Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
Race and the transformation of criminal justiceThe early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the city’s population declined by 14 percent. Crime was concentrated in central cities: in 1990, two fifths of Pennsylvania’s violent crimes were committed in Philadelphia, home to one seventh of the state’s population. The subject of crime dominated American domestic-policy debates.
Most observers at the time expected things to get worse. Consulting demographic tables and extrapolating trends, scholars and pundits warned the public to prepare for an onslaught, and for a new kind of criminal—the anomic, vicious, irreligious, amoral juvenile “super-predator.” In 1996, one academic commentator predicted a “bloodbath” of juvenile homicides in 2005.
And so we prepared. Stoked by fear and political opportunism, but also by the need to address a very real social problem, we threw lots of people in jail, and when the old prisons were filled we built new ones.
But the onslaught never came. Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.
According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.
Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.
How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.
A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.
One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:
The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes).
The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes).
This growth in punitiveness was accompanied by a shift in thinking about the basic purpose of criminal justice. In the 1970s, the sociologist David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there. Felons are no longer persons to be supported, but risks to be dealt with. And the way to deal with the risks is to keep them locked up. As of 2000, 33 states had abolished limited parole (up from 17 in 1980); 24 states had introduced three-strikes laws (up from zero); and 40 states had introduced truth-in-sentencing laws (up from three). The vast majority of these changes occurred in the 1990s, as crime rates fell.
This new system of punitive ideas is aided by a new relationship between the media, the politicians, and the public. A handful of cases—in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent—get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders—and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.
* * *
Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?
The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy—intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order—can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: there is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.
Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.
The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues—persuasively, I think—that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents—consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin—shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:
Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.
Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy.
Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996. The association in the American mind of race with welfare, and of race with crime, has been achieved at a common historical moment. Crime-control institutions are part of a larger social-policy complex—they relate to and interact with the labor market, family-welfare efforts, and health and social-work activities. Indeed, Garland argues that the ideological approaches to welfare and crime control have marched rightward to a common beat: “The institutional and cultural changes that have occurred in the crime control field are analogous to those that have occurred in the welfare state more generally.” Just as the welfare state came to be seen as a race issue, so, too, crime came to be seen as a race issue, and policies have been shaped by this perception.
Consider the tortured racial history of the War on Drugs. Blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested for a drug offense in 1975 but four times as likely by 1989. Throughout the 1990s, drug-arrest rates remained at historically unprecedented levels. Yet according to the National Survey on Drug Abuse, drug use among adults fell from 20 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 2000. A similar trend occurred among adolescents. In the age groups 12–17 and 18–25, use of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all peaked in the late 1970s and began a steady decline thereafter. Thus, a decline in drug use across the board had begun a decade before the draconian anti-drug efforts of the 1990s were initiated.
Of course, most drug arrests are for trafficking, not possession, so usage rates and arrest rates needn’t be expected to be identical. Still, we do well to bear in mind that the social problem of illicit drug use is endemic to our whole society. Significantly, throughout the period 1979–2000, white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?
Think of the cost this way: to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that the ratcheting up of enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
An interesting case in point is New York City. Analyzing arrests by residential neighborhood and police precinct, the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues Valerie West and Jan Holland found that incarceration was highest in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, though these were often not the neighborhoods in which crime rates were the highest. Moreover, they discovered a perverse effect of incarceration on crime: higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later. This growth and persistence of incarceration over time, the authors concluded, was due primarily to the drug enforcement practices of police and to sentencing laws that require imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in high-incarceration neighborhoods, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored. Thus, discretionary and spatially discriminatory police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods, even as crime rates fell.
Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners and in public vestibules—come predominantly from the poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:
Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.
The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.
So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.
* * *
I have been exploring the issue of causes: of why we took the punitive turn that has resulted in mass incarceration. But even if the racial argument about causes is inconclusive, the racial consequences are clear. To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by the forces of law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.
In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black–white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state college.
The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.
One cannot reckon the world-historic American prison build-up over the past 35 years without calculating the enormous costs imposed upon the persons imprisoned, their families, and their communities. (Of course, this has not stopped many social scientists from pronouncing on the net benefits of incarceration without doing so.) Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.
Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.
Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other. Those offenders who are released ‘into the community’ are subject to much tighter control than previously, and frequently find themselves returned to custody for failure to comply with the conditions that continue to restrict their freedom. For many of these parolees and ex-convicts, the ‘community’ into which they are released is actually a closely monitored terrain, a supervised space, lacking much of the liberty that one associates with ‘normal life’.”
Deciding how citizens of varied social rank within a common polity ought to relate to one another is a more fundamental consideration than deciding which crime-control policy is most efficient. The question of relationship, of solidarity, of who belongs to the body politic and who deserves exclusion—these are philosophical concerns of the highest order. A decent society will on occasion resist the efficient course of action, for the simple reason that to follow it would be to act as though we were not the people we have determined ourselves to be: a people conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we all are created equal. Assessing the propriety of creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities at the start of the 21st century presents us with just such a case.
My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these brutal facts do at times incline me to cry out in despair. But my argument is analytical, not existential. Its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.
This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems—unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens—even those who break our laws?
* * *
To address these questions, we need to think about the evaluation of our prison system as a problem in the theory of distributive justice—not the purely procedural idea of ensuring equal treatment before the law and thereafter letting the chips fall where they may, but the rather more demanding ideal of substantive racial justice. The goal is to bring about through conventional social policy and far-reaching institutional reforms a situation in which the history of racial oppression is no longer so evident in the disparate life experiences of those who descend from slaves.
And I suggest we approach that problem from the perspective of John Rawls’s theory of justice: first, that we think about justice from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” that obstructs from view our own situation, including our class, race, gender, and talents. We need to ask what rules we would pick if we seriously imagined that we could turn out to be anyone in the society. Second, following Rawls’s “difference principle,” we should permit inequalities only if they work to improve the circumstances of the least advantaged members of society. But here, the object of moral inquiry is not the distribution among individuals of wealth and income, but instead the distribution of a negative good, punishment, among individuals and, importantly, racial groups.
So put yourself in John Rawls’s original position and imagine that you could occupy any rank in the social hierarchy. Let me be more concrete: imagine that you could be born a black American male outcast shuffling between prison and the labor market on his way to an early death to the chorus of nigger or criminal or dummy. Suppose we had to stop thinking of us and them. What social rules would we pick if we actually thought that they could be us? I expect that we would still pick some set of punishment institutions to contain bad behavior and protect society. But wouldn’t we pick arrangements that respected the humanity of each individual and of those they are connected to through bonds of social and psychic affiliation? If any one of us had a real chance of being one of those faces looking up from the bottom of the well—of being the least among us—then how would we talk publicly about those who break our laws? What would we do with juveniles who go awry, who roam the streets with guns and sometimes commit acts of violence? What weight would we give to various elements in the deterrence-retribution-incapacitation-rehabilitation calculus, if we thought that calculus could end up being applied to our own children, or to us? How would we apportion blame and affix responsibility for the cultural and social pathologies evident in some quarters of our society if we envisioned that we ourselves might well have been born into the social margins where such pathology flourishes?
If we take these questions as seriously as we should, then we would, I expect, reject a pure ethic of personal responsibility as the basis for distributing punishment. Issues about responsibility are complex, and involve a kind of division of labor—what John Rawls called a “social division of responsibility” between “citizens as a collective body” and individuals: when we hold a person responsible for his or her conduct—by establishing laws, investing in their enforcement, and consigning some persons to prisons—we need also to think about whether we have done our share in ensuring that each person faces a decent set of opportunities for a good life. We need to ask whether we as a society have fulfilled our collective responsibility to ensure fair conditions for each person—for each life that might turn out to be our life.
We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge; but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.
Thus, a central reality of our time is the fact that there has opened a wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, the stability of family relations, the attachment to the work force, and the like. This disparity in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history: it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement. At the level of the individual case we must, of course, act as if this were not so. There could be no law, no civilization, without the imputation to particular persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged on its merits to be individually fair, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. The state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. And who can honestly say—who can look in the mirror and say with a straight face—that we now have laws and policies that we would endorse if we did not know our own situation and genuinely considered the possibility that we might be the least advantaged?
Even if the current racial disparity in punishment in our country gave evidence of no overt racial discrimination—and, perhaps needless to say, I view that as a wildly optimistic supposition—it would still be true that powerful forces are at work to perpetuate the consequences of a universally acknowledged wrongful past. This is in the first instance a matter of interpretation—of the narrative overlay that we impose upon the facts.
The tacit association in the American public’s imagination of “blackness” with “unworthiness” or “dangerousness” has obscured a fundamental ethical point about responsibility, both collective and individual, and promoted essentialist causal misattributions: when confronted by the facts of racially disparate achievement, racially disproportionate crime rates, and racially unequal school achievement, observers will have difficulty identifying with the plight of a group of people whom they (mistakenly) think are simply “reaping what they have sown.” Thus, the enormous racial disparity in the imposition of social exclusion, civic ex-communication, and lifelong disgrace has come to seem legitimate, even necessary: we fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed, immorally—denying our own. And yet, this entire dynamic has its roots in past unjust acts that were perpetrated on the basis of race.
Given our history, producing a racially defined nether caste through the ostensibly neutral application of law should be profoundly offensive to our ethical sensibilities—to the principles we proudly assert as our own. Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society. Our country’s policymakers need to do something about it. And all of us are ultimately responsible for making sure that they do.
Are we keeping these people in jail because we want another burden on our tax dollar? What do you propose, a mass pardoning of all murderers, rapists, psychopaths, terrorists, thieves?
Let me take a wild guess, I doubt you want the president of Enron freed. No? Didn't think so. I highly doubt he's very dangerous and I highly doubt he'll be hired in the future by any company to abscond with millions again. According to your logic, he should be freed. But of course, only mass murderers should be freed. All the republican corporate fat cats and corporate criminals should rot in jail, right?
You're obviously not a social scientist. Because you incarcerate people doesn't mean that crime goes down. It may seem intuitive to you, but they are actually non-related events that seem to be related, but are not so. According to Loury, crime rates started falling in 1992. We didn't begin the major prison boom until 1996. So if crime started falling before we started building prisons like Starbucks builds coffee shops, how do you explain the drop that occurred at least four year before that construction boom?
There is actually other data that shows, despite the hype, that crime had been falling since the 1980s.
So, before you start taking pot shots and talking about wild left-wing conspiracies, learn a thing or two about social science. If you need the Cliff Notes Version of myths about violent crime and prisons, please visit http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/CliffsReviewTopic/Myths-About-Juvenile-Justice.topicArticleId-10065,articleId-10062.html
One of the principal obstacles I see in reforming our criminal justice system is the absence of those who work within it to actually acknowledge there is a problem. Former police officers on my committee falsely assumed that there were a disproportionate amount of minority inmates primarily because minorities commit more crime, even when a quick glance at statistics on drug usage and incarceration do not demonstrate this to be the case.
It seems to me that we will not see any real reform until we can change the attitudes of those around us. I appreciate the author's efforts in writing this article. It's refreshing to see that I'm not alone and there are others who "get it."
The somewhat uncivil debate between Al Frick and Kenyon Farrow underscores how entrenched peoples' ideas about criminal justice and prison are.
The prison complex is a deeply entrenched one. It is entrenched financially. It is entrenched in people's minds as the only feasible way of dealing with crime ( a fallacious connection, as Kenyon demonstrates). And it is even physically entrenched!
What can we do?
Social "Science" and all the rest of these soft sciences amaze me in that they use no empirical data to confirm or deny their theories. It's just, "I feel that it's right. " All I know is, incarceration rates are at an all time high and crime is at almost an all time low. That's good enough proof for me.
"One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck."
I question this statistic. We have two million prisoners, and more than one million people working in corrections? The report he cites is not online at http://www.prisonstudies.org/ .
Where are the victim advocacy groups? Who cries for Alan Senitt?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/tobyharnden/aug07/dc-killers.htm
We spend about $27,000 per year on average to incarcerate a person. Most communities spend a small fraction of that large sum on educating children or preparing disadvantaged young adults to lead productive,law-abiding lives.
Incarceration has other profound fiscal and social costs. When a person is incarcerated, how can the victim hope to receive restitution? When a "bread-winner" is incarcerated, government is called upon to subsidize living expenses of the financially devestated family. When the primary care-giver is incarcerated, children often lack the love and care that provide a foundation for a well-adjusted life as a contributing citizen.
None of this is to say that criminals should not be held accountable for the violation of just and rational laws (which excludes most drug laws, petty property crimes, and the like). But accountability is not necessarily synonymous with incarceration. Quite the contrary. As most working people can attest, it's much more difficult to hold down a job, meet familial responsibilities, and cope with the daily pressures of life. And doing so is far more useful than the wasted time millions spend behind bars.
A sound criminal justice policy must be based upon rational policies that serve societal interests, rather than draining much needed resources to produce failure at 60% recidivist rates (an abject failure by any measure).
Certainly, there are people who must be separated from free society because they have inflicted or pose serious harm. But violent criminals constitute less than 30% of the 7.5 million Americans under some form of governmentally imposed constraints on their liberty. (Among even violent offenders, most acted negligently or "in the heat of passion" on a single occasion and present little or no risk of commiting violent acts in the future.)
All this means that well above two-thirds of the people in prison are non-violent and can be held accountable more effectively and at lower public expense through the imposition of penalties that hold offenders accountable through community service. Mandatory participation in educational or therapeutic regimens and other alternatives to incarceration are dramatically less costly, less destructive of family and neighborhoods, and more productively punitive than incarceration.
Prisoners are not the enemy. Some of them are the guys you used to ride with to buy beer when you were underage. Some of them were your teammates; others, classmates. They're the people the police nabbed when you "snowballed" passing cars until someone suddenly yelled "SCATTER!" The overwhelming majority of prisoners are people just like you and me, though few have been as fortunate as we.
In summary, our criminal justice policy produces results that none of us endorse, impacting people who are already marginalized and have little invested in the social order that successful people so highly value. These policies are obscenely expensive, counter-productive, and inconsistent with fundamental American values. The more you learn about the system, the greater the sense of shame and anger you will feel.
What can we do? We can punish irresponsible political leaders who call for ever-longer prison terms for increasingly intrusive invasions of personal liberties. When the newspapers lead with outrageous and sensationalized crime reports, we can write our representatives and ask that they restrain themselves from passing new criminal penalties for the crime de jour ("Insert victim's name here" Law). We can remember that the criminal justice system exists primarily to serve societal interests, and not to satisfy the insatiable desire of victims for vengence. We can become active in our communities to help incarcerated people remain connected to family and friends, or we can help to establish re-connections. In short, we can support and demonstrate care for our wayward brothers and sisters. But all of this has been said much more eloquently than I ever could:
Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, On Crime and Punishment, p.40 (© 1923, Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 87th printing 1971).
In other words, them's us. - Michael
First is his argument that our society's escalated focus on a punitive system overly focused on minorities and, particularly, people of color, may represent a modern means of holding onto the long denied option of lynching for the purpose of racial control. While every black who was lynched may not have been free of all criminal behavior, themselves, absolutely none of these persons deserved lynching and lynching as a practice was an abomination. Those using the rope became instant criminals and killers whose crimes far exceeded any of those by their victims thereby voiding any claims to ethical rights. One may not agree with this comparison but it is, I think, worth consideration.
The other principle theme Loury considers - and one I believe of particular value - is his construct of the "criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos" which then increasingly predict the incarceration and demonization along with the political and economic minimization of black males in particular and the poor overall. These criminogenic conditions, therefore, specifically sustain the very behaviors our rush to incarcerate and punish claim to reduce.
In behavioral theory this is akin to the existence of 'establishing operations'(EO) which creates the conditions for subsequent and highly predictable human behaviors. And inasmuch as EOs are strictly an environmental and transactional construct, they can be deconstructed and neutralized so as to greatly reduce the predicted behavior at the end of the response chain.
But, and in a quick return to Loury's first theme which I identified, such a deconstruction may be obviated by alternating societal motivations. So, this focuses us back to the premise that the problem with our use of incarceration is less the result of individual behavior and more reflective of a need for societal and cultural change.
People will then see how easily this can be done, could always have been done, and will belatedly realize that they had been deliberately scammed by the evil people known as politicians who had set up the police-prosecutors-prison system.
Al - do you believe the contrary "...that we should free those that deserve to be free"? If you do perhaps its is not much of a stretch to suggest that we should invest more in programs that keep our youth out of the system than in keeping them in after the fact(let's not imprison those that don't deserve it). Would you agree or disagree that once a youth enters the prison system their life (post their time served) is no longer their own? It seems this way to me - and at a great cost to society as a result.
Al, have you ever talked with someone who suffered the indignities that one suffers while incarcerated? Have you talked with someone who had to pick a group/gang in prison just to stay alive while trying to serve their time? Perhaps no, but certainly you must comprehend that such an experience leaves a lifelong imprint that is not easily shaken post prison. The punitive nature of our prison system does not condone criminal behaviour, but it does not do much to encourage/support a change of behaviour. Additionally, Al you must know the financial future for lower level criminals post serving their time is bleak at best and their job prospects after serving their time condems them to a lifelong sentance in most cases. Can you suggest some fix here?
I work with kids in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the Bay Area in CA. I can say nearly all are well intentioned/have the potential to be productive members of society if you catch them BEFORE they enter the prison system. Some would believe there is a criminal mindset in the inner cities - I have not found this to be true. I have found a survival instinct exists that at times diminishes moral judgement. Once this wire it tripped, the ripple effect on the individual and their families persists well beyond their time served and contributes greatly to future offenses/behaviour.
Knowing the cost of imprisoning these young people - we clearly underspend on providing them with the tools to be productive in other ways. By not spending to keep them out of prison we statistically know that many will be in the system at some point in the near future.
As I travel in the neighborhoods none of us want to see - there are many of our youth who want a way out, yet find few resources to provide a roadmap. Our money is better spent in providing resources to prevent the mindset/situation that leads to criminal behaviour.
Al - next time you you drive over the speed limit, have one too many drinks and get behind the wheel, fail to put enough money in the parking meter - you just drive right over to the police station and turn yourself in - after all you should be punished for these acts - right? Also, the next time you become aware that your child or family member is illegally downloading tunes from the internet, drinking underage, using drugs - you make sure you turn them in. After all, this is illegal activity and is punishable by law.
Al - do you believe the contrary "...that we should free those that deserve to be free"? If you do perhaps its is not much of a stretch to suggest that we should invest more in programs that keep our youth out of the system than in keeping them in after the fact(let's not imprison those that don't deserve it). Would you agree or disagree that once a youth enters the prison system their life (post their time served) is no longer their own? It seems this way to me - and at a great cost to society as a result.
Al, have you ever talked with someone who suffered the indignities that one suffers while incarcerated? Have you talked with someone who had to pick a group/gang in prison just to stay alive while trying to serve their time? Perhaps no, but certainly you must comprehend that such an experience leaves a lifelong imprint that is not easily shaken post prison. The punitive nature of our prison system does not condone criminal behaviour, but it does not do much to encourage/support a change of behaviour. Additionally, Al you must know the financial future for lower level criminals post serving their time is bleak at best and their job prospects after serving their time condems them to a lifelong sentance in most cases. Can you suggest some fix here?
I work with kids in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the Bay Area in CA. I can say nearly all are well intentioned/have the potential to be productive members of society if you catch them BEFORE they enter the prison system. Some would believe there is a criminal mindset in the inner cities - I have not found this to be true. I have found a survival instinct exists that at times diminishes moral judgement. Once this wire it tripped, the ripple effect on the individual and their families persists well beyond their time served and contributes greatly to future offenses/behaviour.
Knowing the cost of imprisoning these young people - we clearly underspend on providing them with the tools to be productive in other ways. By not spending to keep them out of prison we statistically know that many will be in the system at some point in the near future.
As I travel in the neighborhoods none of us want to see - there are many of our youth who want a way out, yet find few resources to provide a roadmap. Our money is better spent in providing resources to prevent the mindset/situation that leads to criminal behaviour.
Al - next time you you drive over the speed limit, have one too many drinks and get behind the wheel, fail to put enough money in the parking meter - you just drive right over to the police station and turn yourself in - after all you should be punished for these acts - right? Also, the next time you become aware that your child or family member is illegally downloading tunes from the internet, drinking underage, using drugs - you make sure you turn them in. After all, this is illegal activity and is punishable by law.
As the grandmother of a precious and precocious 2-year-old grandson, I fear that no matter how firm a foundation in spirituality, literacy, numeracy and the "social graces" I conscientiously build for an incarcerated "mixed race" man's son, he was literally born "at-risk" of joining what Dr. Loury calls "a new generation of untouchables."
Little Dominic is mercifully too young to remember when he and my daughter waited to visit his father in the county jail last Sunday. only to told that a visit was verboten because this inmate had just been "locked down".
Today, Dom's dad, jailed for "probation violation" told my daughter that he was locked down for "passing a cookie" to another inmate.
If true, how criminal!
To be sure, no love is lost between Dom's dad and me since he relies on my daughter for support. Uncle Sam and I must augment her wages to keep this fragile family afloat. In jail, the state supports "pimp Daddy" as I meanly call him, knowing he's probably got unprintable names for this old gal with whom he is in hostile-dependent relationship.
After breathing a sigh of relief when Dom's dad is thrown in the slammer again, I begin to note innumerable mean-spirited indignities that reinforce this young man's aggrieved and hostil attitude toward the law.
I tell my daughter that my father's Jewish ancestors cooperated with God Almighty to give us The Law and that Dom needs to come up loving the Law. But it ain't easy to "do good" when you're far, far from doing well yourself. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto relied on street kids to sneak out of the ghetto and bring back whatever food they could steal to augment starvation rations meted out by their Nazi jailers.
I deeply regret reference to Warsaw ghetto in "Nether Caste Blues." I have more than once referenced Elie Wiesel's words that NOTHING can be compared to the Holocaust, particularly when this analogy is made with legalized abortion, as it often is. Since Mr. Wiesel will be speaking here next week and this hearing-impaired woman will be in the front-row, I don't want to feel guilty because I transgressed in this matter. (Wiesel's appearance here in the Texas Panhandle comes a year after the KuKluxKlan chose Amarillo to hold an anti-immigration rally.)
Apologies to Boston Review readers for gonzoing into this interchange. I have but little time and tranquility to carefully weigh my words. Please carry on this dialogue about a "problem from hell" that should deeply concern us all. A.Warnecke
The others deserve to be where they are. If you hurt people, steal, threaten people or destroy their belongings you deserve to be in jail.
It is an inconvenient truth that black people are more prone to violence. They are just not able to cope with modern society as a people. Since they cannot succeed within the framework that society has made they turn to crime. That is why 12% of the population is the overwhelming majority in prison. No other reason stands up to the cold, mean, unfeeling facts. Yeah, it's cruel to say such things. But the problem can't be solved when you ignore the largest cause of prison overcrowding.
And that is that people with an average IQ of 80 are trying to compete in a society made up of people with average IQ's of 100. They can't do it . They turn to crime.
You can't solve it with education. It won't take and they don't want it. You can't solve it with welfare and social programs. That has shown to be a complete failure. The only way to solve it is to test every individual and those who can't compete are turned to the easier pastures of Africa.
Feelings are not what's needed. Compassion is killing us. Cold, hard facts and unfeeling logic is the only answer. Use it and you will see that the problems and solutions are obvious.
But these thugs don't worry about anyone else's rights or what damage they are doing to neighborhoods and families! If we need more prisons, open up those FEMA camps and put even more of them to work in private prisons! I for one have no sympathy for these thugs. And if a judge gives these punks 20 or more years, let every day of it be at brutally hard labor! Enough of this weepy, worry about the criminal fluffy feelings. Do the crime, do the time and pay!
Another aspect of punnishment that is a crime, is to house non violent "offenders" (oxymoronic term if ever there was one), with killers and rapists. To place people that are no threat into the same confines as people that are never getting out, is the recipie for your societal ills. I repeat, Vice is not a crime, until organized crime gets control of your governments, THEN it is now some imagined crime.
I find it really funny how the collective will give the few the power over their own pain treatments, just freaking amazing to me how stupid that idea is.
No one wants "a mass pardoning of all murderers, rapists, psychopaths, terrorists, thieves?" all the murderers. That is not what this article is talking about.
It appears that our corrections system is in fact become a criminal training system.
I agree with ookie regarding the distinction between crimes against persons and/or property. The question,Who/what is harmed? must be central.
I disagree with ookie's description of the plight of black people as being something to do with inferiority of intelligence.
The idea of mentoring young men and women presupposes that society has an interest in developing the potential of each of it's members. What is whiny about that?
All welfare and phony disability (disability not earned through an on-the-job injury versus becoming "disabled" by taking drugs or having "attention deficit disorder") should be terminated for those who are convicted. The prisons need to be geared to train the inmates to do jobs "Americans won't do".
Also, the average inmate costs the taxpayers over $30,000 per person per year and can range as high as $80,000 per person per year for those in maximum security in California.
The author needs to get over the "injustices" to the poor black males. Why not focus more on productive individuals such as middle class black males who want to make something of themselves?
The welfare system has created the problem with the "poor" black male (who cost taxpayers an average of $25,000 per person per year) over the last forty years and now the same effect is being seen in the whites and latinos.
This is serious problem, those corporations dealing in repression have enough clout to lobby lawmakers into consolidating the arsenal of laws to grow each and every petty felony into a full-blown crime deserving jail-time, thus buiding profit for those companies.
Prison running shouldn't be a private business, if let to become so, at the end of the day we will all become probationary inmates because some influential person have a vested interest in our utter criminalization.
Now I will tell you what is at the bottom of every problem America has: Americans do not know the difference between a republic and a democracy. If you personally think, "Well, they are different words for the same thing," go back and re-read the Federalist Papers, the Constitutional Debates, etc. Like Plato says in his REPUBLIC, "Democracy always appears just before tyranny."
Now it is understood why Bush and his coven are out there trying to "make the world safe for democracy"--just like the one here; with it's insane penal system, militarism, and common fear and loathing.
If we don't get to the ROOT of a problem we can spin in cercles forever chopping at leaves and branches.
This is serious problem, those corporations dealing in repression have enough clout to lobby lawmakers into consolidating the arsenal of laws to grow each and every petty felony into a full-blown crime deserving jail-time, thus buiding profit for those companies.
Prison running shouldn't be a private business, if let to become so, at the end of the day we will all become probationary inmates because some influential person have a vested interest in our utter criminalization.
This soft garbage about "misguided" youth is a ridiculous joke. Why don't you read about what's going on in Katrina these days?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010532
Is our system perfect? No system is. But it's utter retardedness to say that we need to free all prisoners because one of them may be innocent. Because when you do this, you're dooming 10,000 future innocent victims to death.
It is an inconvenient truth that a larger proportion of blacks commit crimes than whites. Every year, activist groups claim police stop and frisk more blacks than whites. But that does not take into account
the victim's descriptions of the criminal. If a mugging victim is saying that it's a black man, far be it for a cop to stop and frisk a white man for "political correctness. "
Society cannot correct and make up for improper upbringing. I see kids in the ghetto being brought up by teenage dropout mothers who curse and yell at them as if they were worthless. What are they supposed to learn from this? To stay in school because that's what mommy did?
And those who are arrested -and their families and friends- will they just laugh it off and go gently into that good night; or will they seek vengeance? If a logical overhaul of this crazy system does not come to pass, we the people are sure to be caught in the crossfire of these warring factions. Then what becomes of us when the diarrhea hits the fan? Surely, this can't be the Age of Aquarius that they spoke about.
www.leap.cc
So in that conservative spirit, which is also my background, I think it is important to state: prisons cost money.
The less people we have in prison, the less money we have to spend. For both sides, we should be trying to figure out ways to get the number of people in prison down. Lets start there...
Your argument is a straw man. No one wants murderers or violent individuals to be walking the streets. And no one except you is suggesting that either.
What we're pointing out is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in jail for very minor crimes; that once you're in jail, your life is destroyed; that once you're in jail, it's almost impossible to stay out of jail; that the law puts black people in jail disproportionately for the very same crimes that white people commit; that jail is set up to be purely punitive and not in any way try to help the criminals become better citizens *even if that would be just for our own protection and not just because it's the right thing to do*.
The article doesn't mention, but I'd like to add, that the prison system is well-known to be the second-most corrupt and graft-ridden system in America, where billions of your tax dollars are skimmed off the top and put into people's pockets. (Of course, the most corrupt system is the military...)
This talks about racism; this is not racist.
Indeed this is writing at it most compassionate -- he urges the reader to put themselves in the place of the people who are being oppressed.
I'm sorry that word bothers you but sometimes you need to shock people to wake them up to the injustice in the world. You should not attack people who are passionately on your side just because you don't like their choice of phrase.
I am innocent...
If you plead guilty you will get only 5 years.
But I am innocent!
If you plead not guilty, you will get up to 20 years...
But! But!
You'd better take the 5 years offer...
Ok ok, I will plead guilty...
White Americans hate all minorities and their willingness to hire illegal slaves is a sign of this inherent racism. They have become like the racist, murdering Jews, who also happen to incarcerate too many people, in Apartheid Israel.
Yet another sign of AntiChrist's collapse.
A scumbag convicted sex-offender arrested for murder of a 20 something white woman. Her body was found underneath the bed in a hotel in plastic garbage bags.
This piece of trash was wanted in Alabama and had previously been convicted of sex acts with an under 12 year old child. Also, he was wanted for multiple other crimes and had stolen a woman's bank account and car and fled to NYC.
This kind of garbage is what happens when you let the trash out. You talk about prisoner's rights. How about the right of this young woman to live her life and not be murdered and tossed into trash bags??? You want me to have sympathy for this piece of sh.it? Give me 10 minutes with this piece of garbage, that's all I ask.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/nyregion/01hotel.html?bl&ex=1188792000&en=82c98bad6f8bc553&ei=5087%0A
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gm6kPu0TXP7goj75N64FTFGZlwHA
MS Fitts bangs the nail dead nuts!
THe scum-baggers that really did a job on us during the Clinton administration following hand in hand from the scum-baggers who defiled this country before ,namely Bush and Regan had at their helm one thought first and foremost :GREED
screw the people get as many youths, irrelevant of race behind bars, erode the Constitution under the guise of protecting our neighbourhoods from violence etc. etc.
THe present Bushtapo regime added its own fine tuning because GUESS WHAT PEOPLE? the next great influx of inmates will be the Dissenters, people like you and me who will be termed "terrorists", "grave security risks","anarchists" "militants".
All the while, we run around theorizing about the WHY when the outcome is already presprung because we keep giving away our power.
GANSTERS ARE GANGSTERS. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN SET OF LAWS THAT DISAVOW ANY ALLEGIANCE TO ANYTHING THAT DOES DO NOT SERVE THEIR OWN ENDS. aS IS SAID AGAIN & AGAIN, " IF YOU GOT THE JUICE, YOU GOT THE MEANS"
If you have had the patience to read this rant, thank you. At least once or twice this Labor Day Weekend let's toast to us THE PEOPLE because in the end no matter what shit comes down from wherever, it slides off our backs. We may stink a bit, but we can still raise our hands with the middle index finger pointing upwards !
Yours respectfully,
DOZT
It is a deterrent, like that part in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back where they talk about not wanting to get put in county jail since they make you toss the salad there. When I was growing up, people would be like, "Oh yeah, you might go to jail. You'll go to some nice place with books and cable and get your three square meals and get to work out with the weights, and you'll probably get out early for good behavior to boot." Now when people talk about prison, they're more like, "Man, haven't you seen Oz? I don't want to go there."
I think that's a good change. Some people are good people and won't commit crimes for the sake of not committing crimes or harming others, but some people will do whatever they feel they can get away with, and for those people the thought of hard time in jail and not getting let off light is a helpful deterrent.
It is a good idea to work on social reform and keep people from going to prison in the first place anyway, but the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Prison should be a place you don't want to go. Also, we should try to work to make it to where people don't feel forced into situations that will put them there. Putting money to the goal of social reform doesn't have to come out of the budgets of prisons though. We could just invade one less country this next presidential term and we would have more than enough money for both.
I implore everyone to please make the effort to listen to what another person actually says and react to that instead of what your own prejudices and history cause you to think or assume they said. There is very often a difference between the two and very often a person who tries can make the distinction. Although being human we all are prone to the occasional failure.
I presume to point out Al_Frick as the most vocal individual in this discussion who has apparently failed to examine the actual message of the article he appears to be trying to respond to.
I will further presume and attempt to interpret for the benefit of the discussion with Mr. Frick and others.
What I believe Mr. Loury is saying is that the criminal justice system has problems, you actually agree with this assessment as evidenced by one of your own posts. Mr. Loury then goes on to examine and demonstrate why one of the largest problems of our justice system is how it is a product and example of racial inequality within our society, and that it greatly contributes to the continuation of that inequality. He concludes that this inequality is unethical and we, as ethical beings, have an obligation to deal with and eliminate that inequality.
Mr. Frick, nowhere in this article or between its lines do I find Mr. Loury advocating that we indiscriminately free all prisoners as you seem to. Instead I hear him argue that we have an open, honest, discussion of the problems present in our justice system with the goal of reshaping it so that it is effective while maintaining a consistency with our beliefs and values, equality appearing to be of key importance to Mr. Loury.
I would be interested, Mr. Frick, if you would explain where in this article you find the argument that we indiscriminately free prisoners.
-We need to create a free slave labour force privately run ,which starts as a experiment in the black communities. Once it's FINED-TUNED it can be spread across all racial groups in U.S.
-We need to perpetuate this so these people need to be paroled from time to time have quick sex make more babies, break stiff supervisional rules, re-offend then sent back in for increasingly longer and longer sentences.
These house-holds need to be sigle parent house-holds because kids from such according to statitics fare worse than double parents house-holds
-we also need to create a situation where the mother will be working 2 or 3 jobs so she'll need to put this child in a daycare,where he'll grow up in a daycare Again because children who grow up detached from their parents during their FORMATIVE years will ALMOST certainly grow up to be a social misfit with a penchant for deviant lifestyle.
-Once this mechanism is FINE-TUNED it can be broadened across all groups in society.
and those jobs we outsourced to China,Malaysia,Indonesia,India can be brought back home for this cheap CONTROLLED labour force.
"Those poor black guys" once we get this right your kids will join them soon HA,HA your kids will be joining them soon"
Crime is down because todays criminals cannot out think todays technology.
Like a lot of the above postings say; crime goes down when you put the criminals in jail.
This is a good read, but you could have given technology some of the credit.
Men, relative to women, commit disproportionately more crimes by far, especially violent crimes. This does not offend anyone's democratic sensibilities or result in a cry for a kind of "affirmative action" quota system to be used to determine who is/is not arrested or incarcerated.
Among the total male population, African-American men relative to differently racially categorized men are far more often arrested and incarcerated if you look at certain (mostly urban) regions, locales, and national statistics.
This fact is widely felt as inherently wrong in the guts of many people, particularly those raised in privileged, secure, class and race-homogenous enclaves with a sense of guilt at their social superiority and also an affection for it. What better tonic then to retain the privilege but atone for it an achieve moral self-righteousness by condemning "evildoers" whose chief sin is to be purveyors of racism and any disagreement or obstacle to radical egalitarianism, otherwise known as anarchy?
Only in the most parochial, soft, white-bread minds does democracy=freedom=equality of all by every possible socioeconomic measure.
Only from such minds is it plausible that the prisons are full of a majority of faux-criminals who merely smoked a little dope or engaged in the "victimless crime" of performing sexual acts for pay, often on men of the middle class, while their children roam the streets or are left to drown in tubs or play with loaded guns--owned by the crack dealer/pimp/"father" who takes his cut of the profits, inducts children into a life of sexual abuse as "normal," and provide a fine male role model with his fists and other weapons.
I don't want these people in my vicinity, and neither do my neighbors, who are all middle-class but very diverse racially if that makes you feel better. We do not like hearing constant gunfire, occasionally followed by screams, or bullets in our houses.
It is unfortunate and a deep problem that arrest and incarceration correlates so strongly with being black and poor. But the proper response to this reality is not to support a foregone conclusion--or at least a deeply felt anxiety and suspicion--that this correlation and the resulting "racial disparity" is a condition of inequality brought about by malevolent forces, evil motives and ideas.
***A lot of you commenters need to read the article on Philip Rieff in this same issue.***
No one should ever be in jail over marijuana. But yet there are hundreds of thousands who are. No one should be in jail for prostitution, but they are. There are dozens of "crimes" that no human should have to face jail for. It is from that pool of people that we find out jails crowded and overflowing.
The others deserve to be where they are. If you hurt people, steal, threaten people or destroy their belongings you deserve to be in jail.
It is an inconvenient truth that black people are more prone to violence. They are just not able to cope with modern society as a people. Since they cannot succeed within the framework that society has made they turn to crime. That is why 12% of the population is the overwhelming majority in prison. No other reason stands up to the cold, mean, unfeeling facts. Yeah, it's cruel to say such things. But the problem can't be solved when you ignore the largest cause of prison overcrowding.
And that is that people with an average IQ of 80 are trying to compete in a society made up of people with average IQ's of 100. They can't do it . They turn to crime.
You can't solve it with education. It won't take and they don't want it. You can't solve it with welfare and social programs. That has shown to be a complete failure. The only way to solve it is to test every individual and those who can't compete are turned to the easier pastures of Africa.
Feelings are not what's needed. Compassion is killing us. Cold, hard facts and unfeeling logic is the only answer. Use it and you will see that the problems and solutions are obvious.
I meant to respond to those comments and accidentally included them below my own.
I question the accuracy of the idea that prison populations would be evenly distributed by race if you removed all the "hundreds of thousands who are [in prison over marijuana]" even if we make no distinction between someone who possessed a relatively small amount, and a person involved in a massive growing or distributing operation. There is also the pragmatic reality that the dealer down the street who has concerned the neighborhood due to drive-by shootings and children living in poor conditions is often in prison on "minor" drug charges because that is all they could get him for--the chief motive being to get him out before something worse happens.
All this behavior tends to be associated with any kind of drug trade and prostitution:
"If you hurt people, steal, threaten people or destroy their belongings you deserve to be in jail."
If you want prostitution and drugs to be legalized, that is a different issue. Many, maybe most cops would agree with you.
This is flatly racist:
"It is an inconvenient truth that black people are more prone to violence. They are just not able to cope with modern society as a people. Since they cannot succeed within the framework that society has made they turn to crime. That is why 12% of the population is the overwhelming majority in prison. No other reason stands up to the cold, mean, unfeeling facts. Yeah, it's cruel to say such things. But the problem can't be solved when you ignore the largest cause of prison overcrowding."
None of this has anything to do with "being black." Blackness and race in general is a non-scientific, biologically meaningless designation. Being poor and male in urban America has always correlated with criminality, arrest, and incarceration. You can find many analogous situations around the world, past and present. American Indian reservations are no picnic. Being poor and of indigenous descent in the slums of Mexico City is no picnic. Men and women both are driven by pride and ambition to be someone who is not dependent, weak, despised. They will pursue whatever assets, power, and esteem their immediate economy offers.
These representations and the "culture" they have spawned has been fully embraced on a broad, popular level, most notably by black Americans themselves. Optimistically I like to think there is a black silent majority of working, middle-class, professional, and affluent african-americans who rightly hate and reject this culture. Yet they have done little to stop it, and the result is disastrous.
It is not just a benign aspect of "my culture" or "lifestyle choice" to dress and talk like a thug. Acting like a thug is not far behind, and people who electively put themselves into this culture are going along with a major tenet of it, which is oppositional and crudely revolutionary in its open rejection of or despise for the "mainstream" values and behaviors it exists to defy.
This in itself is a performance of rejecting the social contract, and arguments like Loury's --in this context-- look very much like arguments for a double standard that lets criminals and criminal-enabling cultures off the hook by merely accepting them or excusing them. Black racism and antagonism toward blacks--and other groups--is, in my view, the most potent form of aggressive racialized discrimination at work in the US today, and no analysis of the problems Loury discusses is complete without attention to this fact.
Why?
"Men and women both are driven by pride and ambition to be someone who is not dependent, weak, despised. They will pursue whatever assets, power, and esteem their immediate economy offers." - dpk
For geographics and demographics associated with crime, we can ask: What does the immediate economy offer? What are the barriers to more productive choices?
Working class people have a gut distrust of statistics, seeing how these have been manipulated so many times before. Why does Loury has this touching faith in the accuracy of statistics churned by those who have a special interest in seeing certain results? Why should we believe, esp. those of us who live in the inner city that the crime statistics are any more accurate than , let's say, Bush's claims for weapons of mass destruction?
Finally, I have been around thugs and street criminals for more than 30 years and in all my observations, I can only think of 2 cases in which anyone stole for survival, to eat or pay rent. Nearly all crime is done for access to consumer items, like drugs, brand-name this, brand-name that. To pretend that more jobs and better wages, etc as desireable as these may be,will magically stem these longings is naive at best. Human desire is infinitely elastic, especially when pumnped up by the Tee-Vee and as a sociologist, Loury should be the first to know this. . .
International Platform Against Isolation:
WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF THIS PLATFORM?
The prisoners in Turkey started a period of action in the middle of 2000, in order to oppose the transition plan into isolation cells, which created a big sensibility in Turkey. In October 2000 the political prisoners in Turkey started a hunger strike. This resistance, which was later turned into a death fast, both created influence in the public and was supported by large sections of the people. For a certain period there was also support from Europe, the homeland of the isolation policy.
The isolation policy, which determined the agenda of Turkey and the Big Resistance (the ‘death fast’) created a certain consciousness about the effects of isolation on a person.
But in the same time this brought political instability for a Turkey, which was on its way to Europe.
The regime in Turkey also took support of European countries in the name of political stability and it started an attack against the political prisoners in 20 prisons, which ended in a massacre on 19th December 2000.
This military assault lasted exactly four days and happened before the eyes of the whole world. Finally, it ended on 22nd December with the ‘victory’ of the state.
The balance was frightening: 6 female prisoners at Bayrampasa prison were burned alive. There were killed in total 28 prisoners with bullets, in the fire, or by being beaten to death with truncheons.
Without exception, all political prisoners were tortured, hundreds of them were wounded and confronted with abuse or rape before their transfer to the new opened F-type isolation prisons.
This operation, that was realized in the name of prison reform of the EU, entered the history of prisons as an unforgetable massacre.
The families of thousands of political prisoners in Turkey faced this massacre attacks in the consciousness to get organized, under the danger to loose their children.
They had just a single force, which was their own force… The whole public was silenced for the sake of the EU plans. Even the press in Euro