U.S. incarceration rates top worldwide charts

You'll be happy to know, as an American citizen, you are nearly half as likely to be a victim of violent crime or theft today than you were a decade ago. But you are also far more likely to be reading this newspaper from a prison cell.

This week, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released data detailing the ever-increasing American prison population, which continues to expand even as the crime rate steadily declines.

Since 1994, the prison population of the United States has increased by 42 percent, leaving one out of every 138 Americans imprisoned. That's two people from your overcrowded Psychology 101 class locked up at any given moment.

This trend has left the land of the free the most incarcerated nation on the planet, both in absolute terms - with more than two million citizen prisoners, we even beat China - and per capita, where Americans have five times the rate of confinement of our closest competitor, Great Britain.

Unfortunately, you're even worse off if you are a minority. In 2004, 60 percent of the prison population was made up of minority inmates. Amazingly, 12.6 percent of all African-American men between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned last year - one in eight.

To keep up with the flood of 900 inmates per week, prison spending has quadrupled over the last 20 years, even as budgets for treatment and education programs continue to be cut, including those for nonviolent criminals, who make up the majority of prisoners. Such programs at the state and local level, for example, those that treat drug violators in Washington and Brooklyn, N.Y., cost as little as half as much as a comparably long prison sentence and reduce rates of recidivism by more than 25 percent.

Of course, support for such programs instead of new prisons and harsher sentences could lead politicians to be labeled "soft" on crime. Instead, we'll continue to enjoy being tough on crime by spending more tax money to make sure those two million prisoners are more likely to return to their cells.

Chris Narkun

Opinion editor