"When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry..."

After recently reading the book Newjack, by ethnographic journalist Ted Conover, my lingering interest in the US Prison System was brought to my moral/mental foreground. After being denied entry into some of the nation's top maximum security prisons, Conover decided to be hired, undercover, as a Corrections Officer at Sing-Sing prison (located just 5 hours Southeast of Rochester, in the Hudson River Valley). The one-year account of his experiences "walking the [prisoner] block" is extremely engaging and well written. His observation of racial discrimination, distorted punishment, and generally inhumane experience (on the part of both prisoners and guards) is astounding. I highly recommend this read to anyone seeking to learn more about the U.S. prison system.

For now, I offer a few key facts and figures I have come across in my cursory internet research of the US Prison System:



General Statistics

(Click on image above for better image definition.)

The U.S. has the highest prison population rate of 738 per 100,000 of its national population, compared to other democratic nations.

More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison.

Class and Race

Many of us have heard of the extreme discrepancies in race and income when comparing the incarcerated population to the general population... Some quick facts:

One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is incarcerated. That figure is 1 in 100 for black women between the ages of 35 and 39, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

For more figures on incarceration by race, check out this Interactive Map of the US:
Who goes to prison for drug offenses?

Women in Prison

From 1977 to 2003, New York State's female prison population increased by approximately 500 percent--This is twice the rate of males. A good portion of this increase can be attributed to the "war on drugs" , as officially declared by Nixon in the early 1970's, but which was also heavily supported by the Reagan and Clinton administrations, and still holds effective today.

As the Women's Prison Association reports: "Women in the criminal justice system are largely non-violent and not a risk to public safety. Typically, they are poor women of color who were arrested for drug-related crimes. Most have substance abuse histories, and are survivors of family violence and sexual abuse as well. Over three quarters are mothers and more than half have minor children at home."

Bringing it Home

Recently, I decided to meet with the Director of a local prisoner advocacy group, The Judicial Process Commission (JPC), to see how I might begin to do something, on both a personal and public level, about what is happening in our prison system. I now hope to attend their September training session in order to be a mentor for a woman in a local jail/prison. There is also talk, in the younger Rochester activist community, of hosting a prisoner correspondence program, while more pointedly advocating for prison reform and eventual abolition of the prison system as it exists today. Some friends and I will be meeting in a couple weeks to make plans for the coming year.

Finally, some of you might recognize the title of this blog post as a stolen lyric from Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues". Cash's lyrics seemed an apt way to introduce a discussion of our prison systems, as he sings from the point of view of the imprisoned person. That is, the statistics I have listed are really only a summary of millions of personal stories of suffering and injustice.