The shame of U.S. prisons

Most of us, I imagine, have not spent time in prison. Thus, we cannot know quite what it is like to be incarcerated. Yet many of our fellow citizens are incarcerated. In fact, writes Adam Gopnik in “The Caging of America” (The New Yorker, Jan. 30), “Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.”

Gopnik writes that “a prison is a trap for catching time.” The relentless ennui is suffocating. “The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock,” he writes. Time stops.

Given the inhumane horror of being in prison, the greater horror is how ubiquitous it is in our country. “For a great many poor people,” writes Gopnik, “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.”

He adds that “more than half of all black men without a high school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives” and calls such mass incarceration “the fundamental fact of our country today, … as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” In truth, he writes, “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.”

Just as startling as the number of people jailed today is how much the prison population has grown in the past 30 years. “In 1980,” Gopnik writes, “there were about 220 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to 731.” This growth has huge consequences on our society. In the past 20 years, “the money states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.” The irony here is that the single greatest factor in reducing recidivism (relapsing into criminal behavior) is education.

And, as is pointed out often, the cost of keeping a prisoner is much greater than the cost of educating a person. For example, says Karin VanZant, CEO of Think Tank and the National Circles Campaign, studies show that by looking at third grade reading scores you can figure how many kids will drop out of high school before they graduate, and many of these will end up in prison. In Ohio, instead of investing $7,000 per year to raise reading scores, they are spending $37,000 per year for a prisoner.

Gopnik also points to the brutality of U.S. prisons. “Every day,” he writes, “at least 50,000 men … wake in solitary confinement, … 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.’ ” Add to this the existence and threat of prison rape (see Gopnik’s quote on page 11), and you have a horrible situation.

Gopnik looks at some recent literature on prisons and crime and encounters some interesting insights. For example, “Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crime,” he writes. If you close down an open drug market in one neighborhood, it does not necessarily move to another neighborhood.

Another insight: “Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.”

Gopnik concludes: “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.”

Take time to read the entire article. This huge problem in our country needs radical reform.

Two letters in the Feb. 27 issue respond to Gopnik's article. One, which I quoted from in my blog on immigration, is from Katherine Fennelly, who points out that "over 20,000 immigrants now languish in federal prison for no crime other than entering the United States without a valid visa."

The other letter is from Laura A. Tyson, who calls "our national obsession with imprisoning people for relatively petty and nonviolent offenses … a modern-day form of debtors' prison." She notes that many inmates she encounters "are arrested for outstanding warrants, some that date back as far as the 1980s. Nearly all of these warrants are for unpaid fines" for such things as loitering, "shoplifting, traffic violations, parking tickets and possession of small amounts of controlled substances." Since these women cannot pay the fines, they serve time in lieu of paying. They are "credited" about $30 a day toward their outstanding fines, but their stay in prison costs the public $100 a day. Talk about waste.

The U.S. prison system is not only immoral, it is wasteful, inefficient--in a word, stupid.

In the same chapter of the Bible (Matthew 25) where Jesus talks about welcoming him when we welcome the stranger, he also says, "I was in prison and you visited me" (v. 36).

Visiting is certainly important, but reforming prisons and removing prisoners is equally important. It's a shame.