Incarceration Nation – No it’s not Bahrain, but it may help explain critical silence on Prisons

If our prisons were a country, what would Incarceration Nation look like? Foreign Policy opinion
19 December, 2013 – By Rosa Brooks

WASHINGTON — You already know that the United States locks up a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. If you look at local, state and federal prison and jail populations, the United States currently incarcerates more than 2.4 million people, a figure that constitutes roughly 25 percent of the total incarcerated population of the entire world.

A population of 2.4 million is a lot of people — enough, in fact, to fill up a good-sized country. In the past, the British Empire decided to convert a good chunk of its prison population into a country, sending some 165,000 convicts off to Australia. This isn’t an option for the United States, but it suggests an interesting thought experiment: If the incarcerated population of the United States constituted a nation-state, what kind of country would it be?

Here’s a profile of Incarceration Nation:

Population size: As a country — as opposed to a prison system — Incarceration Nation is on the small side. Nonetheless, a population of 2.4 million is perfectly respectable: Incarceration Nation has a larger population than about 50 other countries, including Namibia, Qatar, Gambia, Slovenia, Bahrain and Iceland. And though the population of Incarceration Nation has dipped a bit in the last couple of years, the overall trend is toward growth: over the last 30 years, the incarcerated population of the United States has gone up by a factor of four, making Incarceration Nation’s population growth rate more than double that of India.

Geographic area: This is a tough one, since I haven’t found any way to accurately measure the physical space occupied by Incarceration Nation. We have to do some educated guessing here. There are more than 4,500 prisons in the United States. Let’s assume that each of those prisons takes up about half a square mile of land — a reasonable (and probably quite low) estimate given that most prisons are, for security reasons, surrounded by some empty space. That gives Incarceration Nation an estimated land area of about 2,250 square miles: small, but still larger than Brunei, Trinidad and Tobago, Luxembourg, Bahrain and Singapore.

Population Density: No matter how you look at it, Incarceration Nation is a crowded place. If we assume a land area of 2,250 square miles, it has a population density of roughly 1,067 people per square mile, a little higher than that of India. Of course, the residents of Incarceration Nation don’t have access to the full land-area constituting their nation: most of them spend their days in small cells, often sharing cells built for one or two prisoners with two or three times that many inmates. In 2011, federal prisons were operating 39 percent above capacity; in many state systems, overcrowding was much worse. (In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons was so severe it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”.) …more