ABSTRACT
Right realism and its propositions on incapacitation have been extremely influential in the USA as the following figures suggest: the prison population in the USA exceeded two million people for the first time in 2002; it is the biggest prison population in the world, and has the highest number of inmates as a proportion of its population. A report from the US Justice Department has estimated that 12 per cent of black men in their 20s and early 30s were in prison, but only 1.6 per cent of white males in the same age group. The overall increase – almost double the number in 1990 – has been credited to the ‘get tough sentencing policy that has led to longer sentences for drug offenders and other criminals’. One in every 142 people living in the USA was in prison. (BBC News, 2003a). Penal incapacitation is not restricted to the USA: on 30 January 2004 the prison population in England and Wales stood at 73,688 an increase of 2,729 over the previous year and 25,000 over the previous ten years (Prison Reform Trust, 2004).
