New jail construction quietly booming

In These Times -   New jail construction is quietly booming across the United States. Some may be surprised to learn that during the most intense jail-building years, from 1990 to 2005, a new facility opened every 10 days.  There are nearly 2 million people presently caged in more than 6,000 correctional facilities across the country, including 1,566 state prisons and 3,116 local jails. Recent data shows that number has only grown, and the push to build new jails and prisons continues.

Currently, a new $3 billion jail in Brooklyn is moving ahead, a $1.25 billion prison in Alabama is nearly complete and, among many others, lawmakers in Hawai’i are considering a new $1 billion mega-jail, a facility with more than 1,000 beds.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, while the stated goals of jail construction are safety, security, and solving jail overcrowding, the result is most often hundreds or thousands of new jail beds to incarcerate even more people and a windfall for contractors in charge of designing and building new jails.