We in the United States have the largest percentage of our population under lock and key than any other nation on earth. Why is that. That will be the topic of the next two posts.  This time we will look at it from a time standpoint and a geographical perspective. The next post will look at the make up of the prison population to see why they are there.

Let me start off this post by letting you know that I have never used any kind of illegal drugs. I did go to college in the 1960s but only smelled marijuana, I never puffed it. :)

Timeline of increase

Lets start with a look at it from a time frame.  As you can see the dramatic increase in our prison population took place starting in 1981. It is no coincidence that that was the start of the Reagan administration’s getting tough on crime and its war on drugs. Here is what Wikipedia says about that:

Another contributing factor to United States’ spike in the number of prisoners is the War on Drugs, formally initiated by Richard Nixon with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and avidly pursued by Ronald Reagan.  Incarceration for drug offenses has increased 12-fold from 40,000 in 1981 to nearly 500,000 by 2010, accounting for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population since 1985.

After the passage of Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased. The Act imposed the same five-year mandatory sentence on users of crack as on those possessing 100 times as much powder cocaine.  This had a disproportionate effect on low-level street dealers and users of crack, who were more commonly poor blacks, Latinos, the young, and women.

Worldwide & Statewide Comparisons

As you can see from the above chart we are the only country in the world above 700/100,000 citizens. Russia with their Gulags are number two. Excluding a few countries most other countries in the world have a prison population less than half per capita of ours.

Now lets look at it from a State level. Three southern and very red States top the list for imprisoning their populations. Coming in as a second group are Florida, Texas, and Arizona.  Florida and Texas are widely known to be the capital punishment capitals of the world. They kill more of their citizens than just about the rest of the U.S.

Except for California every “Blue State” is in the bottom half of these statistics.  I don’t have an explanation of this but it is interesting to note. So, there is a significant trend of incarceration rates by State and political alignments. I will leave it up to you to discern the reasons.

Next time I will be looking at who and what offenses make up the prison populations. If we ever hope to be able to reduce our rates we must understand who imprisons the most and why they are there.