Pronouncing Our Own Doom

When will the United States wake up to the problem of our growing prison population?

One fine day, a candidate for president may say the country's goal should be to have only the world's second-highest prison rate, and let Russia or China be No. 1. In terms of incarceration, the U.S. leads the world. The U.S. has a prison rate of 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. Russia, in second place, has a rate of only 628 per 100,000. The world average is a pitiful 166 per 100,000.

It's no coincidence that in both the U.S. and Russia, prison is a hot spot for epidemics. In October, a Virginia teen died from MRSA, a staph infection that has been raging in jails and prisons. Even the nice kids are getting sick. In Chicago, my city, MRSA has been percolating for years in the county jail, where we lock up over 110,000 people every year, men piled on top of men.

The current MRSA is pretty gruesome: First come boils, and then it starts to eat the flesh. And the current epidemic came in major part from the overcrowding of U.S. jails and prisons, just as drug-resistant TB comes out of the lock-ups in Russia. MRSA is an epidemic that has spilled not just out of Chicago jails, but out of those of Los Angeles, Dallas, and elsewhere, according to Dr. Robert Daum, a specialist in what he calls the "pandemic." The Chicago Tribune has run stories; so has the Chicago Reader. But far from being alarmed, the county board has actually cut medical staff at the county jail.

Recently, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia convened a hearing on the alarming size of the U.S. prison rate. Since the hearing was being held by the Joint Economic Committee, its pretext was the economic cost -- $200 billion a year. But Webb, not just a senator but a writer, a novelist, might have been doing what more writers in America should be doing -- raising our astonishing rate of imprisonment as a moral concern. Indeed, why is it not a bigger moral issue, even with writers on the left? About 2.1 million Americans are now in prison. Perhaps up to another 5 ...

The American Prospect - Source

Infectious diseases, particularly HIV, Tuberculosis and Hepatitis, pose formidable challenges for correctional jurisdictions worldwide.

Although prisoners are 10 times more likely to be infected with hepatitis C than the general public, only about half on average were tested for the disease.

A former CDC director, John Miles, who monitors, prison diseases, told a hotel ballroom full of prison doctors and nurses that nearly 600,000 inmates are released every year -- many of them riddled with disease.

Whether prisoners can infect the public at large is not in question. Russia's overcrowded prisons have bred new drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis that have proliferated virulently among the general public. An outbreak of meningitis in Los Angeles' city jail spread into nearby neighborhoods in the early 1990s.

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