MIM Notes 194      September 15, 1999

Prison boom rockets despite 'crime' drop

by MC12

New u.$. government statistics show that incarceration continues 
to skyrocket despite declining official crime rates. The Amerikan 
prison system is part of imperialism's ever-growing system of 
oppression and social control. MIM recognizes all imprisonment 
under imperialism as political; it is the oppressed that are 
locked up after being railroaded within the settler nation's 
bourgeois INjustice system. Imperialism and its allies commit the 
most horrendous crimes; these crimes go unpunished because it is 
the bourgeoisie that creates the laws and controls the courts.

Bourgeois accounting of crime does not include multi-national 
corporations murdering peasants to build golf courses or banana 
plantations. Bourgeois accounting of crime does not include 
devastating malnutrition, preventable disease, and environmental 
contamination resulting from imperialist wars. Bourgeois 
accounting of crime is extremely suspect because crime itself is 
politically defined according to what class and national interests 
are represented within the government.

It's no surprise that Amerika excludes imperialist crimes from the 
official crime rates. But typically, white nation pigs and 
bureaucrats have used official crime rates to justify the 
proliferation of pig departments and prisons. Recent reports prove 
what MIM has said repeatedly: increased imprisonment and 
repression is primarily a result of Amerika's attempts to maintain 
control, not of increased official crime rates.

Despite the continued decline in official crime rates, the U.$. 
prison population grew 4.8% in 1998. The government estimates that 
1,825,400 people were in jail or prison at the end of 1998, up 
from 1,744,001 the previous year. The total rate of imprisonment 
rose to 672 per 100,000 residents, up from 461 as recently as 
1990.(1)

There were fewer officially-defined crimes committed in 1998 than 
there were the year before, but the prison numbers kept going up. 
Authors of the u.$. report attribute this to several factors. 
First, even though "crime" is down, there was a 4% increase in 
people sent to prison and jail. There was also a 39% increase in 
the number of people on parole returned to prison. The rate of 
release continued to fall (from 37% per year in 1990 to 31% in 
1997), and the average time spent in prison before release 
continued to go up (from 22 months in 1990 to 27 months in 1997). 
Finally, expected time served by those now entering prisons has 
increased to 43 months, from 38 months in 1990.

Changes in the INjustice system's policies have made it so that 
the prison population will continue to grow even if crime rates 
fall. People are still going in faster than they are coming out. 
Amerika will imprison more people for lesser crimes and will keep 
them in prison longer. The prison system has its own momentum, and 
it is only partly related to "crime" itself. The INjustice system 
serves political economic purposes -- national oppression, 
population control, the exploitation of labor, jobs for the labor 
aristocracy and contracts for corporate Amerika. A down-turn in 
the crime rate cannot stand in the way of these important goals.

The annual rate of increase in the prison population was lower in 
1998 than the 6.7% average annual increase in the 1990s. However, 
with state prisons 13% above their highest capacity, and federal 
prison 27% above capacity, there is still plenty of demand for new 
prisons and more money for the prison industrial complex.(2)

The new statistics offer fresh evidence of national oppression in 
the INjustice system. In 1998, the states with the highest 
imprisonment rates were those with the relatively largest pockets 
of oppressed nation members: Louisiana (736 sentenced prisoners 
per 100,000 residents), followed by Texas (724), Oklahoma (622), 
Mississippi (574), and South Carolina (550). The states with the 
lowest imprisonment rates were the whitest: Minnesota (117), Maine 
(125), and North Dakota (128). In addition, Puerto Rico, with a 
rate of 330, had a 15% increase in sentenced prisoners last year.

The latest year for which imprisonment of oppressed nation members 
was calculated is 1997. Imprisonment of Black nation members has 
been rising faster than imprisonment of whites throughout the 
1990s. Black male imprisonment is up 61% in the 1990s, compared to 
54% for white male imprisonment. The prison population has dropped 
from 50.1% white to 47.9% white during the 1990s. (Remember that 
Blacks are 12% of the population.) The Latino male prison 
population rose 62% during that time. [We get this information 
from Amerika's accounting of "Hispanic" imprisonment rates. Among 
other settler chauvinist problems with this type of accounting, 
Amerika tallies many Latinos as "white." Figuring that up to one-
third of "whites" in prison are probably Latino or members of 
indigenous nations is reasonable.]

Figure 1 shows 1997 imprisonment rates by gender and nationality. 

Most striking were the imprisonment rates by age as well as sex 
and nationality (Figure 2). Among 25-29 year-old Black men, the 
imprisonment rate was 8,630. This is ten times the rate for white 
men of the same age group. The incarceration rate of Latinos in 
the same age group was 2,703 per 100,000. In percentage terms, 
8.6% of Black men between 25 and 29 years old were in prison in 
1997 (and sentenced to a year or more).

The concentration of prisoners in the prime ages of the 20s and 
30s has calculated, devastating economic, social and political 
effects on the Black nation. Families, neighborhoods and 
communities have major leaders and contributors ripped from their 
hearts and brutally imprisoned for years at a time. When and if 
they are released, the terms of their imprisonment are designed to 
prevent their success in mainstream pursuits. For whites, men in 
their 20s and 30s are getting the education and job experience 
that they will use to translate into positions of power, wealth 
and savings, and building their families. MIM does not diminish 
the importance of Black wimmin when we say that the loss of all 
these Black men, and the damage done to the survivors, takes a 
horrific toll on the Black nation as a whole.

The imprisonment rate for wimmin has been rising faster than it 
has been for men in the 1990s. However, the rate for wimmin 
remains much lower than the rate for men. As MIM has previously 
discussed, the imperialist patriarchy is much more likely to use 
the "mental health" system to control wimmin, while men are more 
likely to be thrown into the prison system. So, the rate of 
increase for wimmin in the 1990s has been 8.5% per year on 
average, compared to 6.6% for men -- but the overall rate for men 
is still 16-times higher, and there are less than 100,000 wimmin 
in prison.

The prison system is indeed booming out of control. It's vital for 
the people to understand the machinations of this system if they 
are to develop their opposition to it. The imprisonment of 
millions of people in this country is not the result of "crime," 
or the attempts of the imperialists to make this country safer -- 
except for themselves and their lackeys. But in building their 
machine of oppression, they are also laying the groundwork for a 
resistance movement, for the development of anti-imperialist and 
revolutionary consciousness on the part of prisoners, former 
prisoners, and their supporters on the outside. The oppressiveness 
of the prison system is a symbol to all that care to see it, a 
symbol of the wanton inhumanity and hypocrisy of the imperialist 
system and its supporters. We need to develop the consciousness 
that the prison system inadvertently promotes, to undermine and 
eventually overthrow that system from within as well as from 
without.

Notes:
1. Allen J. Beck and Christopher J. Mumola, "Prisoners in 1998," 
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 
1999, NCJ 175687.
2. The practice of transferring prisoners into other states has 
grown in the last few years, but it is still only 1% of prisoners 
who are jailed in states other than their own. Leading the way in 
terms of percent of prisoners shipped to other states or federal 
prisons are Washington D.C., Hawaii, and Arkansas, which all have 
more than 20% of their prisoners in other states or the federal 
system (D.C. is in the process of transferring all prisoners into 
federal prisons). The government also reports that Michigan has 
1,317 prisoners in other states, and Massachusetts has 173.