The United States proclaims to be a "paradise of freedom," yet the total number and ratio of its people behind bars both rank the first in the world. According to data released by the statistics bureau of the U.S. Justice Department on Oct. 23, 2005, the total number of people incarcerated in the United States was 2,267,787 at the end of 2004. This meant an incarceration rate of 724 per 100,000, up 18 percent from ten years earlier and 25 percent higher than that of any other nation. (Study Notes Upswing In Arrests of Women, the Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2005.) According to a survey of the New York Times, the number of people sentenced to life in prison had doubled in the United States over the past ten years. (Packing Prisons, Squandering Lives, the Baltimore Sun, Oct. 21, 2005.) From 2003 to 2004, the number of prisoners grew at a rate of 900 each week. In the first half of 2004, the number of newly incarcerated in the 50 states grew 2.3 percent over the same period of the previous year to 48,000.

    As the prisons were packed, the situation of prisoners worsened. On Dec. 31, 2004, 24 state prison systems were operating at or above their highest capacity. The federal system was 40 percent over capacity. (The Nation's Prison Population Continues Its Slow Growth, U.S. Department of Justice, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs) As the government cut back on expenditure of prisons, some state prison systems reduced input on medical care for prisoners. As a result, a large number of prisoners were infected with tuberculosis or hepatitis. In April 2005, a 44-year-old male inmate died in a prison of New York for lack of timely treatment. In recent years, hundreds of inmates suffered head injuries from maltreatment in New York City alone. In a Rikers Island jail of New York, an inmate was punched on the head by a prison guard and he lost the sight in one eye; an inmate had his eardrum broken and the cheekbone of another inmate was fractured from police maltreatment. (In City Jails, A Question of Force, the New York Times, Oct. 30, 2005.) In Phoenix city, inmates were kept in tents and forced to undertake various sorts of labor, fed with only two meals a day and bereft of any entertainment. (El Universal of Mexico, Aug. 26, 2005.) In August 2005, a Qatar student that had been detained for two years without indictment described the living conditions in the prison: no guarantee of basic life necessities, long-time confinement in a very tiny ward with the longest period lasting 60 days, handcuffed and fettered even in the ward, including during bath. During Hurricane Katrina, between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1, 2005, correctional officers from the New Orleans Sheriff's Department abandoned 600 inmates in a prison, as many were immersed in chest and neck level water and left without food, water, electricity, fresh air, or functioning facilities for four days and nights. 

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