“If the incarcerated population of the United States constituted a nation-state, what kind of country would it be?”
In an article for The Oregonian, current Georgetown University law professor and previous State Department senior adviser, Rosa Brooks, provides a unique perspective on America’s prison system. Brooks creates a conceptual “Incarceration Nation” to shine a light on the shortcomings of America’s prison system. She acknowledges that the U.S. won’t be sending 165,000 prisoners off to another country like the British Empire did with Australia, but looking at the U.S. prison population as if it were its own country provides some interesting insight into the trends and finances associated with how the prison system is run.
Brooks starts by noting that Incarceration Nation, with its 2.4 million residents, would have a population growth rate more than doubling India’s and a population density slightly higher than India’s.
In Incarceration Nation, there would be 12 men to every one woman, and about 40 percent of the population would be people of African decent, 40 percent Caucasian, and 20 Hispanic. If Incarceration Nation were to exist on the globe according to its racial makeup, it would be somewhere near Brazil.
She mentions the “nasty habit of involuntarily transporting people hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from their home communities, making it extraordinarily difficult for residents to maintain ties with their families.” While moving prisoners to another country would of course be more extreme, a study in New York found that 70 percent of prisoners are incarcerated more than 100 miles from where their families live, and often times, these prisons are in rural areas where transportation is not available for visitation.
About 10,000 people would be born in Incarceration Nation every year, and these babies would be deported within a few months. Unfortunately, about 70 percent of children with a parent living in Incarceration Nation would end up living there as well at some point in their lives.
The health of Incarceration Nation would be miserable. Brooks states, “If Incarceration Nation were a real country, it would have the highest TB rate in the world,” and ” more than half of Incarceration Nation’s citizens are mentally ill, with depression rates roughly on par with those experienced by citizens of Afghanistan.” Each year a person spends in Incarceration Nation subtracts two years from their life expectancy.
Incarceration Nation would need to be a rich country because it would have to spend $31,000 per year on each citizen. To put that in perspective, the U.S. spends under $20,000 per year on each citizen. In the U.S., taxpayers spend about $39 billion on the prison system each year and the federal and state governments spend about $74 billion total on prisoners every year. All this to say, Incarceration Nation’s GDP would be higher than over half the countries in the whole world.
Brooks notes that Incarceration Nation would employ about 800,000 people to run the prisons — that’s almost the number of people that work in the U.S. auto industry. Incarceration Nation’s richest residents would be the owners of private prison companies like CCA, which makes an annual revenue of more than $1.7 billion. Other rich residents would be companies that used prison labor to keep their costs low. The hourly wages prisoners are paid, ranging from 23 cents to $1.35 per hour, are in line with the wages of garment workers in Bangladesh and China.
While all of this is not new information to Prison Fellowship and its partners, when put in this context of a conceptual country, it is easier to take the pulse of the prison system. The poor health and high costs of Incarceration Nation, as well as the generational cycle of its residents, the difficulties of in-prison familial visitation, and its low prison labor wages do not aid in the rehabilitation of prisoners or their reconciliation with their families. This is why it is so important that we share God’s restorative power with prisoners. While circumstances and environments in prisons may not be conducive to transformations of the heart, Jesus is stronger than any of these barriers. Jesus’ saving grace is the answer to the issues of recidivism, the generational cycle of crime, and the restoration of family bonds.
To learn how you can help share this Good News with prisoners and their families in the New Year, please visit www.prisonfellowship.org.
