ABSTRACT
AMERICA'S GROWING CORRECTIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Over the past two decades, the United States has been engaged in an unprecedented imprisonment binge. Between 1980 and 2000, the prison population ballooned from 329,821 to 1,381,892-a rise of 319 percent.1 The increase was so great that by 2000 the number of citizens incarcerated in state and federal prisons exceeded or approximated the resident populations of thirteen states and was larger than all of our major cities with the exceptions of Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.2 The incarceration rate (number of persons in state and federal prison on any given day per 100,000 population) increased during the same time period from 138 to 478, as compared to only 26 in 1850. We now imprison at a higher rate than any nation in the world, having recently surpassed South Africa.
