Housing behind bars

25% of all prisoners on the planet are incarcerated in the United States of America, according to an article published in the Boston Globe recently. That's 2,500,000 people - creating the third biggest industry in that country. It hasn't always been like that, in the Seventies incarceration rates were similar to other countries. The Globe draws a comparison to the parallel reduction in the provision of new public housing in the U.S. Borrowing from the research of sociologist Loic Wacquant, the article says,

In the 1990s, as federal corrections budgets increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor."

In the current recessionary atmosphere public spending is decreasing - so what does this mean for these "big houses"?

Read on at James Carroll's Boston Globe article.