TheMillerCircle.org

A few months ago, I received a notice to report for jury duty in the Hennepin County court system, physically located in downtown Minneapolis. I was able to postpone the date of my appearance by a month to come after with the end of the semester, so beginning in the middle of June I will have to be available for jury duty for two consecutive weeks. Oddly enough, though I have friends who have served on  jury duty many times, this will be my first experience as a juror. I have always felt that jury duty is an opportunity for us as citizens to express our views on the legal system and the laws that have been passed, including the criminal codes, that in many cases do not give judges the option of sentencing on the merits of the case, but merely on whether the law was broken. And, what about the laws? Then too, we have a judicial system in which many judges have to run for re-election, like politicians, and this makes them accessible to populist fads, generating wide excursions in our judicial decisions. Furthermore, our criminal justice system has produced a leviathan waiting for us just around the corner in the form of more than 2.3 million prisoners as of June 2008. Many of these prisoners have families with children, such that an entire culture of Americans are growing up in relationship to our prison system. This is new. The threat of this large growth in our prison population places us at risk of creating a new exponential growth curve for our incarceration rates of the future, because the children of the current prison population are themselves at risk of imprisonment.  How will we respond? Will we simply build more prisons? Will we do nothing to prevent these sons and daughters and wives and husbands of prisoners from following in their footsteps?

Bureau of Justice Statistics

The graph on the right shows the steady march towards the state prison population we have today (as of 2005; data does not include Federal prison system). Clearly the major criminals behind bars are there for violent crimes, such as murder, rape, manslaughter, robbery and many others. According to the Bureau of Justice, about 22% of the current prison population consists of people in jail for drug crimes, reflecting our war on drugs, whose most visible success is the increased incarceration rate for “drug crimes.”  A similar number of prisoners have been convicted of property crimes (burglary, bad checks, etc) and a smaller number reflect public order crimes (weapons violations, drunk driving). Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, has concluded “the American incarceration rate has made the United States a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach”  (quoted from the NYT article by Adam Liptak). I believe that the most fundamental constant to the growth of our penitentiary system is old fashioned racism.

If I have the opportunity to give my views in some way on our legal system, I intend to express the following:

1. I will not vote to convict anyone of a drug-related crime, unless committed through violent means
2. I will not vote for conviction of any marijuana-related arrest, including possession, distribution or production
3. Minnesota has no death penalty so I will not have an opportunity to express my opposition on that penalty
4. I will be very reluctant to vote for conviction if mandatory sentencing is forced on the judge, although that would be based on the crime and the nature of the case. I believe that hardened criminals, guilty of violent crimes, need to be separated from society, but I also believe we are not working hard enough to make alternative opportunities available to the young people in these poor neighborhoods and get to them before crime becomes about their only other alternative. We have never seriously approached poverty and slum areas in this way and the end result could be a net savings in cost and a net increase in public safety and cultural productivity (to me, the Van Jones book “The Green Collar Economy: How One Soltuion Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems“ is a fiscally sound, practicable way of making a down payment on saving the planet and elevating the impoverished components of our culture).
5. I will not vote to imprison someone who falls victim to our lack of a social safety net (bad checks, petty crimes of poverty)
6. In summary, I believe in an older concept of criminal justice, one that puts violent crimes as the major motivation for maintaining a prison system. But, I also believe that our criminal justice system should be focused on rehabilitation, not propagation of criminals and crime.  I do not believe that drugs or petty property violations should qualify to incarcerate someone. These are social issues, not criminal issues and they should be separated and treated as such.

The United States has 5% of the world’s  population but 25% of the world’s  prisoner population. We have 751 people in jail for every 100,000 in our population. Second place goes to Russia at 627, with England at 151, Germany at 88 and Japan at 63. The median for all nations is 125, or about 1/6 of the American rate.  If you look at the economic distribution of our prison population, you would conclude that it is a crime to be poor and black in America. Our current prison population exceeds that of China (2.3 million vs 1.6 million, though there are several hundred thousand in China who are in “labor camps” as political prisoners working in factories). We have a corrections economic sector that employs more people than the top three corporations in America (Ford, General Motors and Wal-Mart) and the growth rate in our prison industry has been an astonishing fourfold increase over the last quarter century. I refuse to be a passive participant in keeping alive a system that is such an obvious failure.

Our economic recovery, assuming we have one, will further amplify the difference between the top and the bottom of our economic culture in terms of  income scales and living standards; we will see a new generation of the homeless, with an expansion of the neighborhoods that breed crime and poverty. Those pictures of boarded-up houses in suburban America that we see today will become our modern suburban slums–the final reality that will set in, once we realize that our current economic downturn reflects a permanent loss of national wealth that has been building up for the last thirty years, as we traded manufacturing jobs for working at McDonald’s. The only chance we have to rescue our culture from this bleak outcome is to rebuild our economy, using a different system of rank ordering success, save the planet in the process and invest in our impoverished neighborhoods to bring them into the new order, complete with a social safety net. This will be a fight with the Republicans until they die out as a major party–they are so deeply corrupted by their unyielding support and defense of corporate America, that they don’t serve the public interest in almost any dimension of their political profile, assuming that they have one.
Things weren’t always like this: Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America,” “In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States.” Well, that was then and this is now. In between then and now we had the dominance of the Republican mentality of solving our social problems by building more prisons (many Democrats were in agreement on this solution as well).  If citizens don’t stand up and declare that our system of justice and its attendant rate of incarceration is racially and poverty-biased, using our drug laws and property laws as a substitute for racism, we will only see further escalation in our rate of prison population growth through an exponential curve which will prove to be economically unsustainable. If we continue with our present trends, at some point we may have to ask who is really in prison? Is it the massive population of the incarcerated, or is the culture that put them there, the one that does not have enough creativity to solve their social problems by any method other than isolation and brutality? It would only take a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand citizens taking up jury duty in each county courthouse, or within the Federal court system, to advocate for the needed changes in our legal system that is now riddled with excess towards the accused, unless of course the accused happens to be an American corporation. Juries now tend to assume that all of the accused are guilty, or they wouldn’t have been charged. This is intellectual laziness and malaise.

It is profoundly disturbing to live in a culture that has no trouble sending young men off to unjust wars, knowing that if they come back at all, they will be physically or psychically damaged (or both), but should they run into problems once they have returned, we have no trouble placing them in prison if they violate our outrageous drugs laws or write a bad check to feed their family. That is not my idea of a just state. So, next time you are asked to serve on a jury, be prepared to convey your personal outrage about our current legal system. Like our economy, that too has to be rebuilt from the ground up. We shouldn’t be averse to the challenge. If we don’t focus in on this aspect of our culture, surely our Bastille Day is waiting around the corner: Attica was just a warm up exercise.

RFM