As recently reported by the Marshall Project, conditions in America’s federal prisons are getting worse. Among the problems highlighted at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing involving federal prisons director Collette Peters: hundreds of preventable deaths of people in federal jails; excessive overuse of solitary confinement; and a deadly shortage of psychiatric services.
But the problem is much bigger than these specific federal-prison deficiencies. Today, far too many Americans—disproportionately those from underprivileged backgrounds—are trapped in a senseless system of mass incarceration. According to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, “The United States has less than five per cent of the world’s population and nearly one-quarter of its prisoners. Astonishingly, if the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans were a state, it would be more populous than 16 other states. All told, one in three people in the United States has some type of criminal record. No other industrialized country comes close.”
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