Prison population at all-time high in US

By Gabriele Chwallek Dec 12, 2006, 1:53 GMT

Washington - The state prison in Angola, Louisiana, is home to a flourishing industry in burials.

One inmate builds the casket, another lines it with cloth. Another group organizes funeral ceremonies. These prisoners stay busy because most of the 5,000 inmates in the facility are serving life sentences. That means more than 90 per cent of them will eventually die behind bars.

The length of their sentences also means that many aging inmates have lost contact with the world outside, leaving no other final resting place for them than the grounds of the prison facility.

Before they die, frail and sick old prisoners are cared for in their own geriatric division. Those who are dying are moved to a hospice, a type of facility that has been added to many US prisons in recent years. The need for hospice facilities has in turn created an avalanche of expenses for prison administrations. Providing an aging prisoner with such care can eat up as much as 60,000 dollars per year, three times the outlay for a healthy prisoner.

And the problem may get worse because state and federal prisons in the US are fuller than ever. Recent statistics released by the Justice Department show that the US ranks number 1 in the world when it comes to incarcerating people. The figures showed that 2.2 million people were behind bars in the US at the end of 2005, an increase of 56,000, or 2.6 per cent, over the year before.

For every 100,000 residents of the US there are 738 prisoners, according to the Sentencing Project. The Washington-based organization said that compares with 611 prisoners per 100,000 people in Russia, 148 per 100,000 in Great Britain, 95 in Germany and 85 in France.

The Sentencing Project, whose main goal is comprehensive reform of US criminal law, also calculated that at the end of 2005 there were more than 7 million people in the US either in prison, on parole or pardoned. That's one of every 32 US citizens, and every 23rd inmate is older than 55 representing an increase of 85 per cent over the year before in the number of prisoners that age.

The rise in the prison population cannot be attributed to an increase in crime, said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project. The crime rate has fallen since 1991 and is at its lowest since the '60s. In the same span of time the number of prisoners has increased 50 per cent.

Overcrowded prisons and the aging of the prison population clearly are the result of tougher sentences implemented in the course of the last 15 to 20 years, said Gotsch. No other country doles out such long prison sentences, she added.

Gotsch cited laws that exist in several US states that require life in prison for criminals who commit a third offence after being convicted of two violent crimes. This means that in some states even if the third offence is shoplifting, the sentence is life in prison.

Gotsch said an increase in regulations for minimum sentences is another reason the average length of incarceration was 30 per cent higher between 1995 and 2001 than the six-year period prior to that. Judges have little discretion especially when it comes to drug offences. For example, possession of five grams of cocaine - an amount equal to less than two teaspoons of sugar - inevitably results in a five-year sentence.

Gotsch called this 'unbelievable,' and said it explains why more than half the approximate 185,000 people in US federal prisons are there after being convicted of drug charges.

Civil Rights organizations such as the Sentencing Project also are especially concerned about the ethnic imbalance among the prisoner population when compared to the population at large. According to the most recent statistics released by the Justice Department the rate of imprisonment for black males is six times higher than that for white males.

If this trend continues, then every third African American male born today would land in prison at some time in his live, Gotsch said.