Lowering the Bar

Trey Smith

In this morning's post, Taking Aim, I noted that, while national crime statistics have steadily fallen across the board over the past 20 years, local police departments are arming themselves at alarming rates. Here's another interesting fact to chew on. As Charles Davis writes in Wells Fargo’s Prison Cash Cow,

By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted. Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full quarter of the world’s prisoners.

So let's review. Crime is down by a significant amount -- by more than 50% for some types of offenses -- yet the rate of incarceration is up 50% over much of this same time period. What in the hell is going on here?

Davis later points out that "the private prison industry grew by more than 350 percent over the last decade and a half" -- yes, the same period of time that incarceration rates have gone up. This should make it easy for us to connect the dots.

What it tells us is that, due to the lobbying efforts of the corporate prison industry, our political leaders have been lowering the bar for what constitutes a prison-able crime. In other words, to keep the profits flowing, more Americans are being locked up for lesser and lesser offenses.

From a purely economic standpoint, this makes a good deal of sense. If less people are being arrested for crime, the prison-industrial complex must find potential prisoners from a shrinking pool of available candidates. So, they must make do by imprisoning folks for the types of crimes -- mainly nonviolent ones -- that a generation ago would have constituted merely a fine and/or probation.

A cynic might even theorize that one of the chief reasons the President and Congress keep dragging their feet about crafting legislation to deal with this nation's jobs crisis is that they are hoping it leads to more crime. More crime means more prisoners, more prisoners means greater corporate profits AND greater corporate profits means bigger campaign contributions.

It's a great system...unless you're one of the 2.3 million poor schmucks behind bars!