite is
true. Crime and especially violent crime steadily decreased over the same
period. Two factors–the lock-up of mostly poor, black or Latino
recreational drug users and of immigrants–now account for more than
80% of people behind bars in our country. Draconian drug prohibitionist
policies and new laws that criminalize undocumented immigrants have
flooded the nation’s prisons.
In other words, while actual behavior in society improved overall, the
U.S. government broadened the criteria for depriving people of their most