Jailing the entire world?

California’s Crowded Prisons

A three-judge panel has tentatively ordered California to reduce the population of its desperately overcrowded prisons by as much as one-third, or as many as 55,000 prisoners, over the next three years. The ruling was an extreme step � but a necessary one. Like many states, California is putting too many people behind bars for too long, and it doesn�t have the money to build more facilities.

. . .

California�s 33 prisons were designed to house 84,000 inmates; they now hold more than 150,000. In some cases, prisoners are being triple-bunked in gymnasiums and other places not intended to be used for housing. There are not enough medical facilities or enough personnel to ensure that prisoners get the mental health and medical treatment they need.

. . .

A large number of California prisoners are behind bars for technical parole violations. Others are in for minor, nonviolent crimes. Inmates like those can and should be released, and given help to reintegrate into society. The state�s limited prison space should be used for people who truly need to be there. It is not ideal when a court has to intervene so directly in managing prisons. But California has been unwilling, on its own, to run a prison system that complies with the Constitution.

There are now 2.3 million people behind bars nationwide � many for nonviolent crimes. And many state prisons are badly overcrowded. Incarcerating people who do not need to be is not only illegal and inhumane, it is a bad crime-fighting strategy.

Among the evils of privatizing government is the notion of prison for profit, which leads to outrages like this:

Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

And yet our wonderful new stimulus package contains a number of what Jeralyn at TalkLeft calls “Let’s Put More People in Jail” grants. As her colleague TChris states:

Job creation isn’t a smart rationale for funding crime prevention grants in the stimulus bill. Congress should instead consider a bill that focuses more specifically and comprehensively on crime prevention. The relative need (or lack thereof) for more police officers, more prisons, more after-school programs, more job training, and more drug treatment centers deserves more carefully considered debate than it can receive when packaged as part of the stimulus bill.

A long article by Bruce Western in the Boston Review last summer begins like this:

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the �basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.� By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, �With the world�s largest prison population,� he said, �our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.� Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison�s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb�s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor�s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.

. . .

The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.

The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration�a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.

Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.

We are doing ourselves great harm through these incarceration policies. Western offers an intelligent discussion of alternatives and ways to redeem our past mistakes. I recommend that you read the whole article.

We are currently imprisoning our own citizens, illegal immigrants, and suspected terrorists. Pretty soon, it seems like, our entire society will consist of nothing but prisoners and guards.

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