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Playing with numbers is usually fun, but sometimes it can be rather alarming. This exercise started with an announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice that the prison population in the United States had reached 1,244,554 in 1997, representing substantial growth from the 1990 population of 773,919.
That's an annual growth rate of 7 percent, when the population has been growing only 1.1 percent a year.
That number covers only state and federal prisons. America's local jails, operated by cities and counties, have also seen substantial growth, from 405,320 inmates in 1990 to 490,442 in 1994, the last year I have figures for. This works out to an annual increase of 4.9 percent.
More inmates mean more guards, cooks and the like. In 1982, only 298,700 people worked in prisons of all kinds, and by 1992, that had grown to 566,600, for an annual growth rate of 6.6 percent.
Judicial employment -- prosecutors, judges, clerks, investigators, etc. -- has grown at 4.2 percent a year.
To my surprise, though, overall police employment has grown at a slower rate, only 1.7 percent annually.
That was amazing because I had presumed that every jurisdiction was like Salida and other towns in Colorado: that is, undergoing a police population explosion.
This town's population of about 5,000 grew by perhaps 10 percent from 1975 to 1995, while the police department nearly tripled in size, from six officers to 17.
Whatever the Bruce Amendment does -- supposedly limit governmental expenditure growth to the combined rate of inflation and population increase -- it doesn't seem to affect law enforcement, where employment and budgets seem to grow well beyond these constitutional constraints.
When I talk to friends in other Colorado towns, they
report the same phenomenon. Gunnison had more people
when I was a kid 30 years ago than it does now,
one
said, but for some reason they need about three times as
many cops these days.
Another friend, who works in the finance department of another Colorado town, points out that it's very difficult to control police budgets.
One difficulty, she noted, is that there are
drug-seizure funds, and the police like to keep them off
the books. You really have to fight to make sure there's
an accounting for all public funds.
Another difficulty is that They hustle federal grants
all the time, like the Clinton Administration's program to
put 100,000 more cops on the street. But you can get that
money only for three years, at most.
Then it's up to the town to pay them,
she
continued, and when you start asking how we'll cover
that future expense, then you're not a public official
trying to do your job of serving the taxpayers efficiently
-- you're an enemy of law enforcement, of all these
dedicated people who put their lives on the line every
day.
A mayor in another town told me that it's basically
impossible to control police spending, and it doesn't
matter who you elect or what they promised during the
campaign.
You think you get them in agreement when you're
drawing up the budget, and then they start lobbying the
council individually. The police never seem to realize
that they're only one part of city government -- we've got
streets to fix, parks to maintain, water and sewer systems
to operate. We're supposed to balance those needs, but in
the current political climate, I don't see any way to do
it.
Indeed, fiscal conservatism seems to stop at the blue
line -- witness all the conservatives
who proclaim
the benefits of low taxes and limited government, but
ignore those alleged virtues when it's time to fund police
and prisons.
Back to the numbers. In 1990, there were about 1.18 million total inmates in local, state and federal prisons. There were 829,000 peace officers at all levels, 344,000 judicial employees and 498,000 corrections workers, for a grand total of 2.85 million, or 1.1 percent of the population.
Five years later, the total American prison-industrial complex employed 3.6 million people, or 1.4 percent of the population, and if the trends continue, then in 2000 it will be 1.7 percent of the population, or 4.6 million people -- more than the population of Colorado.
But the most interesting date, as I run these numbers out, watching how this industrial complex grows faster than the population, comes in 2084.
That year, assuming present trends continue, America will have 4 million cops, 204 million prison guards and 16 million judicial employees, along with about 500 million prisoners -- 717 million people in the prison-industrial complex, but a population of only 700 million.
But I'm sure they'll figure out something; after all, as
the saying goes, you can't stop progress.
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