Whenever I write about prison issues, I receive responses from tough-on- crime readers that follow a predictable pattern: “These people have committed crimes. They don’t deserve any sympathy! If they want us to respect them, they should respect the laws.”
This line of reasoning has some appeal, because it’s simple, it assigns all the blame to individuals rather than to the justice system, and it relieves the public of any duty to think carefully about prisons.
But given the size of our incarcerated population, the demographics of inmates and the for-profit characteristics of the penal industry, the “what-part-of-illegal-don’t-you-understand?” argument doesn’t address the important questions that we should be asking.
The U.S. prison population has skyrocketed during the last 35 years, so that we now have more than 2 million people locked up. We hold the dubious distinction of having more inmates than any other country on the planet – more than Russia, the previous leader, and more than China and India, whose overall populations dwarf ours.
If we insist that criminals are the sole cause of their own incarceration, then we’d have to conclude that, for some reason, Americans are more lawless than people in other countries. We’d have to say that the average American is more likely to steal a car, molest a child, rape a woman or smoke crack than the average Spaniard, German or Indian.
But that conclusion would defy the research of sociologists and criminologists, who have compared crime statistics and the rates of victimization in many nations and concluded that, with the exception of gun deaths, Americans are just like their Western European peers. If Europeans had better access to guns, they’d probably match us in that category, too.
Yet, somehow, despite our similarities, the United States has a rate of incarceration that is five to eight times that of other industrialized nations.
We see a similar disparity in the characteristics of the people who are locked up. They’re mostly poor, and disproportionately black. Again, some will argue that poor, black people are simply more lawless than white, middle-class folks. But the research suggests that institutional biases, not crime rates, are the cause of the inconsistencies.
According to a 1999 federal survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 69 percent of all illicit drug users in the United States were white, 12 percent were black and 14 percent Hispanic. “Yet, nationwide, blacks constitute 35 percent of those arrested on drug charges, over 45 percent of federal prisoners serving drug sentences, and 58 percent of state prisoners serving felony drug sentences.”
When we talk about prisons, it’s tempting to say “they’re criminals, so they deserve it,” but this simple statement ignores the powerful forces that have coalesced to create this enormous problem.
In 2003, The Sentencing Project found that Germany’s legislature changed its position on prisons after concluding that “short-term imprisonment does more harm than good; it disrupts the offender’s ties with family, job and friends, introduces the offender into the prison subculture, and stigmatizes the offender for the rest of his or her life.”
Eventually, prisons will gobble up so much of our resources that we’ll have to stop being simplistic and start being smart. The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition reports that Colorado had about 2,500 people in prison in 1980. Now that figure has grown to about 19,000 – a 528 percent increase. As of June 2002, there were roughly 3,700 people in Colorado prisons on drug offenses, at a cost of $100 million a year to taxpayers. Half of these inmates were convicted of simple possession.
Our punitive mindset has created this drug war, mandatory sentencing laws, privatization and political reluctance to use parole. And until we change the way we think about prisons, we’re going to continue to pay a price that’s far steeper than any benefit we receive.
