The figures are startling. In the last year of the Carter administration (1979), our nation's federal prisons held about 20,000 inmates. By contrast, as the Clinton administration draws to a close we will have 135,000 inmates in federal prisons; projecting an annual growth of 10 percent the number will reach a quarter million in five years. In 1979, there were 268,000 inmates in the prisons of all 50 states. Today, they hold almost 1.3 million. In 1979, there were 150,000 in local jails and lockups. Today, local jail facilities hold nearly 700,000. This year, we will exceed 2 million inmates in our prisons and jails. As we enter the millennium, the nation has about 6.5 million of its citizens under some form of correctional supervision. And a new twist has been added: the "supermax" prison composed exclusively of cells used for solitary confinement. A place of studied sensual deprivation and psychological torture, it was designed by correctional managers to control their populations as privileges in routine prisons were diminished and sentences were lengthened. A product less of management necessity than of a twisted psyche, these temples to sado-masochism now dot the American landscape, presently containing 20,000 mostly minority inmates. Spurred on by a "drug war" that focuses inordinately upon the poor and minorities, we have seen astonishing patterns of incarceration among young black men vis à vis similarly accused white men. Although the rates of drug consumption are roughly equal among white and black populations, blacks are imprisoned for drug offenses at 14 times the rate of whites. The patterns in some states are truly astonishing. Between 1986 and 1996 for example, the rate of incarceration for drug offenses among African Americans increased by 10,102 percent in Louisiana; in Georgia, by 5,499 percent; in Arkansas 5,033 percent; in Iowa 4,284 percent; and in Tennessee 1,473 percent.
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