Our understanding of crime has been distorted, warped, and placed out of perspective. The way that we understand the meaning and social context of crime, criminals, courts, judges, juries, defense attorneys, victims and accused has become unfocused, wrapped in myth, legend, racism, superstition and media fantasy. A real understanding crime and society, and the real portraits of crime, criminals, and the fight to stay out of a prison system that wants you back requires context and nuance to fully understand, and those are qualities largely forgotten by the American public. There was a time when our understanding of crime was more grounded in statistical reality and good social science, but that time is long past. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not know or care how we treat the accused in this country, nor do they have little interest in learning why it is important to protect the rights of the accused or prisoners.
I have noticed, in my own experience and conversations with people that there is this overwhelming "lock 'em up, throw away the key" "these people have no rights" "there is no reason for me to care unless a prison is built in my back yard" mentality among a lot of folks. And it truly disturbs me. Because of things like this -- "Just Because You Weren't Dancing is No Reason for Us Not to Beat You Up and Then Throw You in Jail" (by kossack extraordinare jpmassar). Of course, we all know that there increasing, and frankly alarming, reports of massive police brutality all across the country. I mean one search of google yields 575,000 hits. For illustration, some of the worst examples can be found: here and here, and thats just the first two hits of the search query. And who can forget the crazy overreaction of New Mexico Police against Oriana Ferrell during a routine traffic stop.
Those are relatively cherry picked examples, to be sure. But there has been an increase (over the last decade or so) in number, and more dangerously ferocity, of reports about police abuse of power and violation of individual rights, at least that is what I have noticed, and apparently confirmed by good sociological research (a google scholar search for "have the number of police brutality reports increased" is a good starting point). More subtly, operating in the background, there have been changes made to the way criminal trials work that seem to have the effect of ripping the power away from judges to consider context in sentencing and transferred that power to prosecutors when they make charging decisions at the beginning of a criminal trial (briefly discussed in a diary I wrote introducing dailykos the senior thesis I have to finish to graduate). These odious laws, known as mandatory minimum sentencing laws, have been a major factor, along with others, in increasing the power of the prosecutor to a point where our adversarial system is out of balance in many states. This has had the effect of increasing incarceration rates to far beyond what the United States can handle. Here is a chart showing what has happened to the incarceration rates of women, men and the national average since 1925:
As you can see from the chart, incarcerations rates EXPLODED in just thirty years, going from about 300 per 100,000 in 1978 to 900 per 100,000 in 2008! That is a 200% increase in the prison population rate. I believe that the answer lies in the nexus between certain sociological forces that created an environment for just such a crazy increase in the United States prison population, now the world's number 1 jailer. The answer lies with you and me, and everybody. We provided the social context in which such an insane rise in our incarceration rates are possible.
We have been duped into thinking that violent crime is all around us. We have been lead to believe by the media, and by friends and relatives through anecdotes, and through our own sense of self preservation, that violent crime is happening all around us. Flip on a goddamned channel on television. I swear to god, at least five of them are playing god awful cops or prison shows (including MSNBC, which I respect for its coverage of news during the week). Flip to the local news, what else are they talking about besides crime. Violent break ins, murders, rapes, robberies. Flip back to cops, watch a black man being dragged away in hand cuffs. Flip back to the news, see a sketch of a young Hispanic man wanted for murder. Flip the channel to the competing news outlet, see the series of investigations by local reporters about a recent rash of assaults made by a disheveled, homeless looking older man. It seems to me, a Joe or Jane Six-Pack at home would come to the idea that violent crime is everywhere both in his or her own neighborhood and all across the country. Its not their fault, they watch the news just like they are supposed to. Its not them, its the source of the information that has changed. The media is poisoning the information well for profit, and the broke-ass state of our criminal justice system is the result.
This might not have changed many hearts and minds in one year or two, but multiply this by 30 years. The same message, the same beat of the drum. Violent crime is everywhere. It is in your neighborhood. It is lurking around every corner. Look at these crying families. And they feel the urge to act. They feel as if there is something broken.
Out of the goodness of their hearts and souls, they begin to work on a solution that, for sure, was not the best fit for the problem. They form action committees and councils and volunteer organizations, all of which conglomerate into pressure groups, all of which focus their energy on the fastest route to change: either the legislature, or directly to the people. This war between ordinary Americans who earnestly believe that something is broken with our criminal justice system and the politicians, who so adeptly found the path of least resistance, began to change the nature of our criminal trial process. Unfortunately they changed things for the worse, not the better. The path to hell, as they say, is paved with the best intentions. This time in criminal justice is referred to as "the neoclassical reaction" (well, at least in sociology of law circles).
The effects of this reaction have been devastating, obviously. And each of the problems are interrelated. The reduction of the power of the defense attorney, parole board, jury, and judge; the increase in prosecutorial power; the increase of incarceration rates and average lengths of stays in prison; the number of minority men being placed in jail at overwhelmingly faster rates than that of their white counterparts; the reduction of rights of prisoners when they are released; the media and their cherry picked reports of violent crime; the will of the people to "lock em up and throw away the key"; and, the lack of the political will to do anything about it seem to work into a logical and seemingly rational story. Examine it further, and the logic of the story falls away, and all one can see are people's fears, anxieties and prejudices forming a complex and vicious cycle that sucks people up and spits them out, regardless of guilt or innocence.
What is lost in the study of all this is a face to the brutality. Sure, I see news stories all the time about police brutality, especially because it is one of my favorite topics in sociology. But for some reason the diary linked above, about the woman accused of being a dancer and beaten multiple times for it, and denied her even most basic rights snapped me out of my ivory-tower. There is a fucking human cost to all of this bullshit. It isn't just forces and counter forces, causes and effects, its our lives. Its our freedom. Its our individual liberties at stake here -- for every single American. We must stop this feedback loop, once and for all. We must come to learn, as a society, what the real effects of crime are, who the real perpetrators are, and who is just innocently caught in a system not concern with context nor individual circumstances. We must come to embrace the fact that those that deviate from the white-anglosaxon-protestant norm are not committing crime at a faster rate than that of their white-anglosaxon-protestant counterparts. We must understand that there is a complex and deeply rooted money making mechanism (called the Prison Industrial Complex, written about at great length on dkos) pulling the strings behind the curtains both at trial, during a prisoners sentence, and after they are released.
Most of all, we must come, again, to realize that the way we treat our prisoners, those accused of a crime, former felons that have served their time, is the way we treat ourselves. Of course, people who commit violent crime should not be sent to club FED, but we should recognize that they do indeed have rights. That they are, at least, human. They do not deserve a trial in the media, they deserve a fair and impartial trial. Their rights need to be protected. The reason for this, to me, is obvious: what if the trial was wrong? what if some of these people are innocent? They will have seen the absolute worst of their government, and indeed, humanity if they go through this system of so-called justice we have. How do you explain the torture you put the accused through if, when the smoke clears, they are innocent? How do you answer the innocent person's "Why?"
And how do we explain it to our kids? How do we settle this with the way we used to understand criminal justice in the United States?
It is worth considering, as a society -- lest we end up the tyrants we all fear so much.