behind the news

Prison Population Sets Record, Few Notice

Press coverage of the latest numbers on the state of America’s huge prison population has been minimal, but two reports have gone in the right direction.

December 5, 2006

The statistic is sobering: “A record 7 million people, or one in every 32 American adults, were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year,” the Associated Press reported last week.

Two million, two-hundred thousand Americans were in prison or jail, a 2.7 percent increase from the previous year, while “More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005,” the AP added, citing an annual report from the Justice Department released last Wednesday.

The AP’s story didn’t really push beyond the numbers (but it gets props for covering the story at all). While our nation’s huge prison population is nothing new — in a chewy recent piece, the Washington Post reported that the number of American prisoners is now “about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world,” housed for a mere $60 billion or so per year — there has been little reporting of consequence tied to the latest numbers on the state of that population since last Wednesday. That’s unfortunate given the scope of the problem — and the easy peg.

But there were two reports that were at least in the right direction. One was an ABCNews.com piece from last Thursday whose headline asked a good question: “U.S. Hits Record for Incarcerated, Paroled — At What Cost?” Noting the “new record that makes the United States the world leader in incarceration,” ABC reported, “Aside from the huge financial cost of having so many people behind bars — it costs more than $20,000 per year for every incarcerated prisoner — experts say there are serious societal concerns that can have a lasting impact on American communities.”

The better and more important piece was aired by NPR’s Weekend Edition on Sunday, as Judy Campbell from San Francisco’s KQED reported on one congested prison in California, where prisons are at 200 percent capacity.

“Salinas State Prison was built to accommodate about 2,600 inmates,” Campbell said, but now “it holds just shy of 6,000. Nearly 200 high security inmates are housed here in a former gym. They’re stacked in narrow bunks, three high, with little space between them.”

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“It’s like living in a coffin, in a small, confined space,” said prisoner Robert Mattiosky. “It’s actually like living in a box.”

The prison has “a continuous din,” Campbell added, that eventually “gets maddening,” not to mention “almost always cold showers” and scarce personal space.

Another prisoner told Campbell that “he’s willing to take on stricter punishment to get out” of his overcrowded dorm-style housing — constant contact that he says invariably leads to violence.

“I will eventually, if it comes to a position where they won’t move me back to a cell, I will beat somebody up to go to the hole and transfer out of here to go to a real level three, where you can have cell housing,” said Keith Vineyard (“a mountain of a man etched with tattoos”).

The second half of Campbell’s piece gave the broad scope of the problems afflicting California’s prison system, focusing on overcrowding, as it weaved in quotes from an attorney, a corrections spokesman, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In short, Campbell’s work showed that a story tied to the Justice Department report could be both compelling and provocative. Here’s hoping more journalists follow her lead.

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.