Pubdate: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 Source: San Luis Obispo County Tribune (CA) Copyright: 2000 The Tribune Contact: P.O. Box 112, San Luis Obispo, CA 93406-0112 Fax: 805.781.7905 Website: http://www.thetribunenews.com/ Author: Jesse Katz, Los Angeles Times AMERICA LOCKS UP 2 MILLIONTH INMATE 461 Of Every 100,000 Americans Now Serving Time NEW ORLEANS - A statistical milestone will be reached sometime today in the United States. The world's most incarcerated country will lock up its 2 millionth prisoner. That milestone - 1.2 million in state prisons, 645,000 in county jails, 145,000 in federal penitentiaries - is expected to be reached today, according to a study by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that supports alternatives to imprisonment. Although calculating a single day for such an occasion is an imprecise science - and clearly done for political effect - nobody denies that the 2 million era is upon us, or that the growth in incarceration over the last decade represents a social experiment unlike any the United States has seen. "This is the most punishing decade on record," said Vincent Schiraldi, the institute's executive director, noting that the nation's inmate population at the start of the 1990s was 1 million, an unprecedented number at the time. To double that - adding another million in just 10 years - is to equal the growth of the prison population during the previous 90 years. Based on the U.S. Justice Department's most recent data, 461 of every 100,000 Americans are now serving a prison sentence of at least one year. California, though home to the largest prison population, is about average per capita, with 483 inmates per 100,000 residents. In Louisiana, the rate is 736, tops in the nation - a symbol of resolve for some here, a badge of shame for others. Having reached such an extraordinary tally so fast, the United States appears deeply ambivalent about what it has sown. While a plummeting crime rate stands as vindication for many, a growing number of critics - not just liberals, but also fiscal conservatives and anti-government independents - is beginning to question the costs, both economic and social, of keeping so many people locked up. Drug offenders account for the greatest percentage of new inmates, yet hardly anyone believes the drug war is any closer to being won. Sentences everywhere have become longer and sterner, but each year 500,000 ex-convicts return to society, often less equipped to function than before. Racial disparities are so extreme - blacks are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites - that many blacks consider the prison system nothing short of a modern-day slave plantation. As crime rates continue to drop, even a few law-and-order politicians have begun to wonder if the $40 billion that taxpayers pony up annually for incarceration could not be better spent. Race is often the subtext, an unspoken code that contributes to the perception of criminals as "The Other," a distinct and deviant caste. Although blacks compose about 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 50 percent of the state and federal prison population. The odds that a black man will do time at some point in his life are 1 in 3; for whites, it is 1 in 25. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D