Five per cent of the population, twenty-five per cent of the prisoners
======================================================================

Five per cent of the population, twenty-five per cent of the prisoners is the formulation John Kiriakou used from inside FCI Loretto to frame American incarceration: the United States has five per cent of the world's population but a quarter of its prison population, and on a per capita basis holds more prisoners than Russia, China and Iran. "How is that a thing in the land of the free?"

What he blames

His stated causes are two: the government's "ill-conceived and ill-advised" war on drugs, and the propensity of Congress in election years to prove it is tough on crime. He cites the Congressional Research Service for the figure that Congress created fifty new crimes a year over a decade, and Harvard Law School's Harvey Silverglate, whose Three Felonies a Day argues American life is so over-criminalised that an ordinary citizen going about ordinary business commits three felonies daily.

The results he lists are fiscal and human: the Bureau of Prisons accounts for a quarter of the Justice Department's budget, and the ACLU counts 3,278 prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent drug and property crimes.

The people

Kiriakou's argument from inside is that these are not abstractions. In prison, he says, from waking to sleeping most people want to talk to you about their cases, fascinating at first, tedious later, eventually a real pain, but the truth is that many of them have been wronged: by a racist system, by incompetent lawyers, by overzealous prosecutors, or by judges whose hands are tied by mandatory minimum sentences.

He put the economics of it in a Letter from Loretto: these are people who usually made a mistake in their youth and are paying for it with their lives, whose families are also victims, and who, rather than costing the taxpayer $29,291.25 each per year, could be working, paying taxes and paying child support.

The frame he quotes for all of it is Dostoevsky's: a society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals. Kiriakou adds that in America part of the problem is who we consider criminal.

See also

- Three Felonies a Day
- Sentencing Reform Bills
- Letter from Loretto
- Private prison system
