What is jail for? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem | Books

Jhe statistics are familiar but still startling: America’s incarceration rate per 100,000 population is “about twice that of Russia and Iran, four times that of Mexico, five times that of England, six times that of Canada” and nine times that of Germany. Additionally, “Parole and probation govern the lives of 4.5 million Americans” — more than double those who are incarcerated.

These numbers come at the start of Bill Keller’s clever and short new book, in which he attempts to explain how America has become so addicted to mass incarceration, and how we could finally reform a system that houses a disproportionately large population. black and brown.

Keller is a seasoned journalist who won a Pulitzer for his first assignment at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent, in Moscow as the Soviet Union was collapsing. He was then editor and then columnist, but in 30 years, criminal justice has never been one of his specialties. That all changed when Neil Barsky, a journalist-turned-investor-turned-philanthropist, asked Keller to be the founding editor of The Marshall Projectan ambitious effort to produce great journalism on the “causes and consequences” of mass incarceration.

Keller’s book highlights many of the best stories from Marshall Project reporters, but he also uses much of his own reporting to illuminate this particularly dark side of American democracy.

The “good news”: the prison population has actually seen a slow and steady decline, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2020, including an unprecedented drop of 14% spurred by the early releases due to Covid.

America’s unfortunate exceptionalism in this regard is actually a fairly recent development. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the incarceration rate held steady at about 110 Americans per 100,000. But it’s nearly 500 today.

Liberals and conservatives were equally responsible. A House Democratic spokesman, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, overreacted to Boston Celtics draftee Len Bias’ crack overdose, pushing through the 1986 Drug Act, ” which imposed mandatory sentences, confiscations of assets and extravagantly harsh measures”. crack penalties” favored by black residents of the ghetto, while white users of powder cocaine faced much lighter penalties.

As Keller writes, “rehabilitation has been denigrated on the right as a treat.” But a Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Joseph R Biden of Delaware, made it all worse by defending the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only spurred a building boom in prisons, but also eliminated Pell grants for prisoners enrolled in college. Classes. President Biden has admitted his mistake.

It was President Reagan who introduced the profit motive to the prison business, allowing the Corrections Corporation of America to pioneer the “idea of ​​private for-profit prisons”. As Keller explains, “Since new prison owners were paid the same as hotel owners, per occupancy, they had no incentive to prepare prisoners for release.” Private prisons now house approximately 7% of state inmates and 17% of federal inmates.

Keller makes an unwitting argument for sending more Republicans to jail, pointing out that three of the most unlikely supporters of prison reform are Republican officials who have ended up in jail.

Patrick Nolan was the California Assembly’s Minority Leader when, in 1993, he was indicted on racketeering and extortion charges. He served 25 months in a federal prison near San Francisco. When he was paroled, he was recruited by Charles Colson, a notorious Nixon White House Watergate criminal who discovered religion “shortly before serving seven months in federal prison himself.” .

Colson campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners. Nolan became director of a new center for criminal justice reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Meanwhile, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner who later served three years in federal prison for tax evasion and other misdemeanors, has become an advocate for ex-criminals’ voting rights.

It’s not all good news. By the end of the Trump administration, Nolan had succumbed to a right-wing conspiracy theory that “billionaire George Soros was behind a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors and bring down the entire criminal justice system”.

KEller points to Norway and Germany as the best examples of systemic reform. While American prison guards rarely take more than a few weeks of training, Germans take two years of university courses in psychology, ethics and communication. American visitors to German prisons are amazed to see unarmed guards “shooting baskets, playing chess, sharing lunch” and having conversations with prisoners.

One of the reasons Europe is so far ahead is its depoliticization of the criminal justice system: judges and district attorneys are appointed, not elected.

A Fordham University professor, John Pfaff, pointed out that in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s, “as violent crime and violent crime arrests both declined, the number of criminal incidents in state courts” suddenly increased. Due to political pressure, “tens of thousands of additional prosecutors” were hired, “even after the rising crime of the 1980s stagnated”.

Pfaff attributed the racial inequality in prisoner numbers to “an imbalance of political power—tough crime prosecutors elected by suburban whites who see from afar the community destruction of mass incarceration.”

Keller reports that the most effective ways to reduce the prison population are also the most obvious:

• Make petty drug-related offenses “non-crimes”.

• Refer people to “mental health and addictions programs, or probation or community service”.

• “Abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage” judges to “apply the least severe sentence appropriate in the circumstances.”

• Grant “compassionate release to elderly and infirm detainees” who pose no real threat to the general population.

The challenge is to make these common-sense ideas prevail over the rhetoric of politicians who still attack anyone who is “soft on crime” – the instinctive ideology that got us into this disaster in the first place.