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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Land Of The Free! The U.S. Has 25% Of World's Prisoners. (The Economist)

blackprisoner.istock
Joshua Holland
In 2010, The Economist highlighted a case in which four Americans were arrested for importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. That violated a Honduran law which that country no longer enforces, but because it’s still on the books there its enforced here. “The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece.” When the article was published 10 years later, two of them were still behind bars.
As The Economist put it:
America imprisons people for technical violations of immigration laws, environmental standards and arcane business rules. So many federal rules carry criminal penalties that experts struggle to count them. Many are incomprehensible. Few are ever repealed, though the Supreme Court… pared back a law against depriving the public of “the intangible right of honest services”, which prosecutors loved because they could use it against almost anyone. Still, they have plenty of other weapons. By counting each e-mail sent by a white-collar wrongdoer as a separate case of wire fraud, prosecutors can threaten him with a gargantuan sentence unless he confesses, or informs on his boss. The potential for injustice is obvious.
According to the report:
The Department of Justice (Department) is facing two interrelated crises in the federal prison system. The first is the continually increasing cost of incarceration, which, due to the current budget environment, is already having an impact on the Department’s other law enforcement priorities. The second is the safety and security of the federal prison system, which has been overcrowded for years and, absent significant action, will face even greater overcrowding in the years ahead.
Some of that cost growth is the result of an aging prison population. According to the report, in just the past three years, the number of inmates over the age of 65 has grown by almost a third, while the population under 30 fell by 12 percent. “Elderly inmates are roughly two to three times more expensive to incarcerate than their younger counterparts,” according to the review.
Several factors have contributed to the growing numbers held in federal facilities. Primary among them is a longstanding trend of prosecuting more cases that had previously been handled by state and local courts in the federal system.
By one estimate, the number of federal criminal offenses grew by 30 percent between 1980 and 2004; indeed, there are now well over 4,000 offenses carrying criminal penalties in the United States Code.  In addition, an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 federal regulations can be enforced criminally.
Previous Inspector General reviews had found that programs which might have eased the overcrowded system – like a compassionate release program for sick and infirm inmates, and another that allows foreign nationals to serve out their sentences in their home countries – have been underutilized and/or badly mismanaged.
Further reading: Liliana Segura’s report on the growth of the private prison industry in The Nationand the Center for Constitutional Rights’ fact sheet, “Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in US Prisons.”

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