Bigger Than The Gulag

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of Fareed Zakaria's column
in this week's TIME Magazine.

By Fareed Zakaria

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a
fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam
Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional
supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag
Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”
Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per
100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other
developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per
100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and
­Britain - with a rate among the ­highest - has 153....
This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively
recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000
adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has
happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.
That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went
from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost
tenfold increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are
in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans
were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or
larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for
possession....
Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and
liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the
1990s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying
mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always
in American politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are
now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state
capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is
rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of
cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.
Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at
six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20
years. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7
billion on the UC system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has
built one college campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the
state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.
The results are gruesome at every ­level. We are creating a vast
prisoner under­class in this country at huge expense, increasingly
unable to function in normal society, all in the name of a war we have
already lost....