The United States proclaims to be a "paradise of freedom," yet the total
number and ratio of its people behind bars both rank the first in the world.
According to data released by the statistics bureau of the U.S. Justice
Department on Oct. 23, 2005, the total number of people incarcerated in the
United States was 2,267,787 at the end of 2004. This meant an incarceration rate
of 724 per 100,000, up 18 percent from ten years earlier and 25 percent higher
than that of any other nation. (Study Notes Upswing In Arrests of Women, the
Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2005.) According to a survey of the New York Times,
the number of people sentenced to life in prison had doubled in the United
States over the past ten years. (Packing Prisons, Squandering Lives, the
Baltimore Sun,Oct. 21, 2005.) From 2003 to 2004, the number of prisoners grew
ata rate of 900 each week. In the first half of 2004, the number of newly
incarcerated in the 50 states grew 2.3 percent over the same period of the
previous year to 48,000.
As the prisons were packed, the situation of prisoners worsened. On Dec. 31,
2004, 24 state prison systems were operating at or above their highest capacity.
The federal system was 40 percent over capacity. (The Nation's Prison Population
Continues Its Slow Growth, U.S. Department of Justice,
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs) As the government cut back on expenditure of
prisons, some state prison systems reduced input onmedical care for prisoners.
As a result, a large number of prisoners were infected with tuberculosis or
hepatitis. In April 2005, a 44-year-old male inmate died in a prison of New York
for lack of timely treatment. In recent years, hundreds of inmates suffered head
injuries from maltreatment in New York City alone. In a Rikers Island jail of
New York, an inmate was punched on the head by a prison guard and he lost the
sight in one eye; an inmatehad his eardrum broken and the cheekbone of another
inmate was fractured from police maltreatment. (In City Jails, A Question of
Force, the New York Times, Oct. 30, 2005.) In Phoenix city, inmates were kept in
tents and forced to undertake various sorts of labor, fed with only two meals a
day and bereft of any entertainment. (El Universal of Mexico, Aug. 26, 2005.) In
August 2005, a Qatar student that had been detained for two years without
indictment described the living conditions in the prison: no guarantee of basic
life necessities, long-time confinement in a very tiny ward with the longest
period lasting 60 days, handcuffed and fettered even in the ward, including
during bath. During Hurricane Katrina, between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1, 2005,
correctional officers from the New Orleans Sheriff's Department abandoned 600
inmates in a prison, as many were immersed in chest and neck levelwater and left
without food, water, electricity, fresh air, or functioning facilities for four
days and nights.
Sexual infringement is quite common in prisons. According to a report
released by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2005, anestimated 8,210
allegations of sexual violence were reported by correctional authorities, of
which almost 42 percent involved staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct. A report of
the Human Rights Watch said that 21 percent of inmates in seven Midwestern
prisons in the United States suffered sexual violence perpetrated by inmates of
the same sex.
