Those who believe that righteous indignation and protest politics were appropriate in the struggle to end Jim Crow, but that something less will do as we seek to dismantle mass incarceration, fail to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge. If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars. A million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would see their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structures that it is not going to fade away without a major shift in public consciousness.
Ponder that for a moment.
Our current rate of incarceration is 5 times that of a time less than 4 decades ago.
Our increased incarceration is responsible for 1 million jobs - that is out of a total current workforce of about 152 million.
The words are by Michelle Alexander. They appear in The New York Times in an op ed titled as it this diary, In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights Alexander is the author of a book on prisons titled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. At the publisher's website for the book one sees it described as "A BOLD AND INNOVATIVE ARGUMENT THAT MASS INCARCERATION AMOUNTS TO A DEVASTATING SYSTEM OF RACIAL CONTROL, BY A RISING LEGAL STAR." Alexander teaches law at Ohio State.
There are several reasons why I want to focus on the issues Alexander raises
Some of her arguments are familiar - she has two paragraphs where she discusses the rate of incarceration in the US compared to other nations and unequal rate of incarceration for African Americans versus white. For the first she uses the figure of 2.3 million - that coincides with the Bureau of Justice Statistics figures for 2009, and at more than 7/10% of our population represents the highest rate in the world. She notes that
Convictions for non-violent crimes and relatively minor drug offenses - mostly possession, not sale - have accounted for the bulk of the increase in the prison population since the mid-1980s.
and adds
African-Americans are far more likely to get prison sentences for drug offenses than white offenders, even though studies have consistently shown that they are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.
At the publisher's website we can read the following paragraph from the book, which helps explain its title:
Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
If we further explore those Justice statistics we would find that 7,225,800 people at the end of 2009 were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole, about 3.1% of adults in the U.S. resident population. If you follow the last link, or even this one for the Bureau's own website, you will find graphs that make clear that the explosion really began during the 1980s and has continued pretty much unabated ever since.
In 1981 a Republican named Ronald Reagan became president. He had control of the Senate. While the Democrats had nominal control of the House, conservative Dems were more than willing to go along with Reagan's agenda. A key part of Reagan's agenda was the privatization of what had previously been public functions.
There is a moral as well as an economic cost to the profit motivation. A government's goal is to provide a service. It may seek to contain costs, but it has a greater concern for the meeting the needs that service addresses. In a privatized setting, the primary goal is always maximization of profits. That not only means minimizing the cost to the for-profit entity, it also includes maximizing the opportunities to make profits. In minimizing costs to the entity, one will seek to forgo any effort not absolutely essential to the core function that leads to the profit, or to pass on costs to others. Thus in mountaintop removalcoal mining and in hydraulic fracturing for obtaining natural gas, the energy companies do not want to be assessed for costs to damages to the surrounding environment, whether it be burying of streams and habitat in the former or pollution of ground water supplies or creation of earthquake swarms for the latter. If they can get tax breaks for their expenses as the oil companies now have even better.
As to maximizing the opportunity for profits, for-profit entities moving into what were previously government functions will seek to control all aspects of the supply of opportunity to avoid competitive pressures. They will want a guarantee of revenue streams under government mandate. We can see the former in the privatization of many school functions - mandate tests, then let the same companies that produce tests also produce test prep materials, and with sufficient emphasis upon test scores including with government mandated penalties for schools that fail to do well enough on tests, one sees a huge opportunity for profits without having to take responsibility for running the schools.
And for prisons? Focus on harsher sentences, take flexibility away from judges in sentencing, ensure that the harsher sentences tend to fall on groups with less ability to act politically (Blacks and Hispanics), all of which insures a rapid expansion for the need for incarceration which is met by the ability of private companies to quickly build new facilities. When there is a connection with for-profit prison companies and those moving to criminalize and more seriously punish (longer sentences) - as has clearly been shown in Arizona - one quickly realizes how the game is being played.
The moral cost incurred is that people's lives are impacted not for the benefit of society but for the profits of the corporations. Remember, in many states a criminal conviction leads to the loss of many civil rights, not merely the right to vote but also the right to hold many types of licenses. If the impact of such measures falls disproportionally upon those already at a disadvantage by economics - which is true for many Blacks and Hispanics, but also for some groups of Whites - we create a situation where the increased rates of incarceration are used to justify racist attitudes that further poison our society.
Let me return to Alexander. Her entire op ed is worth reading, and I suggest that you do. She writes this piece in a larger context of Civil Rights, quoting from King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." She notes that there are some on the right who are beginning to question the wisdom of what we are doing with incarceration because of the financial costs - remember, .the private prisons are paid for with public tax dollars, and in a time of restricted resources some on the Right have begun to question whether we should not redirect those resources elsewhere. As a result, some would like to avoid discussions of the inequities that are clearly in evidence in our approach to criminal justice, in the explosion both of the number of those incarcerated and the increasing disparity by race. Alexander would disagree. That is in part why she refers to the words of King, which as she notes would not have tested well in a focus group but helped to change this nation.
Consider only one sentence of what she quotes: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Those words of King are timeless. They unfortunately still apply - on far too many issues - to our own time. I lived through the time in which King offered those words. We are, after all, at precisely 50 years remove from the Freedom Rides, which is why several(Meteor Blades and me) here have posted diaries commemorating the occasion. I see the relevance of those words today.
There are thoughtful people who have been seeking to address these issue. I am proud of my soon to be one term Senator Jim Webb, because this is an issue he began addressing as a journalist, and which he has continued to address during his time in public office.
That others recognize that we need to address it is good, but it will not be easy to change the direction we have been taken. The profit motivation gives companies like Corrections Corporation of America - the largest entity in the for-profit prison business - strong motivation to oppose any reform. Those million jobs that have been created are often in communities where the employees in the private prisons represent the largest group of employed people, so others in the community may fear the loss of an economic engine. Such prisons are often in rural areas while those imprisoned have been transported from inner cities.
Oh, and there is one more moral issue. Because the prisons are run and staffed by non-government personal, the various constitutional restrictions on how government employees can treat prisoners may not be in effect. After all, the Bill of Rights was directed at protection against government action, the employees of a company like CCA and the owners will argue that they are not the government (even thought they are doing what should be a government function) and those protections do not apply against them, and given the current makeup of the Supreme Court they would probably find judicial support for their positions.
Let me offer Alexander's final paragraph:
Yes, some prison downsizing is likely to occur in the months and years to come. But we ought not fool ourselves: we will not end mass incarceration without a recommitment to the movement-building work that was begun in the 1950s and 1960s and left unfinished. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch. If we fail to rise to the challenge, and push past the politics of momentary interest convergence, future generations will judge us harshly.
I do not think there is any question that future generations will judge this time harshly. Even were we to rapidly make some of the changes we need, not only on this matter, they will perhaps look back and wonder how for three decades we allowed our rights to be diminished, we went from an emphasis on liberty and freedom to an emphasis on economics and profits without regard to the damage such emphasis did - to rights, to the fabric of society, to the future of the nation, to the well-being of the world.
The well-being of the world - we continue to despoil the environment, as a nation we continue to exert undue influence for economic reasons thereby destabilizing other societies and fomenting hatred against our nation, we show a lack of respect for other cultures if doing so restricts our ability to act or the profits we can obtain.
"When will we ever learn?" That is the question Pete Seeger asked in "Where have all the flowers gone?"
It is the question that pieces like that of Michelle Alexander bring to my mind.
What say you?