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| The exercise yard in California’s San Quentin State Prison death row. Prison Population Increases Despite Decline in Crime WASHINGTON, DC—The FBI has reported that rates of serious crime have been declining for more than a decade.1 Government reports also show, however, that the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation increased dramatically over the same period. In 1990, there were 774,000 state and federal prisoners; in 1995, that number passed 1 million, with another half-million in jails and detention centers; and by 2004, the number of people incarcerated in the United States exceeded 2.1 million.2 What has been happening in communities, in the courts, and elsewhere to cause this incongruity of lower crime rates coupled with expanding incarceration rates? What effect is this having on jails and prisons? Does it appear that the trend will continue? What are the needs of prisoners, and how does the American prison system address them? In discussing prisons and what happens within their walls, it is important to be familiar with the concept of a total institution. A total institution is a place that erects barriers to social interchange with the world at large.3 In total institutions, large groups of people live together, day and night, in a fixed area and under a tightly scheduled sequence of activities imposed by a central authority. In total institutions there are "subjects" and "managers." Subjects are the large class of individuals who have restricted contact with the world outside the institution’s walls. Managers, who are socially integrated into the outside world, are the small class of individuals who supervise the subjects. The social distance between subjects and managers is great, and communication between them is restricted. Each group conceives of the other in terms of narrow, hostile stereotypes, resulting in the development of different social and cultural worlds that are in continuous conflict with each other. In total institutions, moreover, there is an elaborate system of formal rules intended to achieve the organization’s official goals and to maintain the distance between subjects and managers. Correctional institutions are total institutions organized to protect the community against what are viewed as intentional dangers to it. Correctional institutions include penitentiaries and reformatories, as well as a multitude of training schools, ranches, farms, and camps. Regardless of these designations, however, all are generally referred to as "jails" or "prisons"—two words that have quite distinct meanings for the professional, although probably not for the general public. 1. Uniform Crime Reports—2004. 2. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison and Jail Inmates at Mid-Year 2004 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005). |