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Excerpts from an article in Newsweek
Magazine November 13, 2000 by Ellis Cose.
As America puts away millions of prisoners, many
black and Latino, the neighborhoods they leave
behind are growing even more unstable.
Newsweek reports on the tangled culture of
the Prison Generation, and the debate over how to
reclaim troubled lives. In Texas the total inmate
population has grown nearly 500 percent in less
than a quarter of a century. Upwards of 220,000
people are incarcerated there. Only the much larger
state of California (with 240,000 prisoners) has
more residents locked down than the Lone Star
State. And though California's total prison
population dipped slightly for the first time in
decades this year, it seems poised to resume its
upward climb. Fearful of the emergence of young
so-called super predators, Californians this March
passed an initiative targeting underage offenders.
As a result, in the next five years the state will
send an estimated 5,600 youth to adult prisons who
normally would have gone to the Youth Authority or
county jails. America's rate of imprisonment is the
highest on the planet, since we recently passed
Russia, our only real rival, according to an
analysis last month by Washington's nonprofit
Sentencing Project. We have become the nation of
jailers. Check this and a follow-up article called
Crime and Punishment where a Texas scholar argues
for tough sentences in prisons better designed to
rehabilitate. Newsweek magazine. newsweek.msnbc.com
Related Issues,
Books,
Resources
* * *
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they
don't protect, so what the hell do they do? - Jerry
Brown
* * *
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