We are living in times that demand action. For criminal-legal reform organizations the time for words, articles, declarations and protests has long passed. Reformers may have to step up their game. Frankly, as a twelve-year inmate of the Federal system who has witnessed prison from the inside and watched it harden and ossify, I clearly understand its misguided claims and assertions and know that nothing, NOTHING, will change without significant proactive measures. As Che Guevara notably said, you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. It is unfortunate but most true social change comes at a high price to those who want to effect it.
Most citizens not involved with the justice system would be surprised to learn that the vast majority of inmates in the U.S. are not locked up for fraud, theft, rape or murder as TV and Hollywood films would have their audiences believe. They are locked up for offenses connected with drug use and trafficking, unauthorized weapon possession and sales, and with inappropriate sexual behavior involving minors. This country spends fortunes on locking up the greater part of two million people for offenses that could be addressed in hundreds of different ways that do not result in broken homes, economic deprivation and loss of personal freedoms and rights There would also be less lower-tier offenses if we had a better system of education, a more equitable distribution of wealth and a system less driven by a false hyper-morality inherited from the past as well as by a mostly unregulated and addictive digital space in the present: the Internet. Unfortunately, millions of lives have already been ruined. In the last twenty-five years seventy million people in the U.S. have become classified as felons.
Currently nothing will stop our legal system from locking up thousands more.
The problem is not with the prison-industrial complex we have created. Prison is simply a symptom. The disease is our bizarre and conflicted notions of public safety and legality and our distorted sense of ‘justice’. Concepts of long sentences, harsh isolation, life without parole, death penalties and every other legal sanction suggested through the drama of the American courtroom purportedly to deliver ‘justice’, feed a process that destroys lives and communities and accomplishes very little. It does however deliver great ratings for media, and for some, a sense of vengeance and retribution. We are not now a more secure society. In fact, we are less so. The cliche is that insanity means doing something repetitively and expecting different results. Our legal system not only does that, it does it day after day, year after year, routinely. It does it more emphatically with each passing political cycle as if a harsher imposition of the same paranoid insanity will make things better.
Moral panic overtook the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s, a backlash to the moral revolutions of the 1960s that followed the post-World War years. Fear of drastic change drove society to create an expanded legal and carceral system through various crime bills passed in Washington and particularly through the creation of the Federal Sentencing Commission. This system is not based on any science or viable psychological or sociological study. It is simply a senseless hodgepodge formulation and encapsulation of eighteenth and nineteenth century legal practices. As those who believe in the system like to say: ‘we are a country of laws’. That statement implies that we are not a country of people but of ideas written down on some allegedly eternal and indestructible tablet, forever unchangeable. Meanwhile, since these supposedly unimpeachable laws can only be interpreted by fallible judges, prosecutors and attorneys, the system goes on to perpetrate actions that would violate all of these same eternally enshrined ‘truths’. For example, the U.S. locks up thousands of men for decades for downloading child porn but is happy to sell Israel and other countries billions of dollars’ worth of lethal weaponry and bombs to burn, maim and kill children. It puts people in prison for selling street drugs yet fosters and patronizes large pharmaceutical companies that create addictive medications and/or products for massive profit. It allows a man to sit in the oval office who has committed offenses that would put almost anyone else in prison for decades. There is an obvious dissonance here.
This hypocritical and insane manifestation of ‘justice’ which is our legal system has been in effect now for nearly forty years. It shows no sign of letting up or changing and in fact it shows every sign of becoming larger and more destructive. The tip of the spear this leviathan uses is the prison systems, state and federal. Those systems by their nature house the very formula for their downfall. Were inmates throughout the U.S. to be organized in systematic waves of work slow-downs and/or chow hall and commissary boycotts the system, which depends completely on inmate labor and compliance, would fold like a deck of cards. Sadly, it is this kind of difficult-to-organize action that may be not only necessary but long overdue before any real change, indeed before any small amount of compromise can even be considered. The infamous prison riots at Attica Prison in New York in the 1970s brought change but at the too high price of lost lives. Many of the issues that triggered the Attica riots have quietly seeped back into prison systems. The fact is that many of those issues were never truly resolved.
The problem at hand is that our carceral systems have for the most part in recent times provided a semi-humane approach to incarceration. The larger psychological destruction mass incarceration causes is largely obscured or deflected from the consciousness of inmates and the public by the way prisons house their captives. There are obvious and serious exceptions but by and large most inmates in the U.S. are treated in a way that creates the bogus illusion of ‘real life’, a poor imitation of life outside the walls. Television, tablets, pay-phones and computers are provided, usually in ways that are functionally irrelevant to education or rehabilitation, but which provide lulling, mindless entertainment and the illusion of communication. Inmates are given ‘work’ and programs that are generally pointless, but which provide some sense of daily purpose. Inmates are usually fed inadequately but offered plenty of unhealthy food choices, candy and soda in vast quantities often mirroring the nutritional aspects of life in the ghetto. Prison is in fact, a kind of ghetto steeped in poverty and violence. The inmate in an American prison, specially at the lower security levels, learns to accept the brutal loss of freedom which is substituted by a dull imitation of life outside. Their contact with the outside world is severely curtailed. They are shamed and humiliated and infantilized to the point that they learn to accept their captivity as inevitable, as a consequence of their own behavior and not of an organized system of repression. For drug offenders, prison is seen as simply the ‘cost of doing business’. For sex offenders it is a punishment for their self-perceived guilt and moral turpitude or intellectual or psychological weakness. There is an overriding sense that the legal system is God-like and can never be any different than it is. It is set in stone. Most inmates have absolutely no clue of how or when the current legal system came to be or why it is so. It simply is. Unlike the crude prison systems of several other countries that impose violence, cruelty and viciousness purposefully, the U.S. has learned that is is best to keep prisoners in a zombie-like state of inaction, to dupe them into a sense of static safety. This strategy works well in most cases though certainly not always and inmates accept the terrible damage done to their spiritual and physical health and learn not to struggle against their captors. Well trained and militarized goon squads and swat teams wait in the wings in case any large-scale resistance might crop up. That happens rarely. The system achieves perfect stasis. The public is assured justice and safety; the ‘bad’ people are put away ‘humanely’ and everyone lives happily ever after.
Sadly, that is not the complete reality. Right wing conservatism with its pleas for ‘hard on crime’, ‘American superiority’, and ‘a strong nation is a safe nation’ has tipped the balance and dominated the media. Right wing politicians working mainly through the Republican party have spent the last fifty years building the present bastion of coalitions. They’ve used fear of crime and xenophobia as well as a backward religiosity to create and expand the prison industrial complex and to create an isolationist attitude that now threatens to separate the U.S. from all global groups and international treaties. This political force which calls itself ‘populism’ and has spread throughout the world is best defined as a kind of neo-fascism. This is a fascism without blatant repression or symbolic leader worship, though there are elements of both. It is a cancerous movement that will eventually topple any concept of individual rights to privacy, security and freedom. It is an insidious attack on the individual as the core of social life and an increase in the power of the authoritarian State.
In Congress consensus has been achieved for the last thirty-some years primarily using drug and sex offenses as a rallying point for unifying polarized voting blocks. The effect of creating so-called criminals as boogeymen is not much different from the way Hitler used the Jews to consolidate his power. Politicians prey on the public’s fear of being victimized, whether by illegal immigrants, drug dealers or child predators to get votes. To do this they exaggerate statistics and ignore the reality and the nature and source of these offenses. And while there are truly dangerous persons that do need to be isolated from society only the most extreme examples are used as the sole template for ALL offenders. This methodology began to expand prison building in the late 1980s, shortly after the creation of the Sentencing Commission. Senators realized, to paraphrase a line from the Spielberg blockbuster ‘Jaws’, ‘we’re gonna need bigger jails’. The multiplicity of new statutes, the sense of fear pumped up by the media, could only result in thousands upon thousands of more arrests disproportionately targeting mainly minorities in the beginning and now slowly expanding to include citizens from all ethnicities and walks of life. This created a multi-billion-dollar industry and provided work opportunities in several states (Kentucky, for example, or West Virginia) that had lost their manufacturing base to countries abroad after various global trading agreements.
Reversing these social and governmental trends will take a massive effort. There needs to be a well-coordinated strategy to educate the free public as well as inmates about what prison has become, what it really is in this country. I don’t see that happening. There are plenty of voices in the media that continue to support the ongoing legal system with cries of God and country and nationalistic fervor, but few voices are bringing attention to the true direction of our communities. As I said earlier, the Achilles heel of prison systems is inmate labor and compliance. Without the cooperation of inmates and their families the system will fold or at least it will be forced to come to the negotiating table. Inmates and reform advocates need to lobby for sentencing reform which is the true basis of mass incarceration. Cries for the end of mandatory minimums have gone unheard for the past twenty-five years. Very little has changed. While there have been some minor cosmetic alterations to crack vs. cocaine sentences and a diminishment of punitive sentencing for marijuana the larger picture remains mostly unaltered. Also, under the present administration which hawks the usual ‘hard on crime’ stance, along with a virulent xenophobic tone, little will change unless there is more opposition at a grass roots level.
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