The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, returning to Gitmo for the arraignment of alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, reports how much the island prison is costing American taxpayers these days.

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.

That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.

Just to put that in perspective, while each Gitmo detainee costs close to a million dollars per person annually, inmates in federal prisons cost about $25,000 per person. Even in our supposed age of austerity, with Republicans demanding cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and turning Medicare into a voucher plan, there’s always money to waste on an elaborate island prison for thirty times the cost it would take to lock people up here. 

There is no other country in the world that has imprisoned more people of color than the United States. The entire population of the United States only represents five percent of the world’s population and over twenty percent of the world’s prison population. Incarcerating poor people in large numbers has become big business for the United States. As a matter of fact, more African American males are locked up in prisons throughout the United States than were slaves in 1850. This is a larger prison population than that of the top 35 European countries combined.

The United States incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more people than Germany, and twelve times more than Japan. The business of incarceration is major and many people benefit from the misery of others. Some states spend over a billion dollars a year on their correctional system. This does not include the tens of billions of dollars spent by the federal government to police, prosecute, and imprison individuals. Everybody understands that some people need to be locked up if they commit a violent crime against another person. However, locking people up in mass numbers for nonviolent crimes is an atrocity against humanity.

END THE DRUG WAR AGAINST MINORITIES NOW.

Unfortunately, the modern (post-Furman) death penalty continues to be pervaded by racial discrimination based on the race of the victim and, in some places, the race of the defendant. This has been shown in numerous studies that the independent U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) validated in 1990. (U.S. Gen. Accounting Office, Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Pattern of Racial Disparities (1990).) The GAO found that in over 80 percent of the studies (23 of 28), the race of the victim correlated with getting the death penalty, i.e., that for otherwise similar homicides committed under otherwise similar circumstances and where defendants had similar criminal histories, a defendant was several times more likely to receive the death penalty if his victim were white than if his victim were African American. In the most validly conducted studies, the defendant was four or five timesas likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was African American.

These results were remarkably consistent across data sets, time periods, states, and analytic techniques. The studies showed that race had its greatest impact in prosecutors’ decisions whether to seek the death penalty. Moreover, subsequent to the GAO analyses, it was revealed that the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, used a training video to teach prosecutors how to improperly keep African Americans off of juries. (DATV Productions, Jury Selection with Jack McMahon, transcript at 45-46 (1987).) Then, in 1998, the Cornell Law Review published a study revealing a pernicious pattern of racial discrimination in Philadelphia capital punishment cases based on the race of the defendant and on the race of the victim. (David C. Baldus, George Woodworth, David Zuckerman, Neil Alan Weiner & Barbara Broffitt, Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview, with Recent Findings from Philadelphia, 83 Cornell L. Rev. 1638 (1998).)

Marijuana possession is now by far the most common misdemeanor charge in [New York City]. Defense lawyers say if everyone with a marijuana charge actually fought his or her case to the fullest, the already overextended court system would grind to a halt.

h/t The Awl