America in Lockdown

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Sentencing Project brings the good news that mass incarceration in the United States is continuing a recent steady drip-drip drop since a period of fifty years beginning in the early 1970s when the prison population grew by nearly five hundred percent.

It grew, not because crime rates grew (they decreased), but because human thirst for retribution and punishment grew, with harsher sentencing.

It also brings the bad news that it will take, at this rate, till 2098 to return to prior levels. I don’t think I’ll live to see that, and I don’t think most of you will either.

But right now, only one country in all the world holds more people in its prisons and jails than we do, and that’s Red China. Only four countries hold more of their people (percentage of their population) than we do, and you wouldn’t want to live in any of them. The United States imprisons four times as many of our citizens as the country we declared independence from.

Within the United States, Mississippi imprisons the largest share of its people — six times as many as our most modest state jailer, Massachusetts.

How many in this country, all told, are we talking about? The Sentencing Project says two million, one of every seven in prison serving life sentences.

The Project is trying to end the extreme sentences peculiar to the United States, which have worked to roll up the numbers of incarcerated into these millions. Working on other sentencing and collateral reforms as well.

So that maybe someday we’ll earn back some authenticity when we sing of our country, as the land of the free.