The following
article was first published on Znet.
Let
me start by quoting my favorite historical personality from
Indiana – the great democratic Socialist Eugene Debs, from
Terre Haute. "While there is a lower class," Debs
once said, "I am of it. While there is a criminal element," he
added, "I am of it; while there is a soul in prison,
I am not free."
Prison
Nation: "Not Unless This Country Plunges Into Fascism"
Debs
would feel most un-free in contemporary America, where 2
million adults spend their days behind bars in the nation
that possesses the world's highest incarceration rate. In
the second year of the new millennium, 40 of every 100,000
people in Italy were imprisoned. The incarceration rate in
Sweden was 60 per 100,000. France: 90 per 100,000. England:
125. South Africa: 400 per 100,000. Russia, with the second
highest rate in the world: 675. The United States led the
world with 690 per 100,000. Incredibly enough, the nation
that proclaims itself the homeland and headquarters of world
freedom comprises 5 percent of the world's population but
houses more than 25 percent of the world's prisoners. "No
other Western democratic country has ever imprisoned this
proportion of its population," says Norval Morris, a
professor emeritus at University of Chicago Law School. Indiana
and Illinois are playing major roles in this dark drama,
contributing 43,000 (Illinois) and 22,000 (Indiana) state
prisoners, respectively to the inmate total in Prison Nation.
With federal, local and county prisoners included, the numbers
would be considerably higher.
America's
incarceration numbers are off the charts relative to the
rest of the world but they are also off the charts relative
to our own history. In the last two-and-a-half decades, America's
prison population has undergone "literally incredible" expansion,
rising from less than 300,000 in 1970 to the current shocking
number. There were less than 7500 state prison inmates in
the entire state of Illinois in 1970. Thirty one years later,
I found 7500 Illinois prisoners coming from just six of Chicago's
sixty-six zip codes, including five on the city's west side
and one on the south side. During the same period the number
of prisons in my state rose from 7 to 27.
Reviewing
these numbers I am struck by the depths of an amazing domestic
development that has taken place quietly, behind the scene,
during my lifetime, captured quite well by Angela Davis. "When
I first became involved in anti-prison activities during
the late 1960s," writes Davis, "I was astounded
to learn that there were then close to two hundred thousand
people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three decades
ten times as many people would be locked away in cages, I
would have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I
would have responded something like this: 'As racist and
undemocratic as this country may be [remember, during that
period, the demands of the Civil Rights Movement had not
yet been consolidated], I do not believe that the U.S. government
will be able to lock up so many people without producing
powerful resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless
this country plunges into fascism." (Angela Y. Davis, Are
Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003, p.11)
The
US incarceration rate began its dramatic upward acceleration
in the mid-1970s, after nearly 50 years during which it hovered
around 100 per 100,000. Incarceration is now so extensive
that several large states currently spend as much or more
money to incarcerate adults than they do to provide their
citizens with college and graduate educations. States now
spend 60 cents on prisons for every dollar they spend on
higher education, up from 28 cents in 1980.
Ex-Offender
Nation: the Mark of a Criminal Record
Less
commonly noted, America's mass imprisonment and related felony
marking boom has also generated a massive army of "ex-offenders," whose
liberty on the "outside" is strictly qualified
by the lifelong mark of a criminal record. More than 600,000
individuals are released from state and federal prisons each
year, feeding a swelling army of ex-offenders, saddled with
what The Economist last year called "The Stigma That
Never Fades." According to the best recent estimates,
roughly 13 million Americans – fully 7 percent of the adult
population and 12 percent of the adult male population – possess
felony records. Thanks to numerous barriers to ex-offender "reintegration" (a
phrase that tends to too-easily assume that former prisoners
were meaningfully integrated into American "opportunity
structures" prior to arrest and imprisonment), many
released inmates claim that their "real sentence" began
upon release. This claim often contains a measure of exaggeration,
no doubt: "modern" US prisons are violent and totalitarian
structures, monuments of intentionally planned mass misery,
unmitigated by meaningful investment in rehabilitation and
treatment.
Still,
former prisoners face remarkable obstacles. One of the key
barriers comes in the realm of employment. According to the
best recent estimates, incarceration carries a significant
10 to 20 percent "wage penalty." "Prison time," Northwestern
sociologist Devah Pager notes, "serves to channel individuals
away from skilled occupations and into job sectors which
are characterized by low wages, limited job stability, and
fewer opportunities for advancement." Based on interviews
with 3000 employers by the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality,
researchers report, more than 60 percent of employers would
not knowingly hire an ex-offender. Possession of a felony
record is the single worst barrier to employer acceptance.
This is no small societal problem when 13 million possess
such records in a capitalist society, where most adults must
purchase commodified life necessities through an exchange
medium that is obtained primarily by renting out their labor
power on a sustained basis. Employer and other forms of societal
bias against "ex-offenders" help explain why roughly
two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three
years. A considerable and growing segment of the population
has become part of a permanently stigmatized "underclass" that
recycles in and out of jails and prisons. It forms an everlasting "criminal
element" that is pushed yet further into the lower class
and functions as the key raw material for a bloated, super-expensive
hyper-carceral criminal justice state.
"Civil
Death"
Along
with socioeconomic disenfranchisement comes literal political
disenfranchisement. "Currently," note the leading
academic authorities on felon and ex-felon-voting rights
(Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen), "48 states disenfranchise
incarcerated felons, 37 states disenfranchise felony probationers
or parolees (or both), and 14 states additionally disenfranchise
some or all ex-felons who have completed their sentences." No
other democratic nation denies the vote to a remotely comparable
share of its offender and ex-offender population. One of
the worst 14 states is of course Florida, where felony disenfranchisement,
supplemented by the scandalous and illegal denial of voting
rights to many persons who were merely suspected of possessing
felony records and others whose out-of-state felony records
(see the chilling first chapter, "Jim
Crow in Cyberspace," in Greg Palast's best-selling
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) provided the spectacular
world-systemic transgressor George W. Bush with a key part
of his "winning" margin in the pitiful presidential
selection of 2000.
The
roughly 4.4 million Americans who are disenfranchised due
to a past or current felony conviction "are expected," note
the experts, "to respect the law (and indeed, are often
subject to significantly harsher penalties and face a higher
level of scrutiny, than non-felons). They are expected to
pay taxes to the government, and to be governed by elected
officials. Yet they have no formal right to participate in
the selection of those officials or the public policies that
allocate government expenditures," including the tens
of billions of dollars that American government's spend on
mass incarceration. Even in the horribly diluted and qualified
mechanism of democracy known as the American voting process,
much of the "criminal element" is banned from having
anything to say about the policies that have marked them
for life. In a modern-day version of the medieval practice
of "civil death," breaking the law leads to "complete
loss of citizenship rights" for a considerable segment
of the population. At the same time, it is worth noting that
prisoners count towards the population count and therefore
to the political representation (under political districting
rules) and related state and federal funding allotments granted
not to their home communities (disproportionately urban)
but to (disproportionately rural) regions and communities
that host prisons. An investigation by The Chicago Reporter
- an excellent local public affairs magazine - finds that
mass incarceration's interaction with the geography of prison
construction, political districting rules and federal budgetary
procedures cost Chicago's Cook County nearly $88 million
in federal benefits between 2000 and 2010 (see Molly Dugan, "Census
Dollars Bring bounty to Prison Towns").
Corrections,
Indeed: The Color of Prison and Ex-Offender Nation
Let's
be clear, however, about who exactly is most prone to socioeconomic
and political disenfranchisement through incarceration and
related felony-marking. Beyond its sheer magnitude, the most
striking aspect of America's prison and broader criminal
supervision boom is its heavily racialized nature. As the
penal population has risen, it has become significantly less
Caucasian: non-Hispanic whites accounted for 42% of state
prison inmates in 1979 but less than a third by the end of
the 20th century.
One
group is most especially targeted: Blacks are 12.3 percent
of US population, but they comprise roughly half of the roughly
2 million Americans currently behind bars. Between
1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or prison
grew fivefold (500 percent), to the point where, as the Justice
Policy Institute (2002) recently reported, there were
more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities
in the US. On any given day, Chaiken reported, 30 percent
of African-American males ages 20 to 29 are under correctional
supervision – either in jail or prison or on probation or
parole.
The
incarceration rate for African-Americans is 1,815 per 100,000
compared to 609 per 100, 000 for Latino-Americans, 99 per
100,000 for Asian-Americans, and 235 per 100, 000 for American
whites. For black adult males the incarceration rate is a
remarkable 4, 484 per 100,000, compared 1, 668 per 100,000
for Hispanic males and 1,318 per 100,000 for white males.
Roughly one in ten of the world's prisoners is an African-American
male. In mid-year 1999, 11 percent of Black US males in their
20s and early 30s were in prison and 33 percent of Black
male high school dropouts were in prison or in jail.
Especially
chilling is a statistical model used by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics at the turn of the 21st century to determine the
lifetime chances of incarceration for individuals in different
racial and ethnic groups. Based on current rates, it predicts
that a young Black man age 16 in 1996 faced a 29 percent
chance of spending time in prison during his life. The corresponding
statistic for white men in the same age group was 4 percent.
Consistent
with these findings, nothing is more likely to predict high
incarceration totals and rates at the state level than the
possession of a disproportionately large black population.
Also worth noting, race is the single largest factor determining
which states deny voting rights to felons and ex-felons.
The higher the black composition of a state's prisoner population,
the more likely that state is to disenfranchise its officially
marked "criminal element."
A
recent New Left Review essay by left sociologist Loic Wacquant
is titled "From
Slavery to Mass Incarceration." The experience of
incarceration is so ubiquitous and commonplace in the African-American
experience today that Wacquant can make a compelling case
for designating mass imprisonment as a full-blown historical
stage in the evolution of structural racism in the United
States. Meanwhile, criminologists Dina Rose and Todd Clear
found Black neighborhoods in Tallahassee where every resident
could identify at least one friend or relative who has been
incarcerated. In predominantly Black urban communities across
the country, incarceration is so widespread and commonplace
that it has become what Chaiken calls "almost a normative
life experience."
The
phenomenon of heavily disproportionate Black mass incarceration
is fraught with a savage historical irony. At the very moment
that American public discourse in racial matters has become
officially inclusive – even David Duke now has to deny that
he is anti-Black – the US is flooding its expanding number
of cell blocks with an ever-rising tide of Black people monitored
by predominantly white overseers.
There
is a widespread false belief among whites – ironically reinforced
by the demise of open public racial prejudice – that African-Americans
enjoy equal and color-blind opportunity. "As white America
sees it," write Barbara Diggs-Brown and Leonard Steinhorn
in their sobering By
the Color of Their Skin: the Illusion of Integration
and the Reality of Race (2000), "every effort has been
made to welcome Blacks into the American mainstream, and
now they're on their own… 'We got the message, we made the
corrections [white Americans claim, P.S.] – Get on with it.'"
Corrections,
indeed: as the racially skewed demographics of the American "correctional" system
suggest, the US in the age of mass incarceration is giving
a darkly colored twist to the noble Christian notion that
we are "our brother's [today 'our brothers'] keeper."
A
Policy-Driven Reality
At
first blush, an outside observer from another country or
planet might observe America's prison numbers and conclude
that the United States experienced a significant upsurge
in violent crimes, disproportionately committed by African-Americans,
during recent decades. This would be a reasonable inference
from the extreme measure (by both historical American and
contemporary global standards) of mass and racially disparate
incarceration over the last 25-30 years. Contrary to the "law
and order" rhetoric cultivated by many politicians and
policymakers, however, there has been no clear or consistent
pattern of rising criminality, including violent criminality,
that might explain the upward trend of America's prison numbers. "Since
1980," journalist Vince Beiser notes, "the national
crime rate has meandered down, then up, then down again,
but the incarceration rate has marched relentlessly upward
every single year." During the 1990s, indeed, the US
incarceration rates rose dramatically in spite of crime rates
that fell, thanks largely to fairly robust economic growth
during the "Clinton boom." "Crime is dropping," noted
the well-regarded public affairs journal Illinois Issues, "but
the prison population isn't."
The
black crime rates have been consistently higher than the
white crime rate, consistent with blacks' lower socioeconomic
status and related higher stress levels and weaker social
and familial structures, but there has been no massive upsurge
of black criminality that could even remotely explain the
skyrocketing black incarceration rate.
The
central factor is that imprisonment in the US has "changed," in
Pager's words, "from a punishment reserved for only
the most heinous offenders to one extended to a much
greater range of crimes and much larger segment of the population [emphasis
added]. Recent trends in crime policy have led to the imposition
of harsher and longer sentences for a wider range of offenses,
thus casting an ever widening net of penal intervention." It
is largely for this reason that the majority of Americans
entering the inherently violent space of America's "prison
nation," where as many as 7 percent of inmates are raped,
now do so for nonviolent crimes. Between 1980 and 1997, the
Justice Policy Institute (JPI) reports, "the number
of violent offenders committed to state prison nearly doubled
(up 82 percent)," but "the number of nonviolent
offenders tripled (up 207 percent)." People who committed
nonviolent crimes accounted for more than three fourths of
the nation's massive increase in prisoners between 1978 and
1996. The Justice Policy Institute estimates that there are
currently more than 1.2 million nonviolent criminals behind
bars in the US.
These
trends have impacted black communities with special harshness.
While blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug users,
they account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.
They comprise 42 percent of those held in federal prison
for drug charges and 62 percent of those in state prisons.
Not surprisingly, white drug offenders are much less likely
than their counterparts to serve time in prison. Blacks constituted
more than 75 percent of the total drug prisoners in America
in one third of all states according to a report issued in
2000 by the prestigious human rights organization Human Rights
Watch. In my own state, Illinois, Human Rights Watch reported
that "blacks constituted an astonishing 90 percent of
all drug offenders admitted to prison in Illinois" in
1996. By 2000, the percentage had barely fallen to 89 percent,
making Illinois number two in the nation in terms of this
key disparity.
Chicago
Story
Reflecting
these dark realities, there is now a growing and increasingly
respectable body of academic and policy literature on "racially
disparate mass incarceration" – liberal academic and
foundation terminology for the racist prison state – and
related issues of mass black criminalization and "prisoner
reentry." The literature bears dramatic titles like
The Race to Incarcerate, Incarceration Nation, Lockdown America,
Prison Nation, Cell Blocks Over Classrooms, Travels in a
Prison Nation, Color Bind, and the like.
My
own study released last year is part of this literature.
Titled The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community
in Chicago, Illinois and the Nation, it's full of shocking
details on how and why the penal system has become a central
part of the institutional framework that produces racial
and related socioeconomic inequality in the United States.
Among the worst revelations:
-
As
of June 2001, I learned, there were nearly 20,000 more
black males in the Illinois state prison system than the
number of black males enrolled in the state's public universities.
There were more black males in the state's correctional
facilities just on drug charges than the total number of
black males enrolled in undergraduate degree programs in
state universities.
-
By
2000, I learned and reported, Illinois' prison population
had reached nearly 46,000 and the number of correction
facilities had mushroomed to 27. Illinois' rising state
prison (IDOC) population (94 percent male) stood suggestively
close to the falling number of households (predominately
female-headed) in the state receiving public family cash
assistance – 46,801. Nine years before, the number of prisoners
in Illinois made up less than 15 percent number of the
state's welfare families. The report section in which I
included this data was titled "From Welfare to Prison
State."
-
Black
male ex-prisoners, I found, are equivalent in number to
nearly one quarter (24 percent) of the black male workforce
in the Chicago area. Black male ex-felons are equivalent
in number to 42 percent of the black male workforce in
the Chicago area.
-
In
the finding that most interested reporters, I reported
that ten very predominantly black Chicago zip codes (including
five on the city's West Side and four on the South Side)
received 25 percent of Illinois prisoners released in the
years 2000, 2001, and 2002. I determined that released
prisoners are returning to the same highly disadvantaged
communities from which they came prior to incarceration.
The top 15 zip codes for prison releases contain 10 of
the city's top 15 zip codes for poverty, 11 of the top
15 zip codes for unemployment, 10 of the lowest 15 zip
codes for median income, and 10 of the lowest zip codes
for possession of a high school degree.
There
is, I noted, a significant racial disparity in mass incarceration's
labor market and related economic development consequences
in Illinois as throughout the country. The prison construction
boom – fed by the rising "market" of black offenders – is
a significant source of jobs and associated local economic
multipliers for prison-hosting "downstate" Illinois
communities. Because of its racially dichotomous economic and
related political and budgetary impact in Illinois, I argued
in The Vicious Circle for understanding mass incarceration
as a form of Reverse Racial Reparations - a form of radical
state intervention that transfers wealth, census count, earnings,
government dollars, voting power and even campaign finance
influence away from the black and into the white community.
The analogy with slavery (including the infamous "three-fifths" compromise
that permitted slave states to count black chattel towards
their Congressional representation) is hard to miss, though
black prisoners function much more as raw material than as
labor under the modern mass incarceration system.
The
Racist Prison State vs. National Mythology
My
study resonated well in Chicago's black community and among
intellectuals and activists working to rollback American
incarceration. It failed, however, to achieve remotely comparable
recognition in the mainstream media, even at the local level.
This
lukewarm media response is fairly typical, I think, for those
of us who are writing about and against the racist prison
state. There's an epic disconnect between its significance
(well understood especially in the black community) and the
mainstream attention it receives, especially when you recall
that George W. Bush seized power – with historic consequences – thanks
to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands black ex-felons
(real and supposed) in Florida.
"Freedom's
Beacon"
The
reasons for this disconnect are complex but part of the problem
relates to the filtering power of dominant ideology, whose
core elements are shared across the American political class,
including both policymakers and owners and managers of the
nations' media corporations. The full story of policy-driven
racist mass imprisonment and related rampant black felony
marking is richly anomalous for related core and overlapping
American myths that dominant media has no interest in challenging,
particularly in the post-9/11 period of intensified nationalism
and related domestic mobilization for permanent imperialist
war.
One
such myth holds that the United States is the natural homeland,
epitome and headquarters of freedom, "the beacon to
the world of the way life should be" – to quote Texas
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson justifying her support for
the White House's planned invasion of Iraq in the fall of
2002. Hutchinson's phrase epitomizes the widespread belief
among the political class that America is the embodiment
of human existence at its best – a God- and/or History-ordained
City on a Hill, one that "stands taller and sees farther" than
the rest of the world, as Madeline Albright put it years
ago. This belief certainly informed a statement made by James
F. Dobbins, Director of the Rand Corporation's Center for
International Security and Defense Policy and a former special
White House envoy during US interventions in Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. "The partisan debate" within
the US, "is over," Dobbins proclaimed just before
the US invaded Iraq. "Administrations of both parties
are clearly prepared," Dobbins noted, "to use American
military forces to reform rogue states and repair broken
societies."
To
counter this toxic national-imperial narcissism and show
that the United States is itself a "broken society," activists
can pick from an empirical embarrassment of riches relating
to inequality, poverty, gun-deaths, suicides, the uninsured
and so on. But few social statistics trump the incarceration
numbers when it comes to tearing down the elite's vainglorious
American-exceptionalist story line, particularly the
part of the dominant trope that identifies the US with "freedom." Even
if media authorities wanted to, it would be difficult for
them to tell the truth on such a graphically counter-doctrinal
horror story at the same time that America's aggressively
nationalist power elite – dominated by the formerly radical-turned "respectable" right
wing – is telling itself and the world that America is the "single
sustainable model" of societal excellence, specially
chosen by God and History to exemplify and even export its
superior, liberating virtues.
"Color
Blind America"
A
second great myth challenged by the real story on the mass
carceral warehousing and related permanent criminal marking
of millions of African-American citizens and ex-citizens
is of course the related mainstream notion that America has
become for all intents and purposes a color-blind post-racist
nation, where correctives like affirmative action, not to
mention reparations, are no longer necessary. Even the Manhattan
Institute's John McWhorter, who has made a lucrative career
out of arguing that the chief cause of persistent black difficulties
in a generally post-racist America is black cultural "self-sabotage," acknowledgers
that racial discrimination continues to be a problem in America's
hyper-carceral criminal justice system.
The
Selective Targeting of the Government "Beast"
Another
myth I want to mention is the widely advertised and much
lamented notion of the powerless and cash-strapped state – the
idea that government can't really do anything anymore; that
it doesn't have the strength, the legitimacy, the money,
the wherewithal to carry out key objectives. Tell that to
the nation's mass of prisoners and ex-prisoners.
To
break through the last myth, you have to ask whose objectives
American government can and supposedly can't carry out. In
the wealthiest nation on earth, the public sector lacks the
money to properly fund education for all of the country's
children. It lacks the resources to provide universal health
coverage, leaving 42 million American without basic medical
insurance. It can't match unemployment benefits to the numbers
out of work. It lacks or claims to lack the money to provide
meaningful rehabilitation and reentry services for its many
millions of very disproportionately black prisoners and ex-prisoners,
marked for life with a criminal record. The list of unmet
civic and social needs goes on and on. Listen, however, to
what our public sector can supposedly pay for. It can afford
to spend trillions on Tax Cuts rewarding the top 1 percent
in the thoroughly disingenuous name of "economic stimulus." It
can spend more on the military than on all of America's possible "enemy" states
combined many times over, providing massive subsidy to the
high-tech corporate sector, including billions on weapons
and "defense" systems that bear no meaningful relations
to any real threat faced by the American people. It can afford
hundreds of billions and perhaps more than a trillion dollars
for an invasion and occupation of distant devastated nation
that poses minimal risk to the US and even to its own neighbors.
And of course, it can afford to incapacitate and incarcerate
a greater share of its population than any nation in history
and to spend hundreds of millions each year on various forms
of corporate welfare and other routine public subsidies to "private" industry.
The American public sector, in short, is weak and cash-strapped
when it comes to social democracy for the people but its
cup runs over in powerful ways when it comes to meeting the
needs of wealth, racial disparity and empire. It's useful
to keep that distinction in mind when we hear people like
the powerful Republican tax cut maven and political strategist
Grover Norquist say that their goal – and here I quote Norquist – "is
to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it
down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." When
Norquist and his followers say they want to "starve
the beast" of government, they target some parts of "government" for
malnourishment a lot more energetically than others. They
are most concerned to dismantle the parts of the public sector
that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent
majority of the American populace. They want to de-fund what
the late French sociologist Pierre Bordieu referred to as
the left hand of the state, the programs and services that
embody the victories won by past struggles for justice and
equality. They want to preserve the right hand of the state,
the parts that provide service and welfare to the privileged
few and dole out punishment to the poor, from the budgetary
axe.
Their
wishes are being met. Under the pressure of a relentless,
well-funded political and ideological campaign led in its
most extreme forms by radically regressive and repressive
Republicans like Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove,
the public sector is being stripped of its positive social
and democratic functions. It is increasingly reduced to its
policing and repressive functions, which are expanding in
ways that are more than merely coincidental to the assault
on social supports and programs. It is criminalizing and
thereby deepening social inequality and related social problems
through self-fulfilling policies of racially disparate (racist)
mass surveillance, arrest, and incarceration – a perfect
homeland counterpart to its racially disparate (racist) militarization
of global US empire and its attendant social, political,
and economic problems. The well-funded right-led campaign
to "starve" government's left hand produces instructive
disparities in mainstream news coverage. Dominant media covered
the terrible "problem" posed by the supposedly
horrendous swelling of the family cash public assistance
rolls so heavily that punitive "work-first" "welfare
reform" became practically inevitable during the mid-1990s.
The huge societal and related budgetary problems posed by
massive, costly swelling of prison, parole and probation
rolls and the related need to move people from prison and
the felony-stigmatized margins of society into the labor
market and other areas of civil society are non-issues by
mainstream comparison. They evoke only minor concern outside
the communities of color that are most targeted by American
criminal justice authorities.
The
Liberating Market vs. the Evil State
The
rise of "Racially disparate mass incarceration" also
challenges a fourth great American myth, strongly related
to the third. This legend claims that the defining political
and ideological conflict of our time is between the glorious,
liberty-enhancing logic of supposedly "free market" capitalism
on one hand and the dark, decrepit, and deadening hand of
the public sector on the other hand. "The market," we
are told again and again, is the answer to society's problems.
It is very different from the inherently evil, irresponsible,
and authoritarian State, which suppresses the virtuous "freedom" of
unfettered trade and investment – the magnificent world of
freely circulating commodities, capital, and currency. This
is one of the great fairy tales of our age. The real domestic
policy conflict that matters today, as at the beginning of
the Republic and ever since, is not between the state/polity
and the market/economy. It is between one type (aristocratic
and authoritarian) of public policy and political economy
and another type (social and democratic) of public policy
and political economy. The first brand of policy serves the
interests of the privileged few and punishes the poor and
many others as well. It excludes those at the bottom and
exacerbates their pain and stigma. The second, more left-handed
brand serves the social and democratic needs of the majority,
reaching out especially to those who are most disadvantaged
and in need of uplift and assistance – in the name of equity
and justice.
The
situation of America's burgeoning incarcerated and ex-offender
population is an excellent case in point. Nobody seriously
concerned to ameliorate the plight of the increasingly hyper-criminalized
black and urban population can believe that group is going
to be usefully served by the "free market." That
not-so free market is no small part of what has crippled
inner city communities, pushing many of their residents into "crime" (especially
drug trading and using) and (along with some help from racially
disparate policing and sentencing) the criminal justice system
in the first place. Deeply enabled by and reflective of state-capitalist
public ("trade" and non-industrial) policy, it
has removed the industrial jobs that used to sustain those
communities and denied inner-city people access to the more
affluent communities where jobs and skills have concentrated
(insofar as they have not disappeared overseas or simply
been eliminated). At the same time, the "free" market
has precious little to offer inner-city blacks with criminal
records; that population requires public intervention either
to directly engage and compensate their labor and/or to encourage
or compel employers to hire them.
The
dire situation of the people left behind in hyper-segregated,
deeply impoverished, and savagely de-industrialized communities
by racially disparate sprawl, globalization, and automation
calls for aggressive public, governmental intervention. The
only relevant question is what sort of intervention it's
going to be: left-handed or right-handed. Racist mass incarceration,
launched under the aegis of the ineffective and costly War
on Drugs, is one such intervention, a high- and right-handed
one with fascist implications that can only deepen the intertwined
cycles of poverty, racial inequality, violence, crime, inner-city
destabilization, substance abuse and despair. It promotes
the dangerous criminalization of social problems, a perfect
domestic mirror for the dominant foreign policy, which exacerbates
global crises and deepens violence through the militarization
of world political and social issues. It functions, it is
worth repeating, as a method of racially inverted reparations,
distributing a massive share of wealth from black to white
communities that has yet to find its statistician.
Other
Myths
There
are other national myths that might be included in a more
extended discussion of how the rise of "racially disparate
mass incarceration" contradicts dominant national narratives:
the notion of hard work and personal moral agency as the
key factor determining one's life condition; the idea that "the
criminal element" bases its behavior on a "rational" cost-benefit
analysis of outcomes, factoring in the likelihood and severity
of punishment to their decisions on whether or not to commit
illegal actions; the notion that crime is rampant (a staple
of the violence-happy news media); the notion that "punishment
works" in the effort to stem problem substance abuse;
and the transparently false idea that all Americans are equally
empowered by the rights granted and subject to the punishments
inflicted by the state. This last notion (long ago ridiculed
by the venerable American working-class slogan claiming that "money
talks and bullshit walks" in and out of the courtroom),
is hard to maintain in a time when (a) corporate crooks are
mildly punished for illegal practices that erased the jobs
and butchered the life savings of tens of thousands of Americans
(or more) while (b) hundreds of thousands of disproportionately
black and poor Americans do hard time under shocking conditions
(including the endemic threat of rape) for nonviolent and
especially narcotic offenses.
Policy,
Ideology, and Discourse
There's
little mysterious or tricky about what might and should – from
a minimally social, democratic, and racially inclusive perspective – be
done to close the vicious circle of racially disparate mass
incarceration. The standard "liberal" litany of
minimally reasonable policy solutions is loaded with ideas
that make basic social, democratic, budgetary, and common
sense, including: the repeal of mandatory sentencing laws,
and the establishment of new structures for reviewing and
revising state sentencing policies and pointing judges towards
the most effective use of correctional options; the creation
of new prison and post-prison supports and responsibilities
for prisoners and released ex-prisoners; an end to racial
profiling in traffic and pedestrian stop-and-search and surveillance
and to racially disparate practices in the prosecution and
sentencing of drug and other offenders; the creation of a
new policy focus and government agency to coordinate the
transition from prison to work; the elimination of inappropriate
barriers to, and the creation of new possibilities and incentives
for, the appropriate employment of ex-offenders; investment
in treatment instead of incarceration. In an exhaustive social
science research study that has been scandalously ignored
by all but a few policy makers in the US for almost a decade
now, the conservative RAND corporation found that every additional
dollar invested in substance abuse treatment saves taxpayers
$7.46 in societal costs to pay for crime, violence, and lost
productivity.
Policy
matters of course, but a big part of the problem – a reason
these minimally civilized policy steps are so hard to implement – is
moral and ideological, reflecting and relating to the creation
and maintenance of dominant homeland narratives. To roll
back the ineffective and costly strategy of what the Open
Society calls "over-incarceration," we need specific,
carefully-crafted policy "fixes." We also need
to turn off – or, better, learn to critically scrutinize – its
overabundance of reactionary, law-enforcement-worshipping
television shows and news coverage and drop its related nasty
habit of blaming the victims of its radical experiment in "racially
mass incarceration." The rise of Incarceration Nation
is a radical, deeply racist, and partly even fascist state
development, not a tragic and unavoidable response of the
state to terrible behavior on the part of a massive "criminal
element" that needs to be punitively conditioned to
act rationally upon the supposedly remarkable opportunities
it faces in the glorious world of stateless, color-blind
marketplace capitalism.
In
the effort to slay this many headed prison beast, we need
to liberate ourselves from crippling doctrinal orthodoxies
and rekindle a basic understanding of the need for constructive
and positive (left-handed) government action across deadly,
socially constructed barriers of race, class, gender, and
power. We need to take our political lives and social imaginations
back from the aristocratic, well-funded authoritarians who
have captured public policy and discourse and turned them
into mechanisms of repression and privilege. The stakes are
not minor. As it is now, we are heading towards a Brave New
World in which permanent American racist war and empire abroad
both feeds on and reflects permanent racist inequality and
repression at home, both imposed in the curious names of
freedom, the market, and democracy.
Paul
Street ([email protected])
is the author of Empire Abroad, Inequality at Home: Writings
on America and the World (Paradigm Publishers, 2004).
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