The main vector in perpetuating street gangs is the eternal domestic Drug War which allocates more resources for prisons and drug enforcement than for schools and local social safety nets. And there's only getting to be more people locked up in the system, leading to a hole in the fabric of society...
"
US prison population 55% higher than USSR under Stalin" [
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/us_prison_population_55_higher_than_ussr]
The US prison population now stands at around 2.3 million. This is around 800,000 higher than the PRC with around 1.5 million (with a total population of 1.3 billion) and around 55% higher than the number of prisoners in the USSR under Stalin, which peaked at 1,500,524 in January 1941. The level of crime and the levels of inequality in a society go hand in hand, statistically you are more likely to commit crime the more oppressed you are*. These numbers should be a stark reminder of how polarised the United States is becoming. Throwing more and more people in jail isn't a long term solution, tackling the causes of crime, such as crippling poverty rampant in many inner city areas in the US and shrinking the gap between rich and poor is. Many British politicians too, especially the Conservative Party should take note. Americans should ask questions, why does a country with 4% of the world's population have 25% of the world's prison population? Last year on the 1st of May millions of workers went out on strike, the actions of these people is the example all American workers should follow because only through their combined action can these problems be tackled. They can't be touched by voting in a different pro-business party, only by grass roots action with trade unions and a formation of a labour party upon them; with a radical program of social reforms, nationalisation and re-distribution of wealth can these issues be tackled. *Unfortunately the crimes the capitalists (and Lord Brown) commit screwing the workers with pay cuts and the theft of thousands and tens of thousands of pounds per year per worker in unpaid wages isn't recognised yet as being a crime, just good business.
2012-01-30 "The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people? by Adam Gopnik
[
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?printable=true¤tPage=all]
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. Photograph by Steve Liss.
A
prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about
the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American
prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us,
because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan
Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the
idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems
impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less,
because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for
decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable
sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their
inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless
time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out
five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American
prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s
why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever
forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful
paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping
fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this
whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of
us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask
the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a
smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that
there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple
truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free
is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of
something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For
American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much
longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the
civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred
teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing
you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the
experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s
arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor
black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life,
much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half
of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time
in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in
human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the
fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth,
there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in
prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all,
there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in
America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under
Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled,
Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The
accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as
startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two
hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand
Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred
and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two
decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times
the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a
“carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former
conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds
himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old
joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a
conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a
conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our
prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least
fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary
confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men
are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and
write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo
“exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to
stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the
experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand
prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat,
part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder
for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in
prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and
rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like
eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the
gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic,
incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into
our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and
laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of
incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How
did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging
and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast
numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a
fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology
of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for
punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two
directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on
the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in
Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation,
which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation
continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern
revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,”
traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of
rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of
subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste
for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks
to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School
who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American
Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful
advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the
Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs
through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth
of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with
major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group;
mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising
judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the
way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is
still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests
that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a
justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French
Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may
have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The
trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes
process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the
Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead
of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something
that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong;
the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks
procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t
accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This
emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused
criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural
errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious
violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the
wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you
have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You
may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your
appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous
accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the
jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are,
Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual
punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and
branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with
due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an
essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a
system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real
people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven
judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show
detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons.
Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to
prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in
Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly
depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of
American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in
1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the
Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the
time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country,
where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still
resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating
the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment,
prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow
and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably
worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and
tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon
the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts
few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as
a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure
ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our
civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and
forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal
debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it
personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American
prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black,
at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel,
the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on
their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to
the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine
how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction,
Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he
thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is
and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and
specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,”
the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction,
where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part
of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says
desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz,
justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error
caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be
more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact
but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness,
circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies
of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that
this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American
prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of
procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals.
Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern
reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and
promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor,
writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to
Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White
supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial
domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the
sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks
are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass
incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and
literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black
men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of
“formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for
life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally
discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back
through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really
broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim
conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social
control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic
success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a
common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now
contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The
companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as
little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to
imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit:
the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of
having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as
possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document
exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the
biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the
company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to
caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone
might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is
generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop
and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand
for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the
relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing
practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that
are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes
with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration
could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced,
thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house
them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a
capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as
it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet
a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process
gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of
imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same
period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less
crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison
boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the
crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to
recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may
seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and
adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent
American life and explains much else that happened in the same period.
It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal
rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism,
that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz
himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is
between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious
effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did
have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by
2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime
would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would
have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was
supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated
underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to
change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an
opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content
ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of
gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like
broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work
interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation
between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the
nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that
there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was
warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed
to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a
ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in
Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very
occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the
murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared
to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal
classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A
century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American
prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And
then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a
standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as
eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its
greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer
murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In
social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we
experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill
cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have
gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of
Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big
event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years
crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of
what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how
little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed,
there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons
that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South
Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic
shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes
the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the
sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that
societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions
and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social
existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal
behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the
additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York
finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from
resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing
super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering
welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed
to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any
“Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or
the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer.
There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average
wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or
less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that
is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an
atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible
effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the
slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent
crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down
through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering,
designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the
nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor
crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots
of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an
aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch
the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators,
described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This
was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects
were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the
thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority
communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids
stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a
disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more”
is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of
stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that
by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of
greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long
stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a
radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where
criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities.
“In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority
African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and
what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude
assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side
criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed
that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting
to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only
way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth,
criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of
contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a
set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number
of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in
Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins
Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing
goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the
decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of
crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re
less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember,
nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent
crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style:
“Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used
to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a
result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent
things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.”
Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough
doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice
doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social
pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting
small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the
rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in
incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York,
despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number
of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in
crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly
of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring
observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to
do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we
just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept
that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no
inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling
dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on
Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office
building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of
pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the
opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social
trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians
analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain
things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries
probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York,
who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I.
could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the
mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped
drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and
stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police
believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better
than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a
good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of
punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler
and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid
over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps
the wound to heal itself.
Which leads, further, to one piece of
radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in
stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in
prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is
made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone
with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no
social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer
locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him
bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next
decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of
shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their
bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service
seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom
those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are
ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if
crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop
committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world,
and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in
prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be
alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests,
we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that
are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like
marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked
kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their
fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more
serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana
possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though,
in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to
enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that
manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s
obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in
America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades)
but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which
has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived
risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll
get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The
decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of
imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free
countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably
steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some
mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those
with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal
plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a
brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate
of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred
thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich,
homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries
otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in
a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point
of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a
way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a
break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time
in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a
better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away
at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do
with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to
its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see
the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of
punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or
declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime
wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up
eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no
miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities.
Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana,
leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting
judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are
possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped
end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of
this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take
physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This”
changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that
starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and
Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines.
But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the
attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already
dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed,
overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every
moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and
in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that
you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change
it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social
order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble
problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more
care. ♦
