TheMillerCircle.org

Among the many rough and tumble features of our country is the shocking incarceration rate that we have progressively developed as our national policy towards crime. Glenn C. Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University and author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, has written an excellent article in the Boston Review of Books, where he points out (based on a report by the London-based International Centre for Prison Studies) that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 population) is higher than that of any other country and is approximately 40% greater than that of our nearest competitors (Russia, Belarus and the Bahamas). Compared to more industrial democracies, the differences in prison populations are very striking, including 6.2 X Canada, 7.8 X France and 12.3 X Japan. As Loury points out “We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.” “The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.” “Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes.” When we decide to do something, we usually get it done! But, did we decide and do we really want the outcome that we now know will result from these policies? We have talked about “Blowback” abroad from secret policies of our Federal Government, largely due to the CIA, the most recent example of which is of course 9/11, but what about “Blowback” from our Federal and State penitentiary system? Are we destroying a sector of our own culture with our incarceration policies? Are we trying to grind into dust the poor black American communities using methods that will accomplish what we did to the native Americans?

The stimulus for the growth of prisons in America was partially started by dire predictions of an impending crime and murder wave in our cities that fell short of predictions. The expected crime wave, coupled with our insistence in criminalizing all drugs, including marijuana at the “dealer level,’ provided additional motivation for prison growth. But, perhaps the more sinister element to the expanded incarceration rate is that of support for an insidious racism that is endemic to America. About 1/3 of our prison population have been convicted of violent crimes which include rape, murder and robbery. But, the remaining prisoners, the majority, have been convicted primarily of property and drug-related crimes and inmates are disproportionately black and brown, with an average of 11 years of schooling; they come from the lowest economic sector of our society. If you simply look at the socio-economic sector of our prison population, you might conclude that it is illegal to be a poor black male in America.

Most of us are well aware of the growth in prisons and prison populations that took place beginning in the 1980s, as it became an endemic practice throughout the country. I remember Reagan once remarking that it was only law enforcement that kept us from returning to a primordial life, a kind of terminal Armageddon. When I came to Minnesota in the late 1980s, prisons were the top priority for Minnesota state resources and other developments, like K-12 education, and higher education, had to move to the back of the priority line in favor of new prison construction. It remained that way for many years. You can probably also remember those days when early release from prisons was granted for select non-violent prisoners, in order to make room for the high incarceration rates that accelerated during the latter portion of the 20th century.

It turns out however that the explosion in crime predicted from the demographic data never materialized: crime rates began to drop sharply beginning in 1992. But the threat lasted long enough to give the Republicans a new mantra for their politicians: don’t try to understand the origins of crime, just put every criminal behind bars and let the free market economy eventually solve the problem. This of course is the Republican solution to everything. You simply take every social problem, every environmental issue, every service like medical care and convert it into an economic model and eventually, due the ingenious insight of Adam Smith, the problem will go away by solving itself. Indeed, those who favor our high rates of incarceration claim that the dramatic drop in the crime rate was created by the expansion of the prison population, thus removing the criminal from the streets. Efforts by different experts who have tried to deal with this issue have suggested that between 5-25 % of the drop in crime rates in the 1990s can be attributed to higher rates of incarceration. But these analysts also agree that, long ago, in this march towards criminalization as we now define it, we reached a point of diminishing returns. Even conservative scholars, like John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, claimed, by the end of the 1990s, in an article published in The Wall Street Journal, “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” Yet, despite a broad consensus among many experts that we have gone too far in expanding our prison system, there was no way to get America out of the expansionary incarceration business. The drop in crime was proof that we were doing the right thing. Let’s make more prisons and head for a crime-free America.

But the real truth behind the continued escalation of our incarceration rates, while the crime rate is falling, is what all of us know about the trend in our country, to become more punitive towards criminals and to broaden the definitions of crime. This expansionism includes increasingly harsh mandatory sentences that leave jurists little room to modify the duration of a prison term based on differing circumstances. Where once not a single state had a “three strikes and you’re out” component to their criminal code, as of 2000, there were 24 states with such laws. Our “Go Directly to Jail” cards have been published and issued at high rates and one can see a close correspondence in how we view the behavior of our own citizens, as strict behaviorists, and how we view the rest of the world. If there is any trait of Bill O’Reilly on Faux News that stands out, it is how he represents the American gold standard of a strict, rigid behaviorist, who uses a micrometer instead of a ruler for gaging principles of social justice. We are an empire, unchallenged in the world for military supremacy. We have a new set of standards to apply and we will continue to apply them to transgressions against us at home, as well as abroad. I see many similarities in how we view the outside world and how we address crime in our own country: a kind of rigid intolerance has consumed the country, as if we are living in some kind of biblical era where a righteous set of instructions have been given to us, as the chosen people, to solve the new problems of humanity. And, it’s that way with our prison system. We have entered an era of almost complete surrender to our cortical functions in favor of brain-stem reflexes which reduce complex issues to a black and white binary world. During Ronald Reagan’s administration, he tried to specifically cut the budget for sociological research, such as that supporting Loury’s research and ultimately the article and book to which I referred. Reagan proposed that tactic to eliminate scientific studies, the results of which might undermine his political and social programmatic intent. Bush is doing the same thing today, except that he is not being discriminatory about the discipline: he is cutting the budget for all scientific research.

Loury points out that the problem with our incarceration rate may not be what it seems on the surface. He argues that increased attention to prison as a more punitive rather than a corrective objective began to change at about the time of the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislation and public rejection of segregationist attitudes in that era eliminated the possibility of using race as a discriminatory tool. But if our segregationist behavior was now outlawed and taboo, our option to replace racism with crime expansion as an alternative, acceptable way to deal with the race issue turned out to be a solution which today still flies under the radar screen of racism. Until that time, our public policy about crime and imprisonment was centered on the idea that prison was a place where someone should go but eventually be rehabilitated to join society and become or continue as a contributing member. But that idea began to transform into a more punitive, public safety mode, in which the criminal was viewed as someone who needed to be removed and locked up from society for an increasingly longer time: an issue of public safety emerged and began to dominate our public dialogue about criminal behavior. Our press has been highly compliant with this evolution of attitudes. They give high visibility to the few heinous crimes, without ever pointing out that the rate of those kinds of crimes has dropped considerably over the last 15 years or so. Consider the fact, that nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s were imprisoned before their 40th birthday. Today, a black male in California is more likely to go to a state prison than to a state university. Their imprisonment, permanently stigmatizes them and has a direct negative impact on the chances that they will get a decent paying job and make a livable wage. In the meantime, we criticize them for absenteeism fatherhood (did you ever see any study which attempted to explain absenteeism fatherhood on the basis their imprisonment?). Convicted felons are ashamed, ridiculed and their family connections are either destroyed or seriously marginalized: their links to society are permanently severed through a form of civic excommunication.

We tend to blame the blacks for our modern drug problem. Despite the evidence that overall drug use declined from 20% of adults in 1979 to 11% in 2000, this period of decline in drug use was associated with an explosion in criminalization of drug behavior, and despite the fact that drug usage is higher in whites than in blacks, we incarcerate blacks at twice the rate of whites for drug offenses. In major cities like New York where it has been possible to study some of the issues related to incarceration in great detail, it has been established that the drug dealers, those who take drugs out into the white communities, are in fact those who are arrested and put into prison for drug crimes, because our system is punitive to dealers, but not to users. But, this strategy has not worked in the sense that the cost of drugs has actually declined and the incidence of serious drug overdoses remains high. So if arresting and imprisoning the poor black drug dealer does not impact on the cost of drugs to the more drug-consuming whites, why do we pursue this policy?

Finally, if you think that pursuing poor blacks in their own neighborhoods has contributed to a reduction in crime rates, consider studies by criminologists who have used New York neighborhoods as their laboratory. As described in the Loury article, investigators found that higher incarceration rates in one neighborhood, during one year, seemed to predict higher crime rates in the same neighborhood one year later. Police scrutiny was more focused on high crime neighborhoods and was accompanied by sentencing laws that demanded prison sentences for repeat felons: parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored for parole violations and even if crime rates declined overall, the arrests and convictions would increase in areas that were tightly monitored. Researchers concluded that “incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which the re-supplies incarceration…three mechanisms…contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods.” The social disintegration of the neighborhood is all but guaranteed to insure that black neighborhoods are guaranteed to generate more crime. We have shaped our criminal code to insure this as an outcome. To my knowledge, few people equate what we do to our own society in terms of incarceration policies, with the view that we try to impose the same conditions on the outside world, where we, as Americans, increasingly view that strange wasteland outside of our borders as being occupied by pacifists who do not have the stomach to properly address the real problems of the world and absolve them through real (military) solutions. Some problems can be simply solved by dropping a bomb. That in fact is the background of our history and until we can unify behind a refutation of this ugly past as not only an un-American posture, but an inhumane one, we will continue to engender an increasingly unified hatred for America as an outlier of humanity. The real tragedy behind all of this, is that most Americans will not even be aware of why everyone despises us.