The U.S. & California: Leaders of the Un-free World By
Mary Coomes and Paul Gilroy The
U.S. Leads the World in its Per Capita Incarceration Rate.Out
of every 100,000 American men, 1,100 are in jail.Because
of a passion for arrests and a dedication to longer and longer sentences,
our jails now bulge with more than 2 million souls. It’s
time to ask ourselves some questions.Who
created this situation and why?What
is us costing us, not just monetarily, but morally, to put so many of our
fellow citizens behind bars?And
if we don’t want to be regarded as a 20th century Dickensian nightmare,
what can we do to create a better legacy for our time? First,
some background.Until the 1970s,
our rate of incarceration held steady at around 110 prison inmates for
every 100,000 people.But in the
1980s and 90s, the rate quadrupled.And
in 1998, it stood at 445 per 100,000.During
those two decades, the nation added about 1,000 new prisons and jails.We
began to develop, as some have called it, a “prison industrial complex.” California:
A case study In
1977, California prisons held 19,600 inmates.According
to recent statistics from the California Department of Corrections, the
number of prisoners in California’s (now 33) state prisons has reached
160,655-- that’s an incarceration rate of 467 per 100,000 people (not including
prisoners in county jails). Today, after the construction of 21 new prisons
between 1978 to 1998 at a cost of 5.2 billion dollars, California now has
the largest prison system in the western industrialized world.It
holds more people in its prisons than any other state system.And
California has more people in its jails and prisons than do France, Great
Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined.Even
with all the new construction, the California system is the most overcrowded
prison system in the country. These
figures reveal a tremendous expansion of the prison system in the U.S.
and in California. More importantly though, the numbers force us to face
the fact that such growth is unsustainable without a major shift in state
government funding priorities.And
no matter how much we might value fighting crime, it seems clear that a
society that loudly recites a mantra of“freedom”
while locking up more people than any other country in the world has a
serious problem. How
did we get into this mess?It has
to do with a shift in the political climate over the last thirty some years.Beginning
in the late 60s, elected leaders began moving toward a “Law and Order”
politics, which was in large part a backlash against the perceived lawlessness
of the 1960s -- uprisings in the cities, civil disobedience in support
of civil rights and against the Vietnam war.Conservatives
who feared the growing unwillingness of many in society to stay in their
place called for a crackdown on this “disorder.”The
emphasis on Law and Order, pushed by political figures like George Wallace,
Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, meant a more punitive attitude toward
criminal justice issues. Today,
we are accustomed to a political climate in which our elected leaders compete
with one another to be seen as “tough on crime.”Imagine
a governor in the early 1990s signing a bill that contained an inmate bill
of rights and included a limited program of conjugal visits.It
would have been political suicide.The
fact that none other than Governor Ronald Reagan signed such a bill into
law in 1968 illustrates how drastically attitudes about punishment and
reform have shifted over the past few decades. Until
the 1970s, the California prison system pursued-at least in theory-a policy
of rehabilitating prisoners.The
rehabilitative ideal meant that prisons served to prepare criminals to
reenter society and become productive citizens.Sentencing
under this system was indeterminate; the legislature set the maximum sentence
for particular crimes-not minimums.Judges
and the parole board, known as the Adult Authority, tried to fit the punishment
to the individual and would release the prisoner when they considered him
or her fit to re-enter society. But
there was no place for rehabilitation within the new politics of Law and
Order in the 1970s.Thus, even supposedly
liberal Democratic Governor Jerry Brown-- to appear tough on crime-- signed
the bill that replaced indeterminate sentencing with fixed sentences.Significantly,
that law also removed from the penal code language declaring that rehabilitation
was the ultimate goal of the system and replaced that language with “punishment.” Under
Governors Deukmejian in the 1980s, and Pete Wilson and Gray Davis too in
the 1990s, the tough-on-crime policies have continued.In
the 1990s the California legislature pushed through over 400 bills increasing
prison sentences and others that required mandatory sentences for certain
crimes. In
1994, California under Pete Wilson passed one of the first and harshest
“Three Strikes, You’re Out” laws in the nation.And
it wasn’t just lawmakers who supported this.California
voters passed the same law again in the form of an initiative.Under
the law, prosecutors could call for special penalties for those convicted
of second or third felonies if the first was a serious or violent felony.Under
three-strikes, most sentences double after the second offense and increase
to 25 to life after the third. This
element of California’s elevation of strict punishment to a moral crusade
has been the most controversial.Not
so much out of sympathy for those to be imprisoned, but because it would
cause the prison population to skyrocket.I’ll
return to this point later. Related
to the political cultural that promotes incarceration for punishment is
a second factor--the institutional power and self-interest that has been
created by years of the punitive, law and order ethos.The
colossal prison system now has a large number of camp followers; people
who have a vested interest in its continuation and expansion. Here the
notion of the “prison-industrial complex” is useful-that is, a group of
bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that demand increased spending
on prisons regardless of need.This
new complex functions just like the prison industrial complex of which
President Dwight Eisenhower warned.Ike
was concerned that in the 1960 election between Nixon and JFK, fears of
a non-existent “missile gap” with the Soviet Union were stirred up by military
contractors, the press, and candidates looking for more military spending.He
worried that these self-interested groups would goad Americans into expensive
and unnecessary over-responses to the military threat of the Soviet Union.
Similarly, some people now argue that the “tough on crime” political hype
that supports longer sentences and more prisons leads us to misdirect our
funds and attention. Prisons
no longer serve simply to house criminals, the also serve as an economic
development tools.A kind of “Prison
Keynesianism” to funnel money into economically depressed areas.In
the past twenty years, California has built most of its new prisons in
depressed rural areas, and this has created a kind of built-in demand for
the economic support of policies of punishment.Prisons
are the number one employer in Imperial County in the South.Prisons
like Avenal, Blythe, Corcoran, and Delano are sometimes the only source
of a decent-paying blue collar jobs in their areas. Towns
like Crescent City, in the Northwestern corner of the state, where Pelican
Bay State Prison is located, were on the verge of total collapse when the
construction of a major prison promised the community economic salvation.Unemployment
there stood at 20% when Pelican Bay was built in 1989. Certain
communities have come to see prisons as advantageous -- and their political
representatives pay attention to this constituency and avoid threatening
this new incarnation of political pork. Playing a leading role in this
constituency is the California Correctional Peace Officer Association,
the prison guards union.This organization
has become a real force in state politics. The union gave $1 million to
Republican Pete Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign in 1990, and $2 million
to Democrat Gray Davis in 1998. Prison
growth has been good to the towns in which they’re built and to the prison
guards, and they fight politically to keep the benefits. Politicians
have tied their political fortunes to the crime issue.The
story of Proposition 21 from a few years ago reveals a great deal about
the implications of using the crime issue as pawn in a political game.
Back in 1998, Governor Pete Wilson was considering a run for the Presidency
and wanted to secure his credentials as a tough-on-crime candidate, and
so he pushed the Gang Violence and Youth Crime Prevention Act.This
hard-line measure included a provision that would give prosecutors rather
than judges the right to decide when a juvenile should be tried as an adult.Numerous
corporate donors ( including Unocal, Transamerica, PG&E and Chevron)
who wanted to win the favor of a potential U.S. president gave a total
of $750,000 to the Proposition campaign.As
PG&E spokesman Scott Blakely put it, his company had supported the
drive with $50,000 but had “no position pro or con.”After
Wilson lost re-election and the corporate donors lost interest, the initiative
still had a war chest seven times the size of its opponents’.Gray
Davis, the Democrat, perhaps wishing to avoid appearing weak endorsed the
proposition.(Picking on children
has always been part of the cult of punishment).It
passed overwhelmingly. There’s
another, potentially more powerful, player in the prison-industrial complex
and that is private, profit-driven prison corporations.California
has not followed this trend in large part because the prison guards union
is so strong and private prisons are notoriously anti-union.Better
wages for jailors, after all, eat into the profits. As
capitalist enterprises, private prisons need to maintain and even expand
the prison population.What looks
like waste to taxpayers equals profit to them.Companies
like the Correctional Corporation of America bank on benefiting from state
prison overflow.The CCA recently
spent $100 million to build a prison in the Mojave Desert outside of California
city.They assumed that in the rural
area where layoffs at Edwards Air Force Base created high unemployment
and with California state prisons bulging at the seams, they could force
their way into the California “market” in prisons.As
one CCA executive told the Wall Street Journal, “If you build it . . .
the prisoners will come.”Hardly
a recipe for good criminal justice policy. Still,
for-profit prisons have yet to see their day in California.The
state continues to avoid private prisons. Another
factor that we must consider in a discussion of the prison boom is crime
itself.For all it’s the problems
the rise in prisons has created, have they not helped solve the problem
of crime at the same time?For many
criminals, prison is no doubt the solution.Politicians
did not make up the problem of crime in the 1970s (although I would argue
they capitalized on it).The rate
of violent crime more than doubled in the 1960s and continued upwards in
the 1970s.Another spike in the rate
in California hit in the mid-1980s, concurrent with the hysteria over crack
and gang-related crimes.Violent
crime was and is a real problem.Many
politicians no doubt thought that this method - an exclusive focus on prison
and punishment-- helped solve the problem. More
importantly, during this time, many politicians, like other Americans,
were changing their attitudes toward drug crimes.In
the early 70s, another liberal, this time the Republican governor of New
York, Nelson Rockefeller, proposed an anti-drug law under which all drug
dealers would get life in prison-- with no plea-bargaining.The
actual law included a slightly less draconian mandatory 15 year to life
term for possession of four ounces or selling two ounces. But
the law demonstrated a rising intolerance to drugs.Ever
since, we have been fighting the so-called War on Drugs.Our
weapon of choice -- not public health measures, but prison.As
Franklin Zimring at the Earl Warren Legal Institute put it, “No matter
what the question has been in American criminal justice over the last generation,
prison has been the answer.”(Until
the 2000 election, that is, when a drug treatment-not-prison measure passed). Still,
a rising crime rate does not account for the growth of California’s prisons.For
one thing, the crime rate has been declining since the early-1990s, as
the number of young males has declined; yet, the number of prisoners in
California has doubled.While America
continues to have a high rate of violent crime compared to Europe, people
convicted of violent crimes constitute a smaller and smaller proportion
of our prison inmates.It the ranks
of non-violent offenders that contribute to the explosion in prison populations.And
although the Three Strikes law has not quite resulted in the predicted
mushrooming of prison populations, it is causing significant growth.Barring
some policy change, these numbers will continue to grow. We
continue to stick with an approach that favors punishment over reform without
ever asking what effect this has on those who commit crimes or on crime
rates.And, unlike most government
spending, taxpayers have dolled out millions for prisons without complaint.Putting
so many people in jail may serve as one way to handle crime, it certainly
makes a good campaign speech, and it sometimes provides a decent living
for folks in poor rural areas, but still, it costs a lot of money. Regardless
of whether we think prisons are an effective response to crime, the solution
is becoming a problem in itself. Show
Me the Money: The
prison boom in California, of course, has meant a lot of money going to
the Department of Corrections.According
to James Gomez, head of the California Department of Corrections (CDC)
until 1997, each “third strike” conviction represents “a $500,000 investment.”The
average yearly cost to the CDC per inmate is $25,607.The
Department estimates that it will need to spend some $6.1 billion over
the next ten years just to maintain the prisons in their current overcrowded
condition. The
focus on prison building has meant a shift of resources within the criminal
justice system.Money goes toward
building expensive prisons, not toward drug treatment programs that might
address the root of the problem or to other less expensive alternatives
to prison.For example, California
parole officers face huge case loads -- in the 1970s they handled on average
about 45 cases, now that number is 90. Drug
treatment has not been a priority. About 85% of California’s inmates are
substance abusers.Yet few, only
about 3,000, receive any drug abuse treatment.And
only about 8,000 participate in pre-release programs to help them adjust
to life on the outside.It is no
wonder that nearly 70% of those paroled return to prison.The
vast majority of parolees returning to prison (60,000 of 80,000) are sent
back for technical violation, like failing a drug test. Another
unanticipated cost of the punitive approach to crime -- and the 3 strikes
law in particular-- has been a huge increase in people requesting jury
trials.Defendants with two prior
convictions may face life in prison.In
this situation, they are not going to plea bargain.So
not only are the jails overcrowded, so is the court system.And
more prisoners awaiting trial clog the county jail systems, which are even
more overcrowded and strapped for cash. This
trend toward imprisonment requires not only a shift in budget priorities
within the Department of Corrections, but also a tremendous shift in resources
in the state budget.The state will
be forced to spend a larger proportion of tax dollars on prisons at the
expense of other programs - or else to raise taxes.The
former has been the trend in the last two decades. Between 1980 and 1995,
the corrections budget increased 847%, while spending for higher education
rose 116%. The
tremendous financial costs and the bureaucratic problems are important,
but something more significant is also at stake here. Lest we forget, what
about justice?Despite former President
Ronald Reagan’s announcement that we live in a color blind society, racism
seems alive and well in the political economy of punishment.The
punitive culture of law and order politics has hit people of color in such
disproportionately high numbers that we cannot ignore the fact that it
is - at least in effect - racist. And
this is especially true of the drug war.Although
research shows that white men use drugs at about the same rate as do black
men, the latter are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense.The
disparities in sentencing for certain drugs is but one example of a very
thinly veiled tilting of the playing field.Sentences
for crack cocaine, used disproportionately by people of color, are ten
times longer than convictions for powder cocaine, most often used by whites. Fighting
crime is one thing, but these approaches to crime and to sentencing reveal
far more than a society of rule breakers.There
is nothing wrong with wanting to reduce crime.But
we must examine not only crime, but our solutions to this problem.We
cannot ignore how they affect various groups differently, and we cannot
ignore their historical roots. As
mentioned earlier, the law and order rhetoric emerged in the late sixties
and the seventies as a political tool.It
was conscious attempt on the part of politicians like Democrat George Wallace
and Republican Richard Nixon to get white voters in the South and in the
Northern cities to shift their allegiances by whipping up fears of black
and Hispanic criminals. For
thirty years now politicians have tried to woo white voters by appealing
to fears of crime, and they have won doing it.And
to the extent that the more liberal political figures have won back some
of those voters, they have often made the same appeals. While
the overt racial rhetoric of some Southern politicians in the 1960s, has
been shelved, the message is still there.In
the hysteria, we have demonized black and Latino men.When
we use terms like predators, or “superpredators” to describe youth in black
and Hispanic neighborhoods, we feed this hysteria. (And after all, these
are the kids labeled in this way.The
difference between a “troubled teen” and a “superpredator” can be expressed
in a calculus of skin tone and parental income).By
adopting this way of viewing kids, we give license to the police who commit
acts of brutality in poor and minority neighborhoods. This
sort of demonization encourages us to tolerate incredible levels of official
violence, especially against convicted criminals, and sadly, the state
of California in the 1990s leads the nation in this regard.Between
1985 and 1995, guards killed 36 inmates -- triple the number killed in
the Federal system and the next six biggest incarceration states combined.News
stories in the past several years testify to the levels of official violence
too -- the acquittals of guards for staging “gladiator battles” in the
prison yards at Corcoran, and for arranging the rape of inmates, and the
psychologically destructive policy of isolation in the Security Housing
Units at Pelican Bay. These
stories are not only a measure of the extent to which the punitive culture
has taken hold, but also give us an indication that we are willing to be
frankly and expensively counter-productive in order to prove our viciousness
toward criminals.Imagine being a
prisoner in Pelican Bay for a ten year sentence, kept in isolation for
23 hours each day and often forced to fight for your life during your in
the exercise yard.At the end of
this sentence you are released with $200 and a bus ticket.What
are your chances of getting a home, a job, and of coping with the world?It
takes a willful blindness to argue that such a person will be able to adjust
if only they work hard and stay straight.Yet
this is what California has done through the 1990s. This
is the world we have built.It has
cost us a lot, measured in dollars, lives, and principles.We
might think of our shining new creation, this huge system of prisons, as
the latest in a long line of public works.California
has a great history of public works projects, from the water and power
projects of the Owens valley, the Colorado, and the Hetch-Hetchy, to the
Freeway system, to the UC and Cal State University systems.They
have served as models for the nation.Each
of these projects has had its problems and its share of corruption, but
they have also reflected in some sense the spirit of the era in which they
were created. In
the first 130 years in the state of California, we built twelve state prisons.In
the past twenty years we have built 21 more.As
a reflection of the spirit of the era, such public works will leave a legacy
of misplaced priorities, of a costly and counter-productive response to
a very real problem.Yet if we have
the ability to build a world of gates and barbed wire, we also have the
power to tear it down.
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