[discuss-dan] American Gulag

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http://www.yesmagazine.org/15prisons/miller.htm

Yes! Magazine

Fall 2000

American Gulag

By Jerome G. Miller

The figures are startling. In the last year of the Carter
administration (1979), our nation's federal prisons held about
20,000 inmates. By contrast, as the Clinton administration
draws to a close we will have 135,000 inmates in federal
prisons; projecting an annual growth of 10 percent the
number will reach a quarter million in five years. In 1979,
there were 268,000 inmates in the prisons of all 50 states.
Today, they hold almost 1.3 million. In 1979, there were
150,000 in local jails and lockups. Today, local jail
facilities hold nearly 700,000. This year, we will exceed
2 million inmates in our prisons and jails. As we enter the
millennium, the nation has about 6.5 million of its citizens
under some form of correctional supervision.

And a new twist has been added: the "supermax" prison
composed exclusively of cells used for solitary confinement.
A place of studied sensual deprivation and psychological
torture, it was designed by correctional managers to control
their populations as privileges in routine prisons were
diminished and sentences were lengthened. A product less of
management necessity than of a twisted psyche, these temples
to sado-masochism now dot the American landscape, presently
containing 20,000 mostly minority inmates.

Spurred on by a "drug war" that focuses inordinately upon
the poor and minorities, we have seen astonishing patterns
of incarceration among young black men vis a vis similarly
accused white men. Although the rates of drug consumption
are roughly equal among white and black populations, blacks
are imprisoned for drug offenses at 14 times the rate of
whites.

The patterns in some states are truly astonishing. Between
1986 and 1996 for example, the rate of incarceration for
drug offenses among African Americans increased by 10,102
percent in Louisiana; in Georgia, by 5,499 percent; in
Arkansas 5,033 percent; in Iowa 4,284 percent; and in
Tennessee 1,473 percent.

There are currently more than 50 million criminal records
on file in the US, with at least 4 to 5 million "new" adults
acquiring such a record annually. This record sticks with
a person, whether or not charges are dropped or there is a
subsequent conviction. A notorious example occurred in the
recent police killing of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed young
Haitian immigrant. In an attempt to rationalize the police
behavior, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani characterized the deceased
as "no altar boy" and released a "criminal record" that
included two past convictions for "disorderly conduct"
and a juvenile charge that had been dismissed over two
decades earlier when Dorismond was 13 years old.

For certain racial and ethnic groups, being arrested and
locked up is a given. Beginning in adolescence, we have
established a warped "rite of passage" for young African
Americans and Hispanics; only by a fluke will they avoid
acquiring a "criminal record" -- the result of an arrest.

In 1990, the nonprofit Washington, DC-based Sentencing
Project found that on an average day, one in every four
African-American men ages 20-29 was either in prison, in
jail, or on probation/parole. Ten years later, the ratio
had shrunk to one in three.

Research conducted by the National Center on Institutions
and Alternatives revealed that more than half of young black
males living in Washington, DC, and Baltimore are caught up
in the criminal justice system on an average day -- either
in prison, jail, on probation or parole, out on bond, or
being sought on a warrant.

Three of every four (76 percent) African-American 18-year-
olds living in urban areas can now anticipate being arrested
and jailed before age 36. In the process, each young man will
acquire a "criminal record." By the late 1990s, federal
statisticians were predicting that nearly one of every
three adult black men in the nation could anticipate
being sentenced to a federal or state prison at some
time during his life.

The most telling numbers of all are contained in a US
Justice Department historical breakdown of admissions to
state and federal prisons over the past century. Although
African Americans were always over-represented (often for
reasons unrelated to crime rates), the racial gap grew
exponentially as we approached the millennium. In 1926,
whites made up 79 percent of the inmates entering our state
and federal prisons. Blacks made up 21 percent. By 1999
however, African Americans were making up between 55 percent
and 60 percent of all new admissions to state and federal
prisons. If Latino inmates are included, slightly over three
out of four Americans sentenced to federal or state prisons
were minorities.

This fact has brought a sea change in public attitudes
regarding crime and criminals and ushered in the era of the
"rhetorical wink," characterized by Lani Guinier, whereby a
white politician can talk about getting tough on "criminals"
and, with a wink, convey to the audience "black criminals."
Race need never be mentioned.

The uncomfortable truth is that the national attitude on
crime is more firmly grounded in race than in putative crime
rates. The surge in crime rates occurred between 1965 and
1973. The general trend since that time, with "blips" in
1989 and 1991, has been for crime to either remain stable
or to decline.

While most people assume jail overcrowding results from
rising crime rates, increased violence, or general population
growth, that is seldom the case. Here, in order of importance,
are the major contributors to jail overcrowding:

1. The number of police officers
2. The number of judges
3. The number of courtrooms
4. The size of the district attorney's staff
5. Policies of the state's attorney's office concerning
    which crimes deserve the most attention
6. The size of the staff of the entire court system
7. The number of beds available in the local jail
8. The willingness of victims to report crimes
9. Police department policies concerning arrest
10. The arrest rate within the police department
11. The actual amount of crime committed

It is common for a "trickle-up effect" to set in. Although
there may be little or no change in the ways serious crimes
are handled, those who engage in minor infractions of the law
end up receiving harsh penalties as well, thereby "casting
the net" of social control ever wider. Such matters should
give the nation pause as we move aggressively to build more
prisons and camps, but there is little to suggest any respite.

The distinguished British criminologist Andrew Rutherford
summarized the trend well: "All natural tendencies toward
stability appear to have evaporated. Not only has there
been a quantum leap of unprecedented proportions in prison
populations, but there appear also to be no indications of
any counter forces which might impose limits."

Carnegie-Mellon criminologist Alfred Blumstein put it another
way: "Once criminal policy in the United States fell into the
political arena, little could be done to recapture concern
for limiting prison populations. ... Our political system
learned an overly simplistic trick: when it responds to such
pressures by sternly demanding increased punishments, that
approach has been found to be strikingly effective, not
in solving the problem, but in alleviating the political
pressure to `do something'."

To many, the "tough on crime" attitude seems a good thing --
a return to basic values, a focus on the rights of victims,
an adieu to the "bleeding heart" policies of the past.
Overall, the prevailing public mood on crime is vicious.

I recently watched a video of a "focus group" on crime
conducted by a Republican pollster and consultant. In
discussing a recent shooting of a teacher by a 13-year-old
African-American middle-school honor student, the consultant
asked the group what they would do in such a case. Their
response seemed even to embarrass him as he tried to smile
away the comments of this scientifically chosen "average"
group of local citizens. "Fry him!" came the insistent
shouts from the group as the 13-year-old's situation
was being presented. Only one older African-American
man remained silent.

I wanted to avert my eyes from the TV. It brought to mind
another mood observed by the Danish sociologist Svend Ranulf
when he looked across the border into the Germany of the
early 1930s to see how that country proposed dealing with
criminals and crime. "Everywhere" he saw a "disinterested
disposition to punish." He called it "disinterested" because
"no direct personal advantage seemed to be achieved by calling
for the harsh punishment of another person who had injured a
third party." Noting that this punitive inclination was not
equally strong in all human societies and was entirely lacking
in some, Ranulf concluded that it did not arise out of concern
for deterrence. Rather, it was a kind of "disguised envy,"
less a response to an increased crime rate than tied to
the economic insecurities of the middle class.

Indeed, the anti-crime program undertaken in accordance with
the principles of National Socialism and proposed by the
Prussian minister of justice in 1933 seems oddly resonant
today. Aggravated penalties were added to criminal acts
already subject to punishment; mitigation was to be allowed
in only the rarest and most exceptional cases; attempts at
crime were to be dealt with as severely as accomplished
crimes; drunkenness was to be considered an aggravating,
rather than extenuating, circumstance; there was to be more
liberal recourse to capital punishment; and prisons were to
be made harsher, with disciplinary measures to be applied at
the discretion of prison wardens. Criticizing the alleged
permissiveness of the Weimar Republic toward criminals, the
minister ended his white paper with a familiar slogan. "It
seemed," he wrote, "that the welfare of the criminal, and
not the welfare of the people, was the main purpose of the
law."

Indeed, prisons and jails are an "early warning system" of
sorts for a society. They constitute the canary in the coal
mine, providing an omen of mortal danger that often lies
beyond our capacity to perceive.

The experience of the past two decades suggests that we are
ignoring this warning. We are in a curious position in which
a surfeit of prisons filled with a million minority young
men is seen not as an embarrassment, but as indispensable
to the smooth running of our democracy and integral to its
economy. In effect, the attitude that suffused Southern
jails and prisons during post-Civil War reconstruction
has been replicated nationally.

For more than 20 years, our politicians have played the
dangerous game of one-upping each other over who can demand
the harshest punishments. In this pursuit, the definition
of what is criminal, the relaxing of limits on the police
to enforce laws, and the mandatory use of prison over non-
institutional means of control or correction have been
distilled to carefully crafted marketing slogans like
"three strikes and you're out."

Offenders emerge from prison afraid to trust, fearful of
the unknown, and with a vision of the world shaped by the
meaning that behaviors had in the prison context. For a
recently released prisoner, experiences like being jostled
on the subway, having someone reach across him in the bath-
room to take a paper towel, or making eye contact can be
taken as a precursor to a physical attack. In relationships
with loved ones, this warped kind of socialization means
that problems will not easily be talked through. In a sense,
the system we have designed to deal with offenders is among
the most iatrogenic in history, nurturing those very
qualities it claims to deter.

During the question period following a lecture to a college
audience, the social critic and linguist Noam Chomsky was
recently asked why he was so rarely seen on TV or on the
"op-ed" pages of our major newspapers and why he wasn't
among those asked to testify on policy matters before
Congress. There seemed to be no dearth of commentary
from the mavens of the Right, yet he was mostly
absent from these forums.

Chomsky responded by describing a conversation he had with
ABC/CNN commentator Jeff Greenfield. Greenfield told him
that he was unlikely to be booked on a national program like
"Nightline," for example, because he was "from Neptune."
Chomsky's views were too far "outside the box" to merit
discussion on a popular TV program. It had nothing to do
with whether or not his ideas might be valid. It was because
he couldn't be afforded the time needed to lay out the context
within which his views might be understood. For him to express
his views absent their context put him in the company of those
who are from Neptune -- out of touch, if not a bit loony.

Chomsky's predicament has a personal resonance. The "context"
of my professional life over the past 35 years has been
shaped by attempts to create alternative programs for the
inmates of detention centers, jails, and prisons. At the
beginning, there was some general acceptance of the ideas
I tried haltingly to express through my work. However, hope
for "consensual validation" of such efforts from peers and
policy makers in the criminal justice community has pretty
much faded with the years, as a sense of alienation pulls
me ever closer to Neptune.

I vividly remember the case of Doug, a stocky 16-year-old
addicted to heroin. Late one evening, returning home from a
meeting near the state reform school over which I'd recently
assumed control, I decided to take a quick side trip to the
so-called disciplinary cottage. I asked the "master" on duty
whether anyone was upstairs in the "tombs," (the strip cells
that I'd ordered closed a few weeks earlier). No. I guess he
thought I wouldn't bother to go upstairs and look. There, in
a far corner of one of the dim cells, was Doug, lying stripped
on the bare cement floor. I stood in the doorway trying to
talk though the mesh security screen that separated us. "How
long have you been here?" The muffled reply: "A few days."
"Why are you here?" His voice grew more agitated: "I tried
to make it over the fence out back." I told him I wanted
him to come out and go back downstairs. "We aren't using
the tombs anymore." Doug let go a torrent of obscenities
-- "You naive asshole! You dumb motherfucker! Don't you
know kids like me need to be in here?"

Doug had learned his lessons well. He had become the well-
socialized product of our reform school -- a "disciplinary
cottage success" who believed what it taught. The way to
handle unacceptable impulses is to be grabbed, beaten,
handcuffed, dragged screaming up cement steps, stripped,
and thrown into a "tomb."

It's not that we don't know that our present medieval tapestry
of crime and punishment will at some point unravel. It isn't
that there aren't alternative ways presently available for
dealing with those who threaten us or break our laws. However,
at times they seem largely futile, if not actually counter-
productive. In the present poisoned atmosphere, even the
most well-intentioned alternatives run the danger of being
pummeled to serve the very same warped conception of
humanity they would challenge.

Somewhere in my youth I learned that the only unforgivable
sin is the sin of despair. For that reason if no other, I
choose to continue what has become a somewhat melancholy
battle. It is a great comfort to know that so many others
continue to exercise their hope for a better way with
equanimity and crazy joy.

--

Jerome G. Miller is the president and co-founder of the
National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, which
develops innovative criminal justice programs and services
(see page 46). Miller has a doctorate in psychiatric social
work and is recognized as one of the nation's leading
authorities on corrections and clinical work with
violent juvenile and adult sex offenders.

Miller is best known for closing the state reform schools
in Massachusetts and replacing them with community-based
programs while serving as commissioner of the state
Department of Youth Services. He has since headed criminal
justice programs in four other states. His books include:
Over the Wall (re-released by Ohio State University Press
in 1998) and Search & Destroy: African Americans in the
Criminal Justice System (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Copyright (c) 2000 Positive Futures Network. All Rights Reserved.

Positive Futures Network
P.O. Box 10818
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-0818
Phone: 206-842-0216
Fax: 206-842-5208

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