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How bad was the Blizzard of '97? Well, I heard that all church services were canceled Sunday in Colorado Springs. Ponder that for a moment -- after all, Colorado Springs is the world headquarters for the Christian Right -- and the blizzard must have been severe indeed.
In Salida, we got less than a foot, but upon hearing
that Gov. Roy Romer had rechristened our homeland (from
State of Colorado
to State of Emergency
), we
decided to be good citizens and postpone a long-planned
trip to Leadville to eat dinner with some friends.
Rescheduling it is turning into a problem -- they're self-employed, too, and finding a common gap in four agendas is harder than finding the snow shovel after a sudden storm buries it somewhere.
We never did find our Saturday and Sunday Posts, which gave rise to certain paranoid thoughts. The governor had earlier conspired to ruin rail transportation in Colorado, then all the airports are closed, he's declared the highways off-limits to all normal traffic, no newspapers, no mail delivery, the power is out in Gunnison, and all those familiar faces on the tube -- well, they could be computer-generated.
Things seem more normal now, but the two days of enforced idleness did give me time to run some numbers that inspire even more paranoia.
On our local ballot this year is a proposal to build a new county jail. The current one, built in 1968, was supposed to hold 12 inmates. Double-bunking has raised the capacity to 24, but often that's not enough, so they're proposing a 100-bed jail.
Chaffee County's population has gone from 10,000 in 1968 to about 15,000 now, a 50 percent increase. But our jail capacity is supposed to go from 12 beds to 100, a 733 percent increase.
The jail promoters say that we won't need all those beds at once, but we will by 2020 or so. Meanwhile, we can cover costs by housing inmates for the state's Department of Corrections, which is so short on space that we currently export convicts to Texas and Minnesota.
Many counties around here -- Lake, Saguache, Gunnison -- are in the same bind with old and overcrowded jails. The ones that aren't -- Custer and Park -- have recently built new jails.
So the prison population problem seems to be fairly widespread, and with some unexpected time on my hands, I looked at the national statistics.
In 1980, there were 182,400 inmates in local (city and county) jails, 311,400 in state prisons, and 28,100 in federal prisons, for a total of 521,900 inmates. Comparable figures for 1995 are 526,300 local, 1,017,000 state, 88,100 federal, 1,631,400 total. Total prison population grew by 212 percent in those 15 years.
This doesn't count juveniles, so we'll just look at the U.S. population over 18, which grew from 164.7 million in 1980 to 198 million in 1995 -- about 21 percent.
In other words, the prison population has been growing 10 times faster than the general population. And the inmate population is, in some ways, only the tip of the iceberg. For every convict behind bars, another three are on probation or parole.
Prisoners require guards, and that employment rose from 183,500 to 321,830. It takes police to put people in prison -- 715,524 in 1980 and 887,056 in 1995.
Add all that up, and in 1980, 1.8 percent of the adult population was part of the prison-industrial complex -- a prisoner, a guard, a cop, a probationer or parolee. By 1995, that proportion had risen to 3.9 percent.
Now comes the fun part. Given what we hear from our elected leaders these days -- zero tolerance, truth-in-sentencing, lock 'em up and throw away the key, etc. -- there's no reason to assume a change in course. So if this trend continues, then by 2010, 5 percent of American adults will be involved, and by 2020, 18 percent.
My extrapolations show that in 2058, well within the expected lifespans of children born now, there will be 430,330,121 Americans over 18. And there will be 430,330,121 Americans in prison, on probation or parole, or serving as correctional or peace officers.
In other words, every day will be pretty much like last weekend was along the Front Range -- everyone will be stuck inside, unable to go anywhere. Snowbound weekends do not give rise to pleasant thoughts -- next time, perhaps we should shut off the computer and get out the Monopoly board.
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