By Chart Riggall
Bipartisan consensus has become something of a rarity in contemporary American politics, but it has begun to emerge around the issue of mass incarceration. The United States’ prison problem, exemplified in the egregious five-fold increase in inmate populations since 1980, now lies within the sights of politicians, pundits, activists of all stripes. Hillary Clinton, Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders, and even prominent Republican Newt Gingrich have all denounced the fact that the Land of the Free now imprisons roughly 700 citizens for every 100,000; by contrast, France, Germany, and China have rates of 100, 78, and 119 per 100,000, respectively.
The disparate range of groups seeking to address the issue ranges from racial justice and penal reform activists, who highlight the criminal justice system’s assault on black communities, to conservative think tanks, such as Right on Crime, that view mass incarceration as a misuse of taxpayer dollars. With this supposed consensus, one would assume that the time is ripe for coalition-building and serious criminal justice reform. This optimism is, unfortunately, misplaced. Not only are there severe limitations to critiques that focus solely on the carceral state’s racism or its financial burden, but also the fundamental objectives of the groups that pose them are severely opposed to one another and hold little promise for producing meaningful reform.
The chief scapegoat for mass incarceration – and with good reason – is the War on Drugs, a policy that began under the Nixon Administration and has been carried out with callous brutality ever since, albeit in a highly selective manner. The state-level drug offender population has increased at an exponential rate since 1980. The rate of that increase currently exceeds 1,000 percent, nearly double the rate of increase for inmate populations of all crimes. Drug offenders likewise currently make up half of the federal system’s population. The criminal justice system’s shifting emphasis from white collar and organized crime to drug offenses was undoubtedly the central force driving the ‘prison boom’ of the 1980s and ‘90s.
“On the law enforcement side, stop-and-frisk tactics, ‘consent’ searches, drug-courier profiles, and mass round-ups of street corner dealers disproportionately assault people of color.”
Perhaps no commentator has done more to bring the Drug War to the forefront of recent debate than civil rights activist and professor of law Michelle Alexander, whose 2011 book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” unmasks the War as a “racial caste system” designed to uphold white supremacy in the so-called post-racial era. Alexander’s thorough dissection of the legal system’s covert racism conveys just how devastating the Drug War has been for black communities. On the law enforcement side, stop-and-frisk tactics, ‘consent’ searches, drug-courier profiles, and mass round-ups of street corner dealers disproportionately assault people of color. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system is ridden with provisions that apply leniency to white criminals while cracking down on those of color. These range from recent developments – such as mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, and the infamous sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine possession – to those as old as America itself, namely prosecutorial discretion and the all-white jury.
The results of these policies have been catastrophic, particularly for young black men: while white Americans actually use drugs at higher rates than black Americans, black men have a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated in their lifetimes. For white men, that number is 1 in 17. And remember that 700 inmates per 100,000 citizens figure mentioned earlier? For black men, it exceeds 2,800. The Drug War and its racial biases are not simply an affront to racial and penal justice, but to human rights: America now imprisons a greater portion of its black population than did South Africa under apartheid’s peak, and there are more black male prisoners today than there were slaves a decade before the Civil War.
The prison-industrial complex’s fundamental racism and the work of activists such as Alexander should by no means be downplayed. However, analyses that are confined to the damage done to black men miss much of the larger story, one that continues to be written. The carceral state is still expanding and beginning to assault other demographic groups. Marie Gottschalk’s “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics”, published in 2014, illuminates mass incarceration’s new targets as it, in her terms, “metastasizes.” First among these are Latinos, who are now the largest ethnic group in the federal prison system, both as a result of their targeting by the War on Drugs, but increasingly also because of harsher, more punitive immigration policies.
Women are another group of frequently overlooked victims of the prison system. They are the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population, and the United States now houses one third of the world’s female prisoners. Black men have certainly been hardest-hit by the prison boom, and have rightfully received the most critical attention. But black women, just 13 percent of America’s females, constitute 30 percent of the female prison population. For Latina women, the general population to incarcerated population ratio is 11 percent to 18 percent. As a whole, the female prison population has grown nearly twice as fast as that of its male counterpart.
And though minority communities have borne the brunt of mass incarceration’s damage, white citizens, particularly poor ones, have not been immune. The Drug Enforcement Administration has begun to take aim at the highly-publicized narcotic and amphetamine epidemics of rural communities. Furthermore, the 400 per 100,000 incarceration rate of white Americans is still egregious (England’s is roughly 150), though it pales in comparison to that of blacks and Latinos.
“…it is easy for activists to call for justice for the “non, non, nons” – non-violent, non-serious, non-sex offenders – it is those that fall outside these narrow parameters, whose crimes provoke a far more squeamish reaction than those of casual drug users, who now constitute mass incarceration’s base.”
It is also imperative to recognize that the War on Drugs is no longer the prison state’s main driver. Its roll-out was the engine of mass incarceration in the 1980s and 90s, but in 2016, this is no longer the case. Releasing all prisoners serving time for drug offenses would only yield a 20 percent reduction in the state-level prison population. “The United States,” Gottschalk observes, “did not just toughen up drug penalties. It toughened up all kinds of penalties for all kinds of offenses.” She argues that although it is easy for activists to call for justice for the “non, non, nons” – non-violent, non-serious, non-sex offenders – it is those that fall outside these narrow parameters, whose crimes provoke a far more squeamish reaction than those of casual drug users, who now constitute mass incarceration’s base. To confront their treatment by the penal system will require taking a long, hard, and difficult look at the way we punish their offenses, one that is overdue and urgently necessary.
Though works such as The New Jim Crow do not paint as full a picture of the issue as is perhaps necessary, their aims are undoubtedly noble and directed toward a larger emancipatory goal. The same cannot be said of the neoliberal policymakers who have largely framed mass incarceration as a fiscal issue. Politicians of every persuasion have echoed the refrain that we simply “cannot afford” to continue locking people up at current rates. The primary issue with such an approach is that it minimizes, if not totally discounts, the moral and human rights concerns of mass incarceration. But its shortcomings extend beyond a basic mis-prioritization, and are ridden with other contradictions.
To begin with, though citing multi-billion dollar state prison budgets – which, in 2010, totaled almost $50 billion – is a sure-fire way of riling up taxpayers, it provides very little much-needed context. Corrections budgets constitute only 2 percent of state budgets, meaning that they in fact have far more room to grow. Furthermore, much of this budget-cutting rhetoric has emerged in the wake of the Great Recession, a development that points to two concerning trends. First is the collective obsession with deficit reduction as a good in and of itself, one that encourages broader support for small-government austerity and the push toward privatization. Such thinking is parallel to that of conservative governors who decline to enact Medicaid expansion, a refusal that leaves millions of dollars for mental healthcare and drug abuse treatment on the table. Dr. Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago called these services, which could provide support for those most at risk of recidivism, “essential” for the process of deincarceration. Second, it is unlikely that the calls for prison reform as a means of budget balancing will still be heard when spending deficits begin to shrink.
Finally, we should consider what exactly is being cut from our budgets when lawmakers call for reductions in prison expenditures. Without actual reductions in prison populations, the closure of facilities and laying off of corrections officers only serves to overcrowd existing prisons and increase the likelihood of inmate-on-inmate violence. The other options are not much more promising. Legislators can choose, as they did with the passage of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, to eliminate educational resources for prisoners, which only increases the probability of recidivism. They can choose to eliminate mental-health services, which similarly inhibits prisoners’ capacity to reenter society. Or as some locales have begun to do, they can cut funding for the most basic of services, such as underwear, toilet paper, and tampons.
The fact is, as Gottschalk reminds us, “[m]ost prison costs are fixed and are not easily cut.” In the face of immense pressure from private prison interests such as the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America (whose role in furthering this catastrophe could be explored ad infinitum), as well as their political enforcers (namely the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC), cuts to the quality of prisoners’ lives are the only ones policymakers are willing and able to make.
“[Mass Incarceration] is likewise not a single issue that can be reduced to a problem of drug criminalization or racial prejudice; like many of the most devastating characteristics of 21st century America, it is intimately bound up in issues of privatization, corporate political influence, gender politics, class dynamics, and immigration policy.”
Mass incarceration is no longer a mere mistake of American policy, an easily-corrected wrong turn in the history of governance. Today, it is a defining feature of this country, one that meets the United States’ age-old hunger for slave labor while conveniently locking away hundreds of thousands of undesirables who increasingly have little role to play in the post-industrial era. It is likewise not a single issue that can be reduced to a problem of drug criminalization or racial prejudice; like many of the most devastating characteristics of 21st century America, it is intimately bound up in issues of privatization, corporate political influence, gender politics, class dynamics, and immigration policy. Activists wishing to confront and demolish the carceral state will be pitted against not only the usual suspects of repression – lobbying interests, ‘law and order’ fear-mongers, and those seeking to uphold racial hierarchies – but also neoliberal lawmakers who would rather make superficial budget cuts and outsource criminal justice than reckon with what we hope to achieve through the punishment of criminals. It seems unlikely that eliminating the few features of prison life designed to facilitate re-entry into society will make our prisons more effective rehabilitative institutions.
Prisoners, locked away out of sight and almost always politically disenfranchised, are some of the most defenseless members of our society. Few jump at the opportunity to try and defend the rights of murderers, sex offenders, drug traffickers, burglars, extortionists, and the litany of other offenders who make up the prison state’s 7,328,200 constituents. But to ignore the injustice that defines their existence is to stand silently by while the United States, not for the first time, confines, marginalizes, and exploits millions of its citizens under the guise of liberty and justice for all.