A large prison population is another characteristic of authoritarian regimes. Hence the burgeoning US incarceration rate during the past decade, coupled with the recent rapid growth of the prison "industry" must be regarded as further evidence of a drift toward authoritarian government, as one would expect given the phenomenon of "Third-Worldisation."
Prison inmates in the US are predominantly poor, and the sentences handed out to people without social prestige or the resources to defend themselves are much harsher than those received by people with higher incomes who are charged with the same crimes. Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics show that the median incomes of male prisoners before sentencing is about one-third that of the general population. Median incomes of inmates are even lower if the relatively few (and more-affluent) white-collar criminals are not included in the calculations.
Since the poor are disproportionately from minorities, the prison population is also disproportionately minority. By 1992, the American authorities were imprisoning black men at a rate five times higher than the old apartheid regime had done at its worst in South Africa, and there were more prisoners of Mexican descent in the US than in all of Mexico [Phil Wilayto, "Prisons and Capitalist Restructuring," Workers' World, January 15, 1995].
Michael Specter reports that more than 90 percent of all the offences committed by prison inmates are crimes against property ["Community Corrections," The Nation, March 13, 1982]. In an era where the richest one percent of the population owns more property than the bottom 90 percent combined, it's hardly a surprise that those at the very bottom should try to recoup illegally some of the maldistributed wealth they are unable to obtain legally.
In the 1980s the United States created mandatory sentences for dozens of drug offences, expanded capital punishment, and greatly increased the powers of police and prosecutors. The result was a doubling of the prison population from 1985 to 1994, according to a report recently issued by the US Department of Justice. Yet the overall crime rate in the U.S. has remained almost constant during the past twenty years, according to the same report. Indeed, the rate dropped 15 percent from 1980 to 1984, yet the number of prisoners increased 43 percent during that same period. The crime rate then increased by 14 percent from 1985 to 1989, while the number of prisoners grew by 52 percent.
Although the growth of the US prison population has been swollen out of proportion to the crime rate by new drug sentencing laws, drug use has not decreased. Repressive measures are clearly not working, as anyone can see, yet they're still favoured over social programmes, which continue to be scaled back. For example, a recently passed crime law in the US commits billions of dollars for more police and prisons, while at the same time the new Republican Congress eliminates family planning clinics, school lunch programmes, summer youth jobs programmes, etc. Prison construction has become a high-growth industry, one of the few "bright" spots in the American economy, attracting much investment by Wall Street vultures.