Long but incredibly worthy read, especially for "victims' rights" advocates, like Steve Twist, who authored and promoted the Crime Victims' Bill of Rights as an amendment to the AZ Constitution in 1990, which resulted in classifiying victims of crime "in custody for an offense" as non-victims. It should be no wonder, then, that AZ prisoners are treated as non-humans by their handlers so often.
This has major implications for how prison rape victims are treated, of course, which I've been deluged with letters about of late. And look at this excerpt form the article below: let it sink in, in fact:
"The Justice Department now seems to be saying
that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in
the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the
history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women."
Depriving people of basic rights while in custody also affects individuals who were never even convicted of a crime, whose perpetrators were those responsible for their safety - like Marty Atencio, killed in a "Jailer's Riot" by officers while being booked. Not that his killers are ever being charged with a crime, since they are police officers just doing their duty. But if they had been criminally charged his family wouldn't qualify for any victims' rights resources, nor do they have standing with the courts as victims, thanks to the "victims rights advocates" of the 1990's. Even Walmart gets to call themselves a victim in court and collect restitution if someone commits a crime against them, and they aren't even a human being.
The least thing people like Steve Twist could do is step up to the plate now, acknowledge their grave mistake, and help us change that amendment so everyone's rights are protected. Until then, both the people we incarcerate and those we entrust thier care to will victimize the most vulnerable prisoners they can knowing that there will be no one who really cares to hold them accoutnable. Every rape, every beat down, every murder, and even every suicide driven by the terror of meeting a worse fate in the custody of the AZ DOC in particular, should weigh heavily on those advocates today.
Much more than just addressing victimization in prison, though, this article makes a compelling argument for prison abolition, for those of you so often puzzled by such a vision.
Crime Victims Rights Week 2013
"Justice for Victims of Prison Violence"
AZ Attorney General's Office (Phoenix: April 25, 2013)
------------from N+1 magazine----------
"Raise the Crime Rate"
N+1 magazine
January 26, 2012
Christopher Glazek
Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift,
a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth
management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation
had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by
corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health
costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from
the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone.
Family affliction, like banker “contagion,” is tricky to sequester: if
Larry and Terry get bankrupted by bad luck, their misfortune cascades,
dragging down creditors, neighbors, and especially their children. The
reason liberals like insurance is that it helps diffuse risk throughout
society. Pooling risk, one might say, is the essence of the progressive
social contract.
Hacker focuses on hazards like cancer and credit exposure, but these are
not the only perils we face. Every time we leave the house—and more
often, actually, if we remain within it—we run the risk of getting
stabbed, shot, raped, or robbed. But while financial risks have crested
in recent decades, the risk of suffering personal violence has receded.
According to government statistics, Americans are safer today than at
any time in the last forty years. In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides in
New York City. In 2010, there were 536, only 123 of which involved
people who didn’t already know each other. The fear, once common, that
walking around city parks late at night could get you mugged or murdered
has been relegated to grandmothers; random murders, with few
exceptions, simply don’t happen anymore.
When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005,
the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent.
Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including
advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the
spread of internet pornography.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the country was more dangerous in 1990, at
the height of the crack epidemic, than in 2006, at the height of the
real estate bubble. What’s strange is that crime has continued to fall
during the recession. On May 23, in what has become an annual ritual,
the New York Times celebrated the latest such finding: in 2010,
as America’s army of unemployed grew to 14 million, violent crime fell
for the fourth year in a row, sinking to a level not seen since the
early ’70s. This seemed odd. Crime and unemployment were supposed to
rise in tandem—progressives have been harping on this point for
centuries. Where had all the criminals gone?
Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that
violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot
so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to
collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the
hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison
system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants
increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and
violence.
Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as
Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from
spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and
local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban
centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The
statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when
juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that
takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not
merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in
American life.
From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States
quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or
parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the
history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most
incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s
Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the
haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more
fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who
control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are
controlled, and defiled, by the state.
Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate
the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons. Its data relied on
official complaints filed by prisoners, which in recent years have
averaged around 800. One such complaint was filed in 1995 by Rodney
Hulin, a boy from Amarillo, Texas, who had been arrested as a
15-year-old after throwing a Molotov cocktail into a pile of garbage.
The trash burned, causing about $500 worth of damage to the exterior of
an adjacent house. Hulin’s prank was unimpressive, but Texas in the
mid-’90s had little tolerance for teenage ruffianism; in 1994, George W.
Bush had become governor, defeating Ann Richards, a popular incumbent,
by depicting her as soft on crime. Hulin was charged with two counts of
second-degree arson. He was a small guy—just five feet tall and 125
pounds—but he got a big sentence: eight years in adult prison.
Within a month of arriving at Clemens Unit, a temporary holding facility
outside Houston for juveniles on their way to adult prison, Hulin was
raped by another inmate. He asked to be moved out of harm’s way, but his
request was denied, and the rapes continued. In a letter to prison
authorities, he wrote, “I might die at any minute. Please sir, help me.”
Help was not forthcoming: getting raped was not deemed urgent enough to
meet the requirements of the prison’s emergency grievance criteria.
When Hulin got his mother to complain to the prison’s warden, she was
told that Hulin needed to “grow up” and “learn to deal with it.”
Hulin’s method for dealing with it was to kill himself. Ten weeks after
his arrival, he was discovered dangling from the ceiling of his cell.
Hulin’s case was unusual: most prisoners who get raped do not write
letters to the warden. It isn’t hard to see why: resisting an inmate who
claims your body as his own, or, worse, acquiring a reputation as a
“snitch,” can turn an isolated incident into months of serial gang rape.
Just ask Roderick Johnson, a petty thief who was attacked by his
roommate shortly after arriving at a Texas prison. Johnson asked to be
transferred to a different section of the facility, and got his wish.
But news of Johnson’s physical availability had spread throughout the
complex—after you’re raped once, you’re marked—and he was soon enslaved
by a gang. In addition to passing Johnson around among themselves,
Johnson’s new overseers sold his ass and mouth to a variety of clients
for $3 to $7, a competitive enough price that it resulted in multiple
rapes every day for the eighteen months that Johnson spent in prison.
When he went to the authorities, they laughed and told him to “fight or
fuck.”
Bringing criminal charges against prison officials for failing to
protect inmates is virtually impossible in the United States, but civil
actions can be filed. After Johnson got out, he lodged a civil suit
against six guards who he said refused to help him. In 2005, a Wichita
Falls jury found in favor of the guards. In 2007, after passing a note
to a clerk at a gas station that read, “I have 9 mm. Put the money in
the bag,” Johnson was arrested again. This time, since Johnson was a
repeat offender, he got nineteen years.
Victims in juvenile facilities, or facilities for women, have an even
tougher time: usually it’s the guards, rather than the inmates, who
coerce them into sex. The guards tell their victims that no one will
believe them, and that complaining will only make things worse. This is
sound advice: even on the rare occasions when juvenile complaints are
taken seriously and allegations are substantiated, only half of
confirmed abusers are referred for prosecution, only a quarter are
arrested, and only 3 percent end up getting charged with a crime.
In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books,
the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence
of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints
appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the
government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual
abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the
Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims,
not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over
the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying
that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in
the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the
history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
America’s
prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that
prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a
system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in
human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding
accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most
urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.
Progressives lament
the growth of private prisons (prisons for profit). But it’s sadism, not
avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis. Prisoners are not the
victims of poor planning (as other progressive reformers have
argued)—they are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes
an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence
against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical
space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended.
Bunk beds, in and of themselves, are not cruel and unusual. University
dorms have bunk beds, too. What matters is what happens in those beds.
In the dorm room, sex, typically consensual. In prisons, also sex, but
often violent rape. The prisons are “overcrowded,” we are told (and, in
fact, courts have ruled). “Overcrowding” is a euphemism for an
authoritarian nightmare.
As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s
definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the
monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably
assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those
instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing
favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative
control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below
it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that
is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots,
places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen.
Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that
lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside
world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.
The media mostly honors the government’s preference for leaving
prisoners in the shadows. The nation’s prisons now contain more
inhabitants than any American city save New York, Los Angeles, and
Chicago. And yet there is no “prison correspondent” at any of the
nation’s major newspapers. This isn’t entirely the papers’ fault. Even
if reporters were sent to the prisons, they could be denied entry: the
Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not prevent prison
authorities from barring the press.
It’s impossible to tell
the story of American incarceration without also telling the story of
American racism. Unlike most leftwing stories about racism, though, this
one isn’t about the South, and it isn’t even really about American
conservatism. After slavery and Jim Crow came the Great Migration, urban
riots, and the war on drugs. The history of the prison crisis is
largely a story about progressive politicians—liberal Republicans and
centrist Democrats—supporting “tough on crime” policies to protect their
right flank, both for self-preservation and to propel other progressive
priorities. The prison crisis was something that we ourselves created,
law by law, decision by decision, state by state.
One of the original flash points was Detroit. In 1967, riots broke out
after city police arrested eighty-four revelers at a party given for a
pair of African American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnson sent in an army division to pacify the city, resulting in
forty-three deaths and the destruction of 2,000 buildings. In the
following months, tens of thousands of residents from the city’s
Caucasian enclaves hurtled across 8 Mile Road to the suburbs; they never
came back. The following year, as the war in Vietnam escalated, Johnson
declared he would not seek reelection, throwing the Democratic
nomination to the cheerful but ineffectual Hubert Humphrey. That
November, after a bitter campaign fueled by racial antagonism, the
country elected Richard Nixon. For the first time in history, the
Democratic candidate had failed to secure a majority of votes from the
old Confederacy.
There followed a thirty-five-year period of “tough” crime laws. They
began in New York State, with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberalish
governor who, having failed three times to secure the Republican
presidential nomination, decided he would make drug policy his peace
offering to the party’s right wing. Previously an advocate of treatment
programs and community supervision, Rockefeller abruptly changed course
in 1973, innovating harsh mandatory minimum sentences for both the sale
and possession of illegal drugs. In the next thirty years, New York’s
prison population sextupled, climbing from 13,400 prisoners in 1973 to
71,500 prisoners in 2000.
The pattern soon repeated itself across the country. As whites abandoned
the cities, their governors and legislatures enacted increasingly tough
sentencing laws for the minorities left behind. In 1978, in what he
would later call the biggest mistake of his life, Michigan’s governor,
William Milliken, an embattled moderate Republican from the state’s
desolate north, signed the 650-lifer law, a Rockefeller-inspired
provision mandating life sentences for anyone caught in possession of
650 or more grams of cocaine or heroin. Only 200 people have served the
life term, apparently because most big cases get transferred to federal
court. (It’s still terrible, though: 85 percent of those sentenced under
the provision had no prior criminal record.)
The new sentencing policies did little to discourage criminals. The same
summer that Milliken signed his life-sentence law, an ambitious group
of teenagers met on the playground of Birney Elementary, on Detroit’s
west side, and founded Young Boys Inc., the first professionalized
multicity drug-dealing ring in the United States. Within two years, YBI
was pulling in $300,000 a day selling heroin in Detroit and other
cities. Many of their clients were Vietnam veterans, tens of thousands
of whom had become addicted to opium overseas. YBI’s
crucial innovation was to distribute their product through a network of
hard-to-prosecute juveniles, “corner boys” as young as 12 years old.
They were also among the first to use limitless violence to terrorize
and execute rivals. As the auto industry collapsed, the market for
heroin grew more and more robust. By the mid-’80s, police activity had
loosened the grip of YBI’s founders; by that
time, though, the corner-boy and murder-the-competition model had spread
to every major city in the United States.
And then came crack. Crack democratized the consumption of cocaine by
providing a cheap and easy delivery system—smoking—for a highly
addictive, high-demand product. Economists have labeled crack a
“technological shock,” comparing the dislocations it triggered to the
impact of computer chips, or mechanized agriculture. Unlike computer
chips and mechanized agriculture, however, crack’s impact was entirely
negative. This was not so much because crack was physically
harmful—though it was—but more because it was illegal, and highly
profitable. Within years of its introduction, the homicide rate for
young black males had doubled. The inner city experienced a spike in
weapons arrests, fetal deaths, low-birth-weight babies, and children in
foster care. Between 1984 and 1994, the death rate for young black males
reached 1 percent—double the rate of soldiers fighting in Iraq. A small
part of this was caused by crack overdoses. A very large part was
caused by a homicidal dialectic of black-market violence and
state-sponsored reprisal, a dynamic sustained by popular hysteria and
irresponsible media.
The media had never met a story they liked as much as crack, which
involved gangs, guns, scary minorities, urban poverty, addiction, and,
crucially, babies. Fetuses incubated in crack-exposed wombs were
supposed to furnish a generation of “superpredators”—brain-damaged
reprobates who wouldn’t be able to tell right from wrong. Although we
now know the “crack baby” is a mythical creature—children of crack
addicts do not exhibit developmental problems above and beyond those
normally experienced by children whose fathers are dead or in prison—the
image set off a moral panic in the 1980s, leading the country to begin
the unusual practice of incarcerating large numbers of women. In 1986,
two months after college basketball star and number two NBA
draft pick Len Bias died of an ordinary cocaine overdose erroneously
pinned on crack, Newsweek declared crack the biggest story since
Watergate and Vietnam. Nancy Reagan was interested in crack, too, and
the White House spent $2 billion on equipment and personnel to fight the
epidemic, including staff hired to amp up anxiety about the drug among
the press.
In the 1990s, the action shifted to the states, twenty-four of which
enacted some version of a “habitual offender law,” more colloquially
known as a “three strikes” provision. Even more than mandatory minimum
sentences for drug offenses, three strikes laws have been responsible
for geometric growth in the prison population. Though details vary
depending on where you look, the vengeful theory underpinning the laws
is universal: repeat offenders need to be removed from society. As a
result, defendants have been given life sentences, which cost taxpayers
as much as $1 million, for crimes as minor as stealing golf clubs from a
sporting goods store or videotapes from Walmart. By 2003, 127,677
Americans were serving life sentences, an 83 percent jump in eleven
years.
As of 2005, the last time a census was taken, there were 1,821 prisons
in the country. Maine had just seven, while Texas had 132. Of these
1,821 prisons, 347 were maximum security. Most countries don’t have
“supermax” prison facilities like we have in the US, where Alcatraz
model of remote, nightmare fortress has become increasingly popular with
the passage of time. Inmates in maximum security facilities are more
vulnerable to rape, which may seem counterintuitive. The risk of rape,
though, increases as prisoners lose control over freedom of movement. In
minimum security prisons, it’s easier to find protection in a crowd. On
the other hand, maximum security prisons are also distinguished by
their willingness to put inmates into solitary confinement for extended
periods of time, sometimes decades. Many psychologists now believe that
such a long period in solitary inevitably leads to insanity. On the plus
side, those prisoners will not get raped, or at least not by inmates.
Meanwhile, back on the battlefield of the war on drugs, crack continues
to be consumed in nearly the same quantities as in 1990. But a huge
price drop destroyed the handsome margins of the crack trade and
virtually eliminated the violence associated with it. The crack-crime
epidemic is gone, but the incarceration complex it fomented lives on. As
a result, one in three black baby boys can expect to spend part of his
life in prison.
Once you go to prison, you never really come
back. Beyond incarceration’s immediate physical and mental horrors,
after being convicted of a felony, your public life is functionally
over. In many states, you won’t be able to vote or sit on a jury. You
won’t be eligible for public housing or food stamps. You’ll find it very
difficult to attend a college, and may find it nearly impossible to get
a job—like everyone else, educators and employers discriminate against
ex-cons.
Finding a job is a particular problem, not only because criminals often
leave prison with a large amount of debt—from court fees, conviction
penalties, probation fines, and especially from child support bills,
which continue to accumulate while convicts are in prison—but also
because steady employment is itself often a condition of parole: a
diabolical catch-22. As scholars have noted, the situation calls to mind
the “vagrancy” laws passed in the South in the wake of reconstruction,
which made it illegal to be unemployed while black vagrantswere arrested
and forced back onto plantations, this time as convicts rather than
slaves. An ex-con who fails to land a job may end up back in prison for
violating parole. Since service-oriented occupations are usually out of
the question, ex-cons are often forced to seek industrial and
construction jobs far from urban centers. This puts a large number of
people in the position of having to take long, expensive taxi rides to
show up for low-wage jobs that don’t even cover transportation costs.
The United States now spends some $200 billion on the correctional
system each year, a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of
twenty-five US states and 140 foreign countries. An ever-increasing
share of domestic discretionary spending, it would seem, is devoted to
building and staffing earthly hells filled with able-bodied young men
who have been removed from the labor force. If we added up all the money
federal, state, and local governments invest in the poorest zip codes
through credits and transfer payments—food stamps, Medicaid, teacher
salaries, et cetera—and balanced that against all the value the
government extracts from those zip codes through sin taxes, lotteries,
and the incarceration complex, we might well conclude that the
disinvestment outweighs the investment. Any apparent gains made in the
last thirty years in narrowing the employment and education gap between
African Americans and whites vanishes once you include the incarcerated
population. Before asking the government to spend a fortune improving
student-to-teacher ratios, it may be prudent to first ask the government
to stop devoting public resources to ripping the heart out of inner-city economies.
Of course, not everyone has made out badly from the country’s
prison-construction binge. Telephone companies run up impressive profits
from prisoners forced to call collect. Defense contractors have signed
lucrative contracts selling paramilitary equipment to local law
enforcement agencies. Rural communities have benefited most of all. Not
only does the criminal justice sector employ 2 million people, including
more than 500,000 correctional officers, most of them in rural areas,
it also helps to inflate the local population of prison zones for the
purposes of congressional districting and social spending.
Schoolchildren learn that in 1787, slave-holding states reached a
compromise with free states that allowed nonvoting slaves to count as
three-fifths of a human for the purposes of apportioning congressional
seats. Counting a slave as a fraction of a man seems like a vivid
manifestation of the way the United States dehumanized Africans. Today,
thousands of people are removed from urban districts, where public money
is urgently needed, and shipped upstate, where each counts for a full person.
In this way, prisoners bolster the voting power of rural districts,
while being unable to vote themselves. Perhaps this is the reason why,
as criminal justice surveys indicate, rural whites form by far the most
punitive demographic.
Certain breeds of urban dwellers benefit,
too. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in
crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has
underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and
Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of
climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it
not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent
areas. Neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant show the population
exchange in its purest form. As African American Brooklynites are
exported upstate for involvement in petty drug crimes, twenty-somethings
reared in prison towns migrate south and reoccupy the same areas
vacated by prisoners. Often, of course, the new inhabitants proceed to
consume and sell the very same drugs that got the previous tenants into
trouble. Since they’re white, they do so with impunity.
What
would it mean to “reform” the prison system? Despite the best efforts of
the moneyed elite and its institutional avatar, the Republican Party,
the credentialed elite that controls the White House has succeeded in
making progress on multiple reformable domains, including credit
markets, the health care system, and public education. These are
important, high-stakes achievements, and, as we have seen, no good deed
goes unpunished. But America’s incarceration crisis is not a reformable
problem. It cannot be addressed by a hectoring Rahm Emmanuel, or a
priggish Olympia Snowe; it will not be solved by a supercommittee, or a
gang of six.
The US prison system doesn’t need reform—it needs to be abolished. Like
slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century,
prison abolition in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a
popular movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set
up the prison regime in the first place.
We can start by
reevaluating our priorities. There’s no use saying that progressive
goals aren’t in competition with one another. They very surely are, and
criminals have lost that competition again and again, with tragic
results. For decades, politicians from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill
Clinton to Barack Obama have sold out criminals in order to win
concessions on health care, abortion, gay rights, early education,
progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives. Prison
abolitionists must now perform the reverse procedure—we must be ready to
sacrifice the traditional progressive agenda on the altar of criminal
justice. Morality, like politics, starts at the edge of Ockham’s razor:
the bad can no longer be allowed to obscure the evil.
The movement to abolish the death penalty is venerable and well-funded.
Although it wasn’t successful in preventing the execution of Troy Davis,
it’s helped a number of inmates get off death row through DNA
evidence, and has arguably had decent success in the last fifteen years
in shifting public opinion away from state-led killing. Hundreds of
highly qualified, well-educated people devote their lives to trying to
eradicate an unethical practice and a national embarrassment.
Compared with the horrors of garden variety American incarceration,
though, the death penalty can be viewed only as a distraction. An
extremely small number of people are executed in the United States—fewer
than thirty a year, on average, in the last three decades. But at any
given moment, a full 7 million people are under some form of regular
surveillance from the correctional system. More African Americans are in
prison today than were enslaved in the 1850s. Back in the early ’70s,
before things got really bad, the United States had a decently large and
energetic prison abolition movement. Why this movement has nearly
disappeared—Angela Davis, a University of California professor and
former imprisoned Black Panther, is virtually the only abolitionist
left—even as the prison crisis has become more severe, is difficult to
answer. The timing, though, suggests that the death penalty may have
something to do with it—after execution was reinstated in 1976, many
activists who might have spent their lives focusing on prisons switched
their attention to a narratively vivid but politically minor bugaboo.
And yet the death penalty does offer one interesting benefit, from the
point of view of prison abolition, because the first question any prison
abolitionist needs to answer is what we’re supposed to do with violent
criminals. An important part of that answer has to be that we must
simply put up with an increased level of risk in our daily lives. But
what about Charles Manson? Surely something must be done to prevent
Charles Manson from chopping up celebrities.
If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to
keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles
Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists
should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death
penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A
prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and
rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society
imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo.
(Interestingly, unlike rape, homicide has one of the lowest recidivism
rates of any crime—you can only murder your wife once—suggesting that
death row inmates may pose less of a security risk than other categories
of offenders.)
Gun control is another area where progressive
energies have been wasteful and counterproductive. “Centrists” of any
persuasion will try to tell you that most people don’t actually want
their fellow citizens running around with guns, but gun control appears
to be one area that really has cost the Democratic Party a large number
of one-issue voters over the years. In any case, you’ll have a hard time
convincing anybody that we should abolish prisons and take
away the community’s ability to defend itself. Even on its own terms,
gun control is not a straightforwardly progressive matter. The war on
guns bears important similarities to the war on drugs—both are used as
pretexts for searching, arresting, and imprisoning ethnic minorities.
Gun control, like drug control, doesn’t do much to restrict
supply—instead, it creates a black market for the product regulated
through violence. In many states, obtaining a gun license is expensive
and complex: we’ve essentially made it legal to own a gun if you’re
wealthy and white, and illegal to own a gun if you’re poor and black.
Years are added onto criminal sentences because unregistered guns are
spotted on the premises, even if the guns have never been used. The only
way to sustainably curb the supply of guns is to reduce demand for
guns, and the easiest way to do that would be to legalize narcotics.
On
May 23, 2011—the same day the morning papers rejoiced over another year
of crime reduction—the Supreme Court ordered the State of California to
release 45,000 prisoners. In a 5-to-4 decision written by Anthony
Kennedy, the Court declared that overcrowding in the state’s
penitentiaries had become so severe that simply existing in the system
violated a prisoner’s Eighth Amendment right of freedom from cruel and
unusual punishment.
As a news story, the ruling generated surprisingly little attention—a
good deal less than the Court’s 2008 decision banning the death penalty
for child rapists— but in legal circles it caused a panic. Antonin
Scalia, in a fiery dissent, called it “the most radical injunction
issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Samuel Alito predicted the
ruling would generate a “grim roster of victims,” anxiously noting that
the quantity of prisoners mandated for release added up to “two army
battalions.” In the early ’90s, Alito pointed out, a similar order
issued by a federal judge in Philadelphia liberated some 10,000
prisoners: within 18 months, 2,748 of the prisoners had been rearrested
for theft, 2,215 for drugs, 1,113 for assault, 959 for robbery, 751 for
burglary, 90 for rape, and 79 for murder. California, Alito suggested,
should gear up for an enemy invasion.
As the prison population has expanded, the ex-prisoner population has
expanded, too, rising from 1.8 million in 1980 to 4.3 million in the
year 2000. Every year, 650,000 prisoners are released from American
prisons. Just as new prisoners tend to come from poor, urban
neighborhoods—in New York, 75 percent of inmates come from just seven
neighborhoods: Harlem, Brownsville, East New York, South Bronx, South
Jamaica, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side—released prisoners
cluster in a limited set of urban enclaves. This isn’t to say that
everyone goes back to where they came from—many ex-cons, especially
those who lack supportive families, specifically avoid their home
neighborhoods. According to surveys, many believe they’ll be less likely
to engage in renewed criminal activity with a change of scenery.
Within three years, 70 percent of released prisoners are rearrested, and
half are back in prison. A large portion of these “recidivists” haven’t
committed new felonies—they’ve simply violated the terms of their
parole. California, which is especially adept at throwing parole
violators back in prison, ends up reincarcerating two thirds of released
prisoners within three years.
Of course, many released prisoners do commit new felonies, and the
evidence is clear that releasing prisoners raises the crime rate, just
as imprisoning criminals lowers it. The impact in both directions is
relatively small, though. One study showed that during any given year in
the ’90s, the net increase in the number of ex-offenders circulating in
the general population accounted for 2 percent of property crimes and
2.5 percent of violent crimes. The effect was higher for murder and
robbery, though. Fourteen percent of murders and 7 percent of robberies
were attributable to prisoner releases in 1994. And that’s only the new
releases—the fraction of murders committed by the entire ex-offender
population was much higher. On the other hand, released prisoners are
subject to considerably more state surveillance than most people, and
while it’s safe to assume that ex-cons commit crimes at a higher rate
than those who have never seen the inside of a prison, they are also
more likely to be investigated and rearrested than someone who was never
on the police’s radar to begin with. Released prisoners also have fewer
noncrime options: getting a job without family or social connections is
virtually impossible for them.
The prospects for California’s released prisoners, therefore, are not
good. Neither are the prospects for the state. The likelihood is high
that most of these released prisoners will be back in jail within three
years, and California may very well be back in court for overcrowding
its prisons. (The state is hoping to preempt the issue by transferring
inmates to county jails in lieu of early release, but it isn’t clear
that crowded jails are any more likely to survive judicial scrutiny than
crowded prisons.) To reduce its prison population, California will have
to do more than release prisoners—it will have to stop creating new
ones.
When evaluating the impact of the war on drugs on the
country’s incarceration crisis, it helps to keep in mind a statistical
nuance: a large fraction of prison sentences are for nonviolent drug
offenses, but a small fraction of the prison population is in for a
nonviolent drug crime. This is because, despite the harshness of
mandatory minimum sentences, drug criminals don’t spend nearly as much
time in prison as other kinds of criminals.
It’s tempting to believe that we could free most of the prison
population simply by liberating nonviolent drug offenders. Nonviolent
drug offenders are “innocent”; they haven’t hurt anybody. Advocating on
behalf of criminals is much easier when they haven’t committed any
violent crime. And yet this misses the point of the prison crisis: you
cannot relieve the suffering of the prison population without increasing
safety risks for the rest of us.
And increasing those risks, from a moral standpoint, is the right thing to do.
What
would happen to California’s criminal community, once freed from the
ping-pong of prison and parole? They would continue being criminals, in
all likelihood, breaking and entering, stealing cars, selling drugs,
and—very occasionally—taking lives. This would be difficult and painful,
both on the individual level for the victims and on a social level more
broadly; economic and cultural shocks accompany any kind of population
exchange, and a massive jailbreak will likely result in a period of
strain and disorganization for inner cities. Over time, though, things
will settle. There will be more fathers around, and more state money for
things like education and health care.
The incarceration complex, like a civil war or foreign occupation,
institutionalizes economic dislocation, making chaos and uncertainty a
defining feature of the life cycle. Crime, on the other hand, causes
disruptions that are smaller and more manageable. Despite the
near-infinite capacity of the human spirit to deal with routine
desperation, the residents of East Harlem will never “adapt” to a
community life structured around prisons, because uprooting communities
is the very function and purpose of incarceration. The capacity of New
York residents to absorb higher levels of crime in daily life, on the
other hand, is nowhere near its limit.
In all likelihood, dismantling or sharply contracting America’s prison
system would make the country feel more like the United Kingdom. In the
UK, only 3 percent of crimes result in a prison sentence. In the United
States, the figure is closer to 18 percent. London is a more dangerous
city than New York. Your likelihood of getting robbed or assaulted is
higher there. For educated, middle-class whites unlikely to get in
trouble with the police, London is, in some ways, a tougher place to
raise children.
On the other hand, life spans are longer in the UK; social mobility is more fluid; racial disparities are smaller; the AIDS
crisis is better-controlled; and neighborhoods are more cohesive.
Despite some slippage in the last decade, the UK never had the prison
boom we experienced in the US—Margaret Thatcher didn’t allow it.
Confronted with a crime and drug abuse rate that is high by European
standards, London attacked the problem on the front end, installing
thousands of CCTV security cameras and hiring
thousands of bobbies to discourage lawbreaking. Compared to the United
States, they do little in the way of punishment.
Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a
deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private
sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In
high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster;
for petty crime, it would be a boon.
If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the
prison-industrial complex, the time is now. Budgets are strained, voters
are angry, and crime is low. The Tea Party is in the midst of
convincing everyone that government is the enemy— and so it is, in the
field of criminal justice.
Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or
pooh-poohed— it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends.
The prison crisis was created by centrists. Limited reforms and immoral
moderation will not end the crisis. Prisoners and ex-cons, the most
abused population in United States, will have to rely on political
extremists, on both the left and the right, to turn the page on what
will one day be recalled as one of American history’s darkest chapters.
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