James Carroll's column in this morning's Boston Globe has the title The prison boom comes home to roost. He begins with a question:
WILL THE fiscal collapse that has laid bare gross inequalities in the US economic system lead to meaningful reforms toward a more just society?
Your immediate response would almost certainly be in the negative, particular after the election results of Tuesday, especially given the Republican gains in governors' seats and state legislatures.
We know - and I have written about - the rapid increase in economic inequality that began with Reagan's ascent to the presidency. But also consider this:
In 1975, there were fewer than 400,000 people locked up in the United States. By 2000, that had grown to 2 million, and by this year to nearly 2.5 million.
We now have 25% of the world's prison population, 5 times our 5% or less share of the total population.
This effectively created a vibrant shadow economy: American spending on the criminal justice system went from $33 billion in 1980 to $216 billion in 2010 — an increase of 660 percent. Criminal justice is the third largest employer in the country.
We know that owners of private prisons were behind the passage of the infamous Arizona law that is so hostile to those of Hispanic heritage - they hope to profit by greater occupation of their facilities, that higher rate paid for by tax expenditures.
It is worse than that. Carroll quotes sociologist Loic Wacquant while writing
In the 1990s, as federal corrections budgets increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, "effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.’’
There are few significant public figures willing to address this issue, one notable exception being the senior senator from Virginia James Webb, who has taken on the issue of examining and reforming our criminal justice system and its inequities.
Carroll devotes much of his column to making a parallel between the housing bubble and the bubble in building prisons, public and private. The latter, I might note, do not directly require tax expenditures to build, but still place a major burden on states in their operation.
Carroll also writes
"Welfare as we know it’’ was replaced by punishment. States went prison-crazy.
The current fiscal crisis brings home the opportunity costs of our insane overemphasis on incarceration:
State budgets suddenly cannot afford prison systems, which universally choke off funds for education, transportation, and infrastructure.
And then there is the moral cost, and this is to me the heart of Carroll's piece:
While a famously over-exuberant economy was built on the lies of bankers tied to an artificially inflated housing sector, the prison boom depended on racist and class-biased "criminology’’ that was, in fact, steadily debunked by penal experts. Just as irrational assumptions of "risk assessment’’ prompted mortgage brokers to understate the risks of home ownership, they led prosecutors, in a parallel noted by Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon, to grossly overstate the risks to society of huge numbers of defendants. The housing bubble, Simon shows, devastated neighborhoods by littering them with abandoned properties. The prison bubble devastated neighborhoods by depriving them of fathers and husbands.
racist and class-biased "criminology" - the rates of incarceration of people of color and the terms they serve (for example, the continued disparityb in sentencing between convictions for powder cocaine favored by Whites and for crack favored by Blacks)can to me be described as perpetuating racism by other means. It leads to destruction of families and communities.
I happen to believe that our current approach to education 'reform' is a further example, with schools in those neighborhoods effectively still abandoned, to be replaced by charters that do not bring value to the community but even it they are successful in educating children beyond passing test scores tends to remove that talent from the neighborhoods, leaving them behind to fester and rot.
Carroll's column struck a nerve. It reminded me once again how little we are truly one nation, how much we are willing to ignore the pain and suffering that so many of our people still encounter. I recently finally saw "the Blind Side" and was struck by when Leigh Anne drives Michael to try to find his mother. She had lived in Memphis all her life and had no idea of the reality of the place.
That is true of too many of us. There are places near us with decaying housing, decrepit schools, little employment, too many liquor stores . . . somehow we avoid those neighborhoods, the people there are not like "us" however we might define the words in quotes.
Or they are far enough away - in the mountains of Appalachia, in the Hispanic towns and villages of New Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley, or on Native reservations in the Upper Midwest or parts of the Southwest.
I see a connection between what we are doing in schools and our policy of incarceration. Somehow we think both policies will lead to societal improvements, that fear of incarceration will reduce crime and that the rigid drill and kill of the 'reform' movement in education will produce more productive citizens. Both policies have already been proven failures. Yet we double down, then double down again.
We imprison and remove people from communities. When they return they have few if any usable skills, and what jobs there are often are closed to those with a criminal record, even if their conviction was not for an offense that should matter for the work entailed in that employment. And if the conviction was for drugs, we permanently bar them from many federal benefit.
We just had an election. In many states a felony conviction - which can occur for too many offenses that perhaps could be treated as minor and the offender easily rehabilitated - results in losing the right to vote. In my own state of Virginia it is exceedingly difficult to get one's voting rights restored, a pattern that is somewhat similar in other Southern states, and which because of the racist pattern of much of our law enforcement and criminal justice results in the significant disenfranchisement of Africa-American males in the South and of Hispanic males in parts of the Southwest. That results in further difficulties for communities of color, because since they have fewer voters proportionally to their citizenry, they are less able to influence policies, so they get more prisons and less housing, poorer schools, worse roads, and so on.
State budgets are in crisis. Republicans control an increasing number of state governments. Budgets will be slashed.
We will see less funds for schools, and the attempt to use the crisis to move away from public schools, and to hell with those who have no other option.
We will see parks and libraries shuttered.
We will see cutbacks on public transportation.
In other words, we may not make the changes our society most needs.
Carroll's piece includes a question, to which he offers a clarification:
Can the war on the poor be returned to the war on poverty? This is not simply opening gates and letting criminals go free, although the harsh fact must be faced that many convicted of non-violent, mainly drug offenses, never belonged behind bars in the first place. But transferring government over-investment in incarceration to re-investment in education and public housing is the only real correction to the massive "corrections’’ mistake we made.
Unfortunately, I fear the answer to that question is a negative: too many jobs and incomes depend upon the continued incarceration of people disproportionally poor and of color.
That their profits and employment carry such greater weight is to me a sign of the moral decay of this nation.
That we even allow private prisons as a means of incarceration, putting a profit motive into the criminal justice system, is an even bigger sign of that decay.
The real costs of our prison boom? Could it be our very humanity, our decency?
