Not sure if it's a coincidence or there is a sudden surge of awareness and interest that will lead to reform, but there's been a lot of excellent books and articles on the prison industrial complex lately. As gets pointed out again and again, the incarceration rate of the United States of America is the highest in the world. African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population.
(Much credit to Book Forum for helping me track these down.)
The Seattle Times did an excellent investigative series on Washington state's abuse of prisoner labor. Despite claims by the state government, there is no evidence that having inmates work while in jail encourages them to find jobs once they're released. Mostly the state has used the program to generate large revenues for itself.
Far from being self-sufficient, CI has cost taxpayers at least $20 million since 2007, including $750,000 spent over three years on a fish farm to raise tilapia that has yet to yield a single meal.
In the latest issue of Mother Jones, there's a riveting piece about Ohio's policy of locking up juveniles in solitary confinement. Not surprisingly, this doesn't lead to rehabilitation.
"They locked me in that little room with nothing," Kenny countered when I reached him by phone a few weeks later. He was cold and lonely in the isolation room, Kenny told me, but that was nothing compared with the psychological torment. "I wasn't even thinking straight, banging my head on the door and everything else. I was acting like a crazy person," he said. "I had some of the roughest nights in there that I've ever had in my life."
The wise and erudite David Cole reviews several new books in the
New York Review of Books, showing how f--ed up the prison system is.
Just Mercy demonstrates, as powerfully as any book on criminal justice that I’ve ever read, the extent to which brutality, unfairness, and racial bias continue to infect criminal law in the United States.
But Cole also strikes a number of hopeful notes:
And there are promising signs that the tide is finally beginning to turn in American criminal justice. The national per capita incarceration rate (combined state and federal prisons) reached an all-time high in 2007, but has fallen each year since then. Last year, the number of federal prisoners fell by 4,800, the first decline in about four decades. It is expected to drop by another 12,000 over the next two years. That’s the equivalent of closing six prisons.
If you're looking for something more academic, try Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who offers an alternative to current reform efforts, which she says are not working well enough.
This grabbed my attention:
Bluntly stated, the United States would still have an incarceration crisis even if African Americans were sent to prison and jail at “only” the rate at which whites in the United States are currently locked up,
She recognizes that African Americans are much more likely to be incarcerated than whites, but says whites are now being targeted as well:
But a new front in the war on drugs has opened up in rural, predominantly white areas that reportedly are facing the scourge of methamphetamine labs, prescription drug abuse, and heroin. Furthermore, since the 1990s, U.S. politicians and policy makers have been laying the institutional and political groundwork for a large-scale war against sex offenders, as discussed in chapter 9. The wider public has been a willing conscript in this new war, which has eerie parallels with the origins and development of the war on drugs four decades ago. The wave of draconian sex offender laws has struck hardest at older white men.
For a historical perspective,
see the Los Angeles Review of Books' take An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment, which charts the history of imprisonment back to thousands of years ago.
Finally, Slate does a pieceon a new theory on why so many Americans are in prison:
What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorneys file a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges.