[Previous entry: "Call for ethnic press to move on from an oppressed mindset."] [Next entry: "Sharp rise in San Francisco jails' black population"]

05/07/2008: "US crime rate drops while rate of incarceration grows."

America has the world's largest prison population. It's not exactly news these days to mention this fact. After all, largely because of the way in which the war on drugs has played out here, the country long ago out-incarcerated Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa and all the other traditionally high-imprisonment countries. But a new report out by the London-based International Centre for Prison Studies explores just how extraordinary the numbers really are.

By 2001, after eight years of falling crime rates, it had risen to 685; three years later to 723; and now to 751. And this rise is occurring not during a period when the public is listing crime as a top concern, as it was in the mid-1990s, but rather during years in which few people list fear of crime as their top concern.

[ It doesn't make sense. Some fiddling of stats must be going on. Is this high level incareration a novel way to fend of a civil war, particularly a race war? Is that what would happen if they didn't lock so many people away? ]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2008/05/prison_blues.html