You can stash this little bit in your “Most Grossly Under-Reported Stories” file.
Last November, the Justice Department reported that there were a record 7 million people behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. That means roughly 1 in every 32 adults in the United States is somehow in the custody of the corrections infrastructure. That’s a 2.7% increase from just the previous year and, what’s worse, the numbers have risen eight-fold since 1975. The federal prison system is currently operating at 34% over capacity. But enough with the statistics already…
Now, I spent about 13 hours in jail once, most of which I was not literally “behind bars” but rather in a endless series of mind-numbing booking procedures or sitting in a large holding room (yes, in cuffs) trying not to look scared while I waited for the next step of booking. Jail is not fun… not even a little. And “jail” is not even “prison,” which I don’t want to imagine. My stint in the big house was ultimately the result of a totally mundane paperwork mistake– for some reason, my driver’s license was showing up as suspended, which it wasn’t– but the two things that I learned in my experience were that (1) you really don’t have to do anything wrong to end up in jail, and (2) once they get you in there, it takes a lot of time and money to get out, regardless of innocence or guilt. Those were the longest 13 hours of my life, hands down.
I’m going to set aside some of the most obvious problems with the high rate of incarceration in the U.S. (racial bias, inept public defenders, Draconian “mandatory minimum” laws, rampant prison violence, backlogged appeals processes, recidivism rates) and address a couple of things that I don’t think get mentioned enough.
1. The slow and steady siphoning of income from lower- and middle-class families. People spend a lot of time talking about the state’s expenses for keeping prisoners in jail (about $20,000 per year), but not enough about the expense to the families of inmates. Since the inmate population is disproportionately represented by lower- and middle-class men, there is a large population of women–who, it should go without saying, are much poorer than the state– who are bearing the burden of the paralyzingly expensive “justice” process. There are a host of reasons why the poor get poorer in this country, but this is a big one.
2. Permanent disenfranchisement of ex-cons. As we all know, anyone convicted of a federal offense loses his or her right to vote… but what many people don’t know is that it is for the rest of his or her life! For felons, it’s not enough to “do the time” for your crime, they keep paying for it looooong afterwards. That means, in our “democracy,” you can pay your taxes, be drafted for service and be accountable to the law without having any representative participation in your government whatsoever. Where is the motivation for reforming the prison system going to come from? Which brings me to the last point…
3. Retribution, not reform, rules the roost. It seems that this country gave up a long time ago on viewing incarceraton as potentially reformative. This is a bit of a vicious circle, I realize, because the over-laden system can only barely house and feed the population that it is charged to manage, so any attempt to institute programs that are not directed at the most basic level of subsistence fall by the wayside. Even still, we lose the moral high ground when we view prison as merely punitive. If we don’t even pretend to believe that prisoners can be reformed, then not only do we set in motion the inevitable (high recidivism rates) but we might as well just execute most offenders.
I’m not sure what action to encourage here to help remedy this growing problem– except, of course, “avoid the police at all costs”– but, at least with reference to #2, I can share an organization that I have been tracking for a while and which I think is genuinely trying to help. Please check out Project Vote, which is steadily working to faciliatate legislation that will re-enfranchise ex-cons.