American Gulag

Recently, the United States achieved the dubious honor of boasting the largest prison and jail population on earth. It reached this zenith by surpassing cash-strapped Russia - long its only rival as a mass imprisonment society - after Russia released thousands of inmates so as to save money. A few years earlier, as America rushed to lock up ever more of its population for ever-pettier offenses, the absolute size of its incarcerated population surpassed that of China - despite China's population being more than four times that of America. According to research conducted by the British Home Office, America now incarcerates over one fifth of the world's total prisoners.

There is something bitterly ironic in this. For America really is a land of liberty, a place where lives, often scarred by injustice elsewhere, can be remade. How tragic, therefore, that over the past twenty years, the country's political leaders have so often decided to deal with many of the most noxious side-effects of poverty - from chronic drug use and the establishment of street drug markets, to hustling, to gang membership and the spraying of graffiti on public buildings - through a vast over-reliance on incarceration.

How doubly tragic that this has occurred in tandem with a political assault on the Great Society anti-poverty programs put in place during the 1960s; that the investments in infrastructure, public education, public healthcare and job training which might curtail crime more effectively are, instead, being replaced by massive public expenditures on building new prisons to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of low-level offenders. With such vicious cycles of crime, punishment and dis-investment in poor communities it is no surprise that the prison population has expanded to such an extent.

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