Prisons, Overcrowding

Prison overcrowding, also called “prison crowding,” is a matter of great contention and concern in current criminal justice public policy debates in both Canada and the United States. Coming to public attention as a social problem most recently in the United States in the late 1970s, prison overcrowding has coincided with the unprecedented growth in the nation's prison population over the past several decades.

Because of the “war on drugs” and mandatory sentencing, the United States has become the world's foremost jailer. With just 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has 25 percent of its prisoners, approximately 2.4 million, a number that steadily increases by about 3 percent each year. In 2006, federal prisons were operating at 37 percent above capacity.

The criminal justice system responded to what some jurisdictions call the “crisis” of prison overcrowding through diversion strategies, relying more heavily on jails for the overflow of prisoners, doubling up prisoners in one cell (also called double bunking), hotly debated early release strategies, and an increasing reliance on private (for-profit) prisons, to name a few. However, policy focus on capacity issues sometimes detracts from the actual conditions of privacy, security, and manageability (including meeting basic needs for nutrition, health, and sanitation) within prisons.

In 2006, the Vera Institute of Justice's Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons held public hearings, which included expert testimony on prison crowding. The conveners pointed out that no academic literature shows an established connection between overcrowding and violence. However, this research is not from the perspective of corrections officers and inmates whose daily experience may lead them to different conclusions. The debate on overcrowding in part thus hinges on experiential viewpoints and definition of terms.

The human experience of “crowding” or “being crowded” has both physiological and psychological components. Research studies show that among the many negative effects of prison overcrowding on inmates are competition for limited resources, aggression, higher rates of illness, increased likelihood of recidivism, and higher suicide rates. Prisoners in overcrowded prisons often cannot get prison work assignments, leading to idleness-related frustration and the higher likelihood of interpersonal conflicts, assaults, and rapes. Staff cannot monitor activities as effectively or identify prisoner problems. If they do identify a problem situation, they have few options to reduce animosities. For example, they may be unable to separate prisoners and place them in different facilities.

Certainly, the amount of space per inmate is a factor in determining at what point a prison contains too many inmates. In fact, the official definition of prison crowding relies on measures related to capacity: either design capacity, the number of inmates that the prison architect originally intended to be housed in that institution, or operational capacity, the number of inmates that a facility's staff, existing programs, and services can accommodate. However, perceptions of crowding may be equally or even more important.

Experiencing a space as crowded or overcrowded—inside prison or not—is related to social density, exigent circumstances, and individual expectations. Residents of urban areas may have lower expectations of personal space than people living in less densely populated areas. Individuals housed in cells alone may feel less crowded than those housed in a large barracks with greater objective space but much less privacy.

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