Prison Planet

If you don’t think Big Brother has too much power, then think about this;  there are more people incarcerated in the United States, than any other country in the world. 

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the entire world.  United States holds 25% of the prison population for the planet.  Even China, with it’s more than quadruple population, and totalitarian all seeing – all knowing government, has a smaller population of prisoners than the United States.

It’s no wonder California has nearly twice the number of inmates that it’s 33 prisons can accommodate.  Is it possible police officers just do a better job in the States?  More than 5 million people are on some kind of probation, or parole.  Meaning that one out of every eighteen American men are under some kind of judicial supervision.  That’s a lot of criminals.

Strangely enough, the prison numbers stayed relatively stable from the beginning of the 20th century, all the way up to 1980.  Then in 1980, the prison population more than doubled in the next ten years.  Then doubled again from 1990 till 2000.  The 1980’s is when the “war on drugs” really started to take shape, and the prison population quadrupled in the next twenty years.

Not only does the United States lead in overall prison population, but also lead in per capita incarceration rates.  The safest by the numbers is Maine, with an estimated incarceration rate of 148 per 100 thousand.  That per capita number is still higher than Canada, Australia, or the average for European countries.

It’s said that the taxpayers of America shell out over 60 billion dollars a year just to feed, house, clothe, and monitor inmates.  That averages out to around $88 a day.  At 365 days a year, that comes to a living wage of just over 32 thousand per inmate, non taxed at that. 

In 2009 for the forty eight contiguous states, the poverty level for a single person under the age of 65 is just under $11,000.  Yet prisoners cost roughly three times that to keep locked up. 

So as of this very moment, I guess you could say that “three hots and a cot” beats being homeless and hungry any day of the week.