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If there was any upside to the whole Paris Hilton brouhaha, it is that her brief incarceration in the Los Angeles County jail system has exposed a real scandal: the dramatic growth of the US prison population and the chronic overcrowding in a penal archipelago bursting at the seams.
In December, the US Justice System announced that 7 million adults - 3 per cent of the US population - were either doing time, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005. Of that total, 2.2 million were in federal, state or local jails, 4.1 million were on probation, and 784,000 were on parole. Over the past decade, said the Justice Department, the US prison population grew by 35 per cent, with blacks (40 per cent]), whites (35 per cent) and Latinos (20 per cent) making up most inmates.
A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a US non-profit organisation, sent an even starker message. Unless these grim statistics are improved then, at present growth rates, America's convicts will outnumber the combined populations of Atlanta, Baltimore and Denver within five years.
"Our incarceration rates show that America's crime and punishment policy is completely out of control," says Tracy Huling, a national consultant on prison issues. A tough-on-crime political culture and harsh mandatory sentences for minor crimes, especially drug offences, had criminalised huge numbers. "We send people to prison today for long sentences that 25 years ago would have drawn probation."
This grotesquely swollen prison population evokes the Soviet gulags, or even the 18th-century British penal system.
Take California, where Hilton's sentence highlighted the crisis in state and local jails.
In 2005 America's most populous state had 170,676 convicts - 70,000 over capacity. Some 16,000 sleep in gyms and corridors. Many minor offenders are routinely released early in Los Angeles to ease overcrowding.
The situation is so dire that last month federal judges began hearings on whether the state should cap its prison population.
Last October, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger offered a startling solution: let convicts serve their time outside the state, a unique upgrade of Britain's 18th-century transportation system. Technically, this would be illegal - inmates were sentenced to California time, not incarceration in Mississippi or Tennessee, two potential destinations - and would also separate prisoners, perhaps by thousands of miles, from their lawyers and families.
"It would impose great hardships on low-income families," says Kara Gotsch, advocacy director of the Sentencing Project, which presses for alternatives to prison. She says people from poor backgrounds - many convicts have led hardscrabble lives - are unable to afford the cost of visiting relatives "warehoused" in institutions far away.
Nonetheless, California's scheme has legs. In April, lawmakers, concerned the ailing prison system would be taken over by the federal government, approved the largest prison expansion in state history, earmarking US$8.3 billion to add 53,000 beds and send 8000 inmates out of state.
Not everyone is happy. "This is not a plan," complained the Senate majority leader, Democrat Gloria Romero. "All we have done is dig ourselves in a deeper hole." While the bill will likely incite a host of legal and fiscal challenges, it reflects a deeply ingrained official culture.
Prisons are big business in the US. California's system has been called the "Golden Gulag" (Ruth Wilson Gilmore's The Golden Gulag says that since 1980 the US prison population has increased 450 per cent, despite falling crime rates), showering money on the powerful prison guards union, on remote communities that house prisons, and on corporations.
The human cost of this trend - and the prospect that at current growth rates 50 per cent of American youth will be enmeshed in the criminal justice system by 2050 - is examined by Prison Town, USA, a new documentary. It focuses on what happens to Susanville, a high-desert Californian town with an economy dominated by two state and one federal prison.
It is a prison colony with more inmates than free people. And although convicts are not allowed to vote, their inclusion as individuals, and often as members of black or Latino minorities, into local population statistics funnels census dollars into the community.
Susanville is part of a growing US penal archipelago. It absorbs tax dollars, either directly for publicly run prisons, or via government contracts for privately run institutions, that add up to a huge windfall for beneficiaries such as the Corrections Corporation of America.
"A lot of special interests are feeding off what is a self-perpetuating system," says Ms Huling. "So any attempt to reduce the size of the system is met with very stiff opposition."
This is expensive for taxpayers. The soaring cost of keeping people behind bars is increasing as inmates age. California spent $1.8 billion on medical care alone last year. At the same time recidivism rates across the board - from federal, state, and local jails - average 40-70 per cent.
Once people are ensnared by the criminal justice system many find it very hard to escape. In recent years there have been tentative steps to confront this issue, most obviously with helping drug addicts. Yet, says Ms Gotsch, there is still "limited access to drug rehabilitation".
Ms Huling says convicts are often sent back to prison for technical violations of their parole, rather than for new crimes. Nonetheless, despite "re-entry" schemes that stress aggressive counselling, job training and monitoring of released convicts, going straight is a daunting prospect.
If life on the street is grim, the rosy view from the prison lobby's boardrooms has stunted political debate on penal philosophy. "The problem is, you can't just change the culture of the prison system," argues Ms Huling. "The system doesn't exist in isolation from the larger culture."
That culture still embraces the penitentiary system, which believes convicts need to become penitent in solitude. The problem is not the system, it says, but the individuals who find themselves locked up. "Sending someone away to sit in a cell is still our primary strategy for addressing crime."
But, given overcrowding - which makes solitary confinement impossible for many convicts - and soaring costs that eat into the public purse, is this philosophy sustainable?
"There's this growing realisation that getting tough on criminals is getting tough on taxpayers," says Adam Gelb, project director for the Pew Charitable Trust's Public Safety Performance Project, which looks at the bottom line.
Certainly, money is probably the major engine for driving US policy makers. Most usually, this results in trade-offs. Thus a scheme to, say, increase funds for rehabilitating convicts via re-entry schemes will likely be countered by handouts for prison construction.
"The interests that are feeding off prisons have the money to influence the legislative process," says Ms Huling. Still, the bottom line is where change might just emerge. In October Steve Aos, an analyst with the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, examined how prison costs might be reduced whilst contributing to lower crime rates.
In essence, Mr Aos concludes that, from both a safety and an economic perspective, the public return on their tax dollars diminishes with greater reliance on incarceration. Instead, more emphasis should be placed on prevention.
Which is hardly balm to the prison lobby. But for those who take their chances sleeping in hallways in overcrowded and volatile prisons, confronting the questions raised by Mr Aos's report can't come fast enough.
