Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire by Robert Perkinson, reviewed today by Daniel Bergner in the New York Times Book Review, claims that, and here Bergner is paraphrasing,

Not only do we incarcerate at some six times the rate that Britain does . . . or around seven times the rate of Canada, but, Perkinson relates, African-Americans are seven times as likely to be locked up as whites, and African-American men today go to prison at twice the rate they go to college.” (Emphasis mine)

Perkinson claims that America moved from “the age of slavery to the age of incarceration.” And Texas is the worst. From the 1960s until 2000 the number of prisoners has increased 600 percent nationally, that’s a factor of 6, but in Texas the number has increased by 1200 percent, a factor of 12.

See the review for more on Perkinson’s proposed causes for this horrible state, but the fact that there are approximately 2 million in prison is more than a reason to be concerned: it’s an indication that we don’t seem to care much about the least well-off in our society. And shouldn’t we measure the health of a society by the way in which it treats the least well-off, not the most well-off, since the latter, by definition, fare well even in the most totalitarian, unjust societies?

Here it’s good to remember John Rawls’ difference principle, one part of which states that we can tolerate inequality as long as the least well-off benefit (the following is from the Stanford philosophy website):

The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past three decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993). Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1993, pp. 5-6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls’ original A Theory of Justice.)

In brief, rights and liberties should be equally available and social and economic inequalities, which can never be fully eliminated, “are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”

If the nation’s financial deficit is one measure of our economic health, perhaps the percent in prison is one measure of our ethical health. The graph at left is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Note the steep increase in the number of adults on probation between 1980, when it was approximately 1/2 percent of the population to 2008, when the number had more than doubled to approximately 1.3 percent of the population.

The BJS statistics are shocking:

Summary findings

• In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole, 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.
• About 70 percent of the persons under correctional supervision at yearend 2008 were supervised in the community, either on probation or parole, while 30 percent were incarcerated in the nation’s prisons or jails.
• At yearend 2008 a total of 4,270,917 adult men and women were on probation and 828,169 were on parole or mandatory conditional release following a prison term.
• State and federal prison authorities had jurisdiction over 1,610,446 prisoners at midyear 2008: 1,409,166 in state jurisdiction and 201,280 in federal jurisdiction.
• Local jails held 785,556 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence at midyear 2008. An additional 72,852 persons under jail supervision were serving their sentence in the community.

If all this seems as though it’s too much to fathom, remember above all that an African-American male is twice as likely to go to prison than college.