I had no sooner read a recent spate of newspaper articles on
the prison crisis in the U.S., and heard Attorney General Holder's announcement
that he would seek to curtail stiff federal drug sentences, than I received from
my daughter-in-law Kate a very germane book on the subject: Ernest Drucker's A
Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. It
fully opened my eyes to an ongoing catastrophe. Shame on me! I
had been only vaguely aware of its monstrous national proportions, even though
it has been all too prominent in my own state, California. Drucker rightly calls it a plague.
Just a few statistics tell the incredible tale. The U.S. stands first in the world in
rate of incarceration:
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Rates of Incarceration, 2008
[Source: A Plague of Prisons, p. 43]
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With only 5% of the world's population,
it has 25% of its prisoners. About
2.5 million Americans are currently in prisons/jails, and almost another 4.8
million are on probation or parole, the total accounting for 3% of the adult
population enmeshed in the criminal-justice system.
It was not always like this. Incarceration rates in the U.S. were virtually constant for
the hundred years prior to 1975, before beginning to surge to current levels,
as seen in the data for New York State:
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Growth of Prison Population in New York State, 1880-2000
[Source: A Plague of Prisons, p. 51]
Drucker, an epidemiologist, rightly calls the surge an
epidemic. His book shows that it indeed has all the hallmarks of disease
epidemics: sudden onset, rapid growth, large magnitude, persistence,
self-sustenance, collateral damage to families, and destabilization of
communities. Like tuberculosis, it
is disproportionately clustered among the poor. Like HIV/AIDS, response to it is through ostracism rather
than engagement, leading to its further spread. Recidivism is similar to the relapse of an illness, also
usually for lack of proper treatment.
Just as John Snow, the father of modern epidemiology, used
data analysis to trace the source of a cholera epidemic in 19th-century
London to a single well polluted by sewage, Drucker likewise traces the cause
for the incarceration epidemic to the start of the war on drugs in the
1970s. The startling growth of New
York's incarceration rate shown above began just when a new set of drug laws
and policies were implemented there in 1973. Those laws mandated lengthy minimum sentences for possession
and use of even small quantities of drugs—sentences that were often more severe
than for violent crimes like rape and murder, and they increased enormously for
repeat offenses. By 2000,
drug-related commitments rose from 10% to 45% of the total. Funding for more prisons grew
proportionally, at the expense of funding for research on and treatment of
addiction. (It's as if research on
the causes and treatment of leprosy had been defunded in order to build more
leper colonies.) And as New York
State went, so went the nation.
Racial profiling exacerbated the epidemic by
disproportionately targeting blacks and Latinos, just as sickle-cell anemia preponderantly
targets blacks. The following
graph shows that rates of incarceration in New York State for blacks and
Latinos have been 10 to 20 times higher than that for whites, both before and
after the onset of the epidemic in the 1970s. There are those who would claim this as evidence that
minorities are more prone to crime, including drug crimes. But in fact use and possession of drugs
by minorities is at about the same level as or less than that of whites; so, if
there were no profiling, the rate of jailing minorities should have decreased comparatively as drug crimes rose from 10% to 45% of the total. On the contrary, blacks and Latinos continued to be arrested
at a rate more than 10 times than that of whites after the 1970s, including
for drug offenses:
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White, Black and Latino Incarceration Rates in New York State, 1880-2000
[Source: A Plague of Prisons, p. 60]
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A single passage from Drucker's
book illustrates the extent of this racial inequity:
"In 2010, the
New York City Police Department arrested 50,383 for misdemeanor marijuana
possession, at a cost of over $75 million … making marijuana possession the
leading reason for arrest in the city.
The vast majority of these arrests are of young people under thirty, and
nearly 86 percent of those arrested are black or Latino, even though research …
consistently shows that young whites use marijuana at higher rates."
Another fact further emphasizes
the inequity: For the one drug
used more by blacks—crack cocaine—federal penalties have historically been as
much as 100 times harsher than for powder cocaine, which is used more heavily
by whites.
The appalling statistics about the epidemic of incarceration
for all kinds of crime go on and on.
Particularly shameful is the vast proportion of incarcerations for
misdemeanors and victimless crimes rather than for felonies and violent
crimes. Even in the impoverished
South Bronx, for example, only 3% of convictions are for felonies, while
approximately half of all arrests are for "life-style" crimes such as
loitering, vagrancy and recreational drug use.
To read Drucker's book is to be thrown into the world of
Dickens, where whole families were imprisoned for being in debt, where being in
the company of gypsies for a month could be punished by hanging, where orphans
were often placed in gruesome workhouses.
The society Dickens wrote about was based on class-conscious definitions
of morality and fitness—a state-sponsored code of living, violation of which
likely would lead to severe, life-derailing and usually undeserved
punishment.
Have we become a Dickensian nation, one which prefers
conformity to heterogeneity, incarceration to education, punishment to
remedies? I shudder to think so!