We're Number One in the World in Putting People in Prison: Shameful

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT 

One thing that the GOP doesn't bring up much anymore is crime.

In the '70s and '80s, crime was one of the biggest red-meat issues that the Republicans demagogued about. An infamous political ad about an inmate released in Governor Dukakis' prison probation program probably (along with some other missteps) lost him the presidency in 1988. It was simply known as getting "Wilie Hortoned," named after the offender (in the attack ad), who was singled out as an example of "liberalism" molly coddling violent criminals.

However, the Republicans can't talk about being soft on crime anymore, because the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's not just a penal system; it's an industry. And due to the aging of the population (young people commit most "crimes"), changing police practices and the locking up of so many poor people, crime in the United States is down - down dramatically.

A New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," [1] shockingly notes:

Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America - more than six million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

And the toll on minorities is devastating:

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today - perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system - in prison, on probation, or on parole - than were in slavery then.

Gopnik is appalled: "The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life."

The roots of violence are complex, but don't equate our incarceration system with just violent offenders. There is an extremely large percentage of American citizens in jail for nonviolent offenses, particularly relating to drugs - and particularly minorities in relation to drug "violations."

To what degree our propensity to hold the world's record for people behind bars is due to economic disparity is not an idle question. There aren't many wealthy people who end up behind bars, nor do rich areas evidence much crime for which people find themselves in prison, except for an occasional Bernie Madoff. Wealthy people tend to commit financial crimes - and if their breaking of the law does not involve millions of dollars, they tend to strike a plea bargain that doesn't require being put in a cell for years on end.

Just look at the lack of prosecution of Wall Street speculators and mortgage fraud financiers. But if you are poor and bounce a check three times, the taxpayer will pay some $20,000 or more a year to keep you confined by the state.

In reflecting upon how America arrived at this harsh, expansive prison system, Gopnik refers to one theory:

"American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations." White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow.

Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. "The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage," the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of "formal control" (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of "invisible control." Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system.

What if black males in impoverished circumstances - living in areas with opportunities for employment - were given jobs instead of jail sentences?

That's a question no political candidate for the presidency - Republican or Democrat - will ask aloud.

It too closely touches upon the truth: that we have economically abandoned large swathes of cities and rural areas, and that we have offered the inhabitants of those impoverished communities "boarding" in prison instead of work.

Even as the economy incrementally crawls toward improvement, the same people we have left behind in good times will continue to be left behind in bad.

Instead, at great economic cost to taxpayers, we will house them in penal institutions. After they fulfill their sentences, they will have an even slimmer chance at obtaining gainful employment.

We, as a society, have caged people of color and poor whites for our social caste convenience - and for that we have pitifully obtained No. 1 bragging rights in the world: top jailer on the planet.