Vermont Prisons Outpace those in Pakistan, Libya, China
By: Ronald Fraser
Rutland Herald (VT)
Myths have a way of hiding what we don't want to see. Americans, for example, are quick to charge Third World dictators with abusive prison policies. But prison incarceration rates tell a different story. Recent reports show that 45 of the 50 democratically elected state governments in the United States, including Vermont, imprison their citizens at a faster pace than any of the foreign governments headed by dictators.
Rulers in Libya, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, China and Pakistan made Parade Magazine's 2005 world's worst dictators list. And the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, located in Oakland, Calif., has issued a report titled, "U.S. Rates of Incarceration: A Global Perspective," showing the incarceration rates for these five dictatorships – the number of persons in prison for every 100,000 population – ranging from a low of 57 in Pakistan to a high of 207 in Libya.
By comparison, prison policies made in Montpelier locked up 247 state citizens for every 100,000 population in 2005. In other words, Vermont imprisons its people at a rate slightly higher than Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libya and four times faster than Pakistan under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If inmates held in local jails in Vermont were added in, the spread would be even wider.
Only five states –Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Minnesota and North Dakota – have prison incarceration rates less harsh than Libya's. All other states enforce prison policies that put dictators around the world to shame, including more than 600 inmates per 100,000 population in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.
The NCCD study went on to compare prison rates in American states to foreign countries with a similar population. While New York state and Australia have about the same size populations, New York prisons hold 92,000 inmates to Australia's 25,000. California's 246,000 prisoners compare to Poland's 86,000 even though each has similar populations.
Why are prisons in America filling at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world? Some say our crime rate is the cause.
But the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., reports, "Criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck examined the near-tripling of the prison population (in the United States) during the period 1980-1996 and concluded that changes in crime explained only 12 percent of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing policy accounted for 88 percent of the increase."
Legislatively dictated sentences for even minor offenses tie the hands of judges and juries. These mandatory minimum punishments continue to keep hundreds of thousands behind bars for just using or selling tiny amounts of "illicit" substances.
In addition, about one-half of all inmates in the U.S. are serving time for non-violent offenses. If prisons were only used to separate dangerous people from the rest of society, the 1,542 state prisoners in Vermont in 2005 could be drastically cut over night.
This uniquely American belief in prisons as the all-purpose punishment for offenses great and small has resulted in one in every 136 U.S. residents living behind bars.
Rather than reforming inmates, U.S. prisons have become a merry-go-round. More than one-half of all inmates leaving prison find their way back – often due to minor violations of parole or probation rules.
The study ends on this note: "The rate of imprisonment in the United States is considerably higher than any other industrialized nation. To ignore it is to condone the flagrant waste of money and lives and the crime-producing effects of needless imprisonment and to perpetuate the myth that more imprisonment means better protection of the public."
With only 5 percent of the world's people, the United States is home to 23 percent of the world's prisoners. If the rest of the world followed America's prison policies, the worldwide incarcerated population would grow from 9 to 47 million. Isn't it time that we stop worrying about the behavior of far away dictators and start downsizing prisons here at home?
Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.
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