{"id":1143,"date":"2012-01-29T10:27:16","date_gmt":"2012-01-29T15:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/how-to-end-the-epidemic-of-incarceration.html"},"modified":"2012-01-29T10:27:16","modified_gmt":"2012-01-29T15:27:16","slug":"how-to-end-the-epidemic-of-incarceration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/how-to-end-the-epidemic-of-incarceration.html","title":{"rendered":"How to end the epidemic of incarceration"},"content":{"rendered":"There are historical reasons for why we lock up so many people,\nsome going back a century or more, and some starting in 1980 and 2001.\nKnowing what they are (and what they are not)\nlets us see what we can do to end the epidemic of\nincarceration that is damaging education and agriculture in Georgia.\n

\nAdam Gopnik wrote for the New Yorker dated 30 January 2012,\n\nThe Caging of America:\nWhy do we lock up so many people?<\/a>\n

\nMore than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go\n\n<\/a>\nto prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale\nalmost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country\ntoday—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the\nfundamental\nfact of 1850. In truth, there are\n\nmore black men in the grip of the\ncriminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on\nparole—<\/a>than were in slavery then.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nIn Georgia,\n\n1 in 13 of all<\/em> adults is in jail, prison, probation,\nor parole:<\/a> highest in the country (1 in 31 nationwide).\nGeorgia is only number 4 in adults in prison, but we’re continuing\nto lock more people up, so we may get to number 1 on that, too.\n
\n\n<\/a>\nOver all, there are now more people under\n“correctional supervision” in America—more than\nsix million—than\nwere in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of\nthe confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest\nin the United States.\n

\nThe accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just\nas startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about\n\n<\/a>\ntwo hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand\nAmericans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred\nand thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two\ndecades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times\nthe rate of spending on higher education.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnd we can’t afford that, especially not when we’re cutting school budgets.\nThat graph of education vs. incarceration spending is for California.\nSomebody should do a similar graph for Georgia.\n

\nThe article does get into why we lock up so many people:\n\n\n

\n\n<\/a>\nHow did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects\nhanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging\nvast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction?\nThere’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history\nand sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the\nAmerican zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century,\n\n<\/a>\napportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially\nNorthern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious\nEastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its\n“reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which\nsees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued\nby other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern\nrevisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison\nEmpire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North,\nthe birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the\nfountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words,\nthere’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the\nslave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.\n<\/blockquote>\nThere may be two original sources of U.S. incarceration, but it looks like the\nsouth has won the race to lock up people.\nAccording to Desiree Evans in Facing South 5 March 2009,\n\nDoing time in the South,<\/a>\n
\nBy 2008, the top five states with the highest adult incarceration rates were in the South: Louisiana leads the way, with one out of every 55 residents behind bars. Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and Alabama finish off the top five.\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nWhile both deep-historical explanations are correct as far as they go, they don’t explain the sudden jump upwards starting in 1980.\nWhat happened then?\nThe article effectively debunks a popular but wrong speculation:\n

\nOne fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same\ntwenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our\ncurrent astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug\nlaws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New\nYork City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking\nup a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young\npeople, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring\nobserves. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had\nnothing to do with putting more men in prison.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nThat’s right: the national epidemic of incarceration has nothing\nto do with the crime rate.\nNationally, incarceration has gone way up since 1980 while crime has not.\nBy locking up more people, Georgia has not made us safer than\nNew York City.\n

\nSo what did happen in 1980?\nThe War on Drugs.\nNixon started it, but Reagan accellerated it, and politicians ever since\nhave competed to be tough not just on crime (as the New Yorker article\ndescribes), but on drugs.\n

\nThe New Yorker article doesn’t say much about\nthe war on drugs as a cause of incarceration,\neven though it quotes, as we have,\n\nCCA’s 2010 report to the SEC<\/a>:\n

\nThe demand for our facilities and services could be adversely\n\n<\/a>\naffected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in\nconviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through\nthe decriminalization of certain activities that are currently\nproscribed by our criminal laws — for instance, any changes\nwith respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal\nimmigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted,\nand sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional\nfacilities to house them.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nThe New Yorker misses the link to anti-immigration laws, even though\nCCA itself puts drugs and immigration in the same sentence.\n\nBetty Liu of Bloomberg tied CCA’s ten-fold stock price increase\nsince 2001 directly to anti-immigration laws.<\/a>\n

\nSo sure, the U.S. incarceration system probably started with the\ntwo old causes the New Yorker cites.\nBut those aren’t the causes of the boom in imprisonment since 1980.\nThe causes of that are the war on drugs and the post 9\/11 crackdown\non illegal immigration, the latter pushed by ALEC and its prison corporation\npartners such as CCA.\nSo the main way to end the epidemic in incarceration in America is to\n\nend the failed war on drugs<\/a>.\nThe New Yorker does get to that at the end:\n

\n\n<\/a>\nEnding sentencing\nfor drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges\nfree to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who\nare judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are\npossible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they\nhelped end the plague of crime.\n<\/blockquote>\nExcept ending the war on drugs is not a small act: it’s the main act.\n

\nWhile we’re at it,\nrepeal the bogus anti-immigration laws such as Georgia’s HB 87\nthat are really excuses to lock more people up for private prison profit.\n\n<\/a>\nWe can’t afford to let incarceration further\n\ndamage Georgia’s biggest industry: agriculture.<\/a>\n

\nIn an even larger sense, this is all a symptom of\n\nprivate corporation money lobbying government.<\/a>\nWhere did we get all these state “anti-immigration” laws?\n\nALEC, the American Legislative Exchange, promoted them in 22 states.<\/a>\nWe need to stop that.\nWe need a\n\nU.S. Constitutional Amendment for Separation of Corporation and State.<\/a>\n

\nDealing with the root causes will take time.\n\n<\/a>\nMeanwhile, CCA also admitted to the SEC that\nlocal community opposition\ncould affect its ability to site a prison.<\/a>\nWe don’t need \na private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.<\/a>\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\nFollow\n\nthis link<\/a>\nto petition the Industrial Authority to reject CCA’s private prison in Lowndes County.\n

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