Research on the crime control industry
Prisonsucks.com is a clearinghouse for useful, verifiable statistics about the crime control industry. Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong. One of these days the public will start listening to prison activists, so let's be prepared to win without being sidetracked by arguments over defective statistics. In some cases, the numbers we need don't exist. In others, the facts exist but activists don't know where to find them. Now you do.
July 2004
"The Prison Economy" now online!
July 13, 2004
The Western Prison Project and the Prison Policy Initiative have posted The Prison Economy section of The Prison Index on the web. Check it out and then purchase the entire report.
New Report: Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Ohio
July 6, 2004
Northampton Massachusetts -- (July 6) The Prison Policy Initiative, an organization that conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy, today released the first analysis of how Census Bureau's method of counting incarcerated people reduces the population of Ohio's urban areas.
A little known quirk in the Census counts people in prison as if they were residents of the prison town. "This inflates the population of rural prison hosting areas, and shortchanges the urban areas most prisoners come from" said report co-author Rose Heyer. Ohio's prison population more than tripled from 1980 to 2000.
"The report demonstrates that criminal justice policy doesn't just affect people convicted of crimes and the people who personally know them. The Census Bureau's current policies coupled with high incarceration and the frequent decision to build prisons in remote places impact vast numbers of citizens and produce results which fly in the face of democratic principles such as 'one person, one vote.'" said Jana Schroeder, Director of the American Friends Service Committee's Ohio Criminal Justice Program based in Dayton.
Continue reading the press release or try the report.