Should America Be Ashamed of Our Prison Population Explosion?

Imprisonment embarrassment. That's what it should be called.

Researchers of America's prison population have found that the number of women inmates continues to swell. The female prison population increased 2.5 percent from 2006 to mid 2007, for a total of 115,308 ladies in America's jails and prisons. Our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters have been packing the jails just like the guys.

One female prison, the Ohio Women Reformatory, houses 2,300 women, many of them mothers. Don't you like that name, “Reformatory”? The truth is very little reformation is going on behind the walls of American jails. The recidivism rate seems to still be stuck at around 85 percent; that means for every 100 persons who are released from jail, 85 percent of them will be re-incarcerated. Those giant revolving doors across the prison industry just keep swinging back and forth.

To their credit, the overcrowded Ohio Women Reformatory, in order to meet the demand of more female offenders, is building a 1,000-bed facility. They say 1,000 beds, but we know that “beds” really mean “women”. So this jail expects another 1,000 women to come knocking to enter Prison Institute.

Our choice of euphemism for the prison industry reveals there is something that really disturbs us about having so many of our fellow citizens locked up. The ballooning jail population shows something of our nakedness as a society, and we find ways to blush away this embarrassment by resorting to figurative language: reformatory, department of corrections, correctional facility, detention center, etc.

Are we embarrassed to call them what they are? Why do we hesitate to say them jails, prisons? What's this “corrections” stuff, like the incarcerated are students getting their tests graded (corrected) by their instructors? We somehow prefer to lessen the impact on our collective social psyche by minimizing the punishment aspect of our prison business. But no matter how tender the language we employ for crime and punishment system, we will do nothing significantly meaningful to reverse the trend towards more and more of our fellow citizens headed into prison cells.

It's high time started calling America's jail houses what they really are – hell holes of the world's greatest country. With the correct semantics, we may start seeing the seriousness of the problem that an ever increasing numbers of prisoners present to this civilized society. Let us call prisons by the punitive names they deserve. Perhaps by doing so, we may just prick our social consciousness into taking the necessary steps to reduce the population explosion of those dark halls of squandered human resources.