- Incarceration rate grew from 411 per 100,000 inhabitants to 486 in 2004
IN the country that claims to be the champion of human rights, the number of prisoners continued to grow dramatically in 2004. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the U.S. Department of Justice had just discretely confirmed that 3,113,664 individuals are currently incarcerated by the repressive U.S. system, not including those held in other institutions under the control of this country outside its national territory, like the concentration camp in Guantánamo.
In a report released on October 23, BJS avoided summing up all the numbers available by stating them separately. Nevertheless, it does admit that 2,267,787 individuals were locked up in federal and state penitentiary at the end of 2004.
This number does not include the 9,788 individuals in immigration detention centers or the 713,990 in local jails; the 102,338 minors in juvenile detention centers, the 15,757 in county jails; the 2,177 soldiers in military prisons and the 1,827 Native Americans in reservation jails.
Nor does it include the hundreds held in its world-wide network of detention centers maintained on U.S. military bases.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons manages the most extensive network of prisons with 180,328 inmates, followed by the states of Texas (168 105), California (166,556), Florida (85,553) and New York (85,533).
Nearly 9% of African Americans aged 25 to 29 are behind bars, compared to 2.5% of Latinos and 1.2% of whites. More than 40% of all convicts are Black, 34% are White, and 19% are Latinos.
The index of U.S. imprisonment grew from 411 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1995 to 486 in 2004, according to BJS. This number only takes into account those sentenced to more than one year, which evidently leaves out many prisoners and eases the appearance of a total disaster.
But what is more evident than ever is that the United States has more persons incarcerated per capita than any other country in the world, while attempting to impose its version of respect for human rights on the rest of the planet.
