MIM NOTES No. 196        October 15, 1999

Facts on U$ imprisonment

The facts about imprisonment in the United $tates are that the 
United $tates has been the world's leading prison-state per capita 
for the last 25 years, with a brief exception during Boris 
Yeltsin's declaration of a state of emergency.(1) That means that 
while Reagan was talking about a Soviet "evil empire" he was the 
head of a state that imprisoned more people per capita. In 
supposedly "hard-line" Bulgaria of the Soviet bloc of the 1980s, 
the imprisonment rate was less than half that of the United 
$tates.(2,3)

To find a comparison with U.$. imprisonment of Black people, there 
is no statistic in any country that compares including apartheid 
South Africa of the era before Mandela was president. The last 
situation remotely comparable to the situation today was under 
Stalin during war time.

The majority of prisoners are non-violent offenders(4) and the 
U.S.  Government now holds about a half million more prisoners 
than China; even though China is four times our population.(5) 

The rednecks tell MIM that we live in a "free country." They live 
in an Orwellian 1984 situation where freedom is imprisonment.

Notes: 1. Marc Mauer, "Americans Behind Bars: The International 
Use of Incarceration 1993," The Prison Sentencing Project, 918 F. 
St. NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC 20004 (202) 628-0871 Reference: 
SRI: R8965-2, 1994
2. Ibid., 1992 report.
3. United Nations Development Programme, "Human Development Report 
1994,:" Oxford University Press, p. 186.
4. Figure of 51.2 percent for state prisoners there for non-
violent offenses. Abstract of the United States 1993, p. 211.
5. Atlantic Monthly December, 1998.