http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=4471
Starve the Racist Prison Beast
by Paul Street ; November 08, 2003
Let me start by quoting quote my favorite historical
personality from Indiana - the great democratic Socialist
Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute. "While there is a lower class,"
Debs once said, "I am of it. While there is a criminal
element," he added, "I am of it; while there is a soul in
prison, I am not free."
Prison Nation: "Not Unless This Country Plunges Into Fascism"
Debs would feel most un-free in contemporary America, where 2
million adults spend their days behind bars in the nation that
possesses the world's highest incarceration rate. In the second
year of the new millennium, 40 of every 100,000 people in Italy
were imprisoned. The incarceration rate in Sweden was 60 per
100,000. France: 90 per 100,000. England: 125. South Africa:
400 per 100,000. Russia, with the second highest rate in the
world: 675. The United States led the world with 690 per
100,000. Incredibly enough, the nation that proclaims itself
the homeland and headquarters of world freedom comprises 5
percent of the world's population but houses more than 25
percent of the world's prisoners. "No other Western democratic
country has ever imprisoned this proportion of its population,"
says Norval Morris, a professor emeritus at University of
Chicago Law School. Indiana and Illinois are playing major
roles in this dark drama, contributing 43,000 (Illinois) and
22,000 (Indiana) state prisoners, respectively to the inmate
total in Prison Nation. With federal, local and county
prisoners included, the numbers would be considerably higher.
America's incarceration numbers are off the charts relative to
the rest of the world but they are also off the charts relative
to our own history. In the last two-and-a-half decades,
America's prison population has undergone "literally
incredible" expansion, rising from less than 300,000 in 1970 to
the current shocking number. There were less than 7500 state
prison inmates in the entire state of Illinois in 1970. Thirty
one years later, I found 7500 Illinois prisoners coming from
just six of Chicago's sixty-six zip codes, including five on
the city's west side and one on the south side. During the same
period the number of prisons in my state rose from 7 to 27.
Reviewing these numbers I am struck by the depths of an amazing
domestic development that has taken place quietly, behind the
scene, during my lifetime, captured quite well by Angela Davis.
"When I first became involved in antiprison activities during
the late 1960s," writes Davis, "I was astounded to learn that
there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison.
Had anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many
people would be locked away in case, I would have been
absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded
something like this: 'As racist and undemocratic as this
country may be [remember, during that period, the demands of
the Civil Rights Movement had not yet been consolidated], I do
not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so
many people without producing powerful resistance. No, this
will never happen, not unless this country plunges into
fascism." (Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories
Press, 2003, p.11)
The US incarceration rate began its dramatic upward
acceleration in the mid-1970s, after nearly 50 years during
which it hovered around 100 per 100,000. Incarceration is now
so extensive that several large states currently spend as much
or more money to incarcerate adults than they do to provide
their citizens with college and graduate educations. States now
spend 60 cents on prisons for every dollar they spend on higher
education, up from 28 cents in 1980.
Ex-Offender Nation: the Mark of a Criminal Record
Less commonly noted, America's mass imprisonment and related
felony marking boom has also generated a massive army of
"ex-offenders," whose liberty on the "outside" is strictly
qualified by the lifelong mark of a criminal record. More than
600, 000 individuals are released from state and federal
prisons each year, feeding a swelling army of ex-offenders,
saddled with what The Economist last year called "The Stigma
That Never Fades." According to the best recent estimates,
roughly 13 million Americans - fully 7 percent of the adult
population and 12 percent of the adult male population -
possess felony records. Thanks to numerous barriers to
ex-offender "reintegration" (a phrase that tends to too-easily
assume that former prisoners were meaningfully integrated into
American "opportunity structures" prior to arrest and
imprisonment), many released inmates claim that their "real
sentence" began upon release. This claim often contains a
measure of exaggeration, no doubt: "modern" US prisons are
violent and totalitarian structures, monuments of intentionally
planned mass misery, unmitigated by meaningful investment in
rehabilitation and treatment.
Still, former prisoners face remarkable obstacles. One of the
key barriers comes in the realm of employment. According to the
best recent estimates, incarceration carries a significant 10
to 20 percent "wage penalty." "Prison time," Northwestern
sociologist Devah Pager notes, "serves to channel individuals
away from skilled occupations and into job sectors which are
characterized by low wages, limited job stability, and fewer
opportunities for advancement." Based on interviews with 3000
employers by the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality,
researchers report, more than 60 percent of employers would not
knowingly hire an ex-offender. Possession of a felony record is
the single worst barrier to employer acceptance. This is no
small societal problem when 13 million possess such records in
a capitalist society, where most adults must purchase
commodified life necessities through an exchange medium that is
obtained primarily by renting out their labor power on a
sustained basis. Employer and other forms of societal bias
against "ex-offenders" help explain why roughly two-thirds of
released prisoners are rearrested within three years. A
considerable and growing segment of the population has become
part of a permanently stigmatized "underclass" that recycles in
and out of jails and prisons. It forms an everlasting "criminal
element" that is pushed yet further into the lower class and
functions as the key raw material for a bloated,
super-expensive hyper-carceral criminal justice state.
"Civil Death"
Along with socioeconomic disenfranchisement comes literal
political disenfranchisement. "Currently," note the leading
academic authorities on felon and ex-felon-voting rights (Jeff
Manza and Christopher Uggen), "48 states disenfranchise
incarcerated felons, 37 states disenfranchise felony
probationers or parolees (or both), and 14 states additionally
disenfranchise some or all ex-felons who have completed their
sentences." No other democratic nation denies the vote to a
remotely comparable share of its offender and ex-offender
population. One of the worst 14 states is of course Florida,
where felony disenfranchisement, supplemented by the scandalous
and illegal denial of voting rights to many persons who were
merely suspected of possessing felony records and others who
out-of-state felony records (see the chilling first chapter,
titled "Jim Crow in Cyberspace," in Greg Palast's best-selling
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) provided the spectacular
world-systemic transgressor George W. Bush with a key part of
his "winning" margin in the pitiful presidential selection of
2000.
The roughly 4.4 million Americans who are disenfranchised due
to a past or current felony conviction "are expected," note the
experts, "to respect the law (and indeed, are often subject to
significantly harsher penalties and face a higher level of
scrutiny, than non-felons). They are expected to pay taxes to
the government, and to be governed by elected officials. Yet
they have no formal right to participate in the selection of
those officials or the public policies that allocate government
expenditures," including the tens of billions of dollars that
American government's spend on mass incarceration. Even in the
horribly diluted and qualified mechanism of democracy known as
the American voting process, much of the "criminal element" is
banned from having anything to say about the policies that have
marked them for life. In a modern-day version of the medieval
practice of "civil death," breaking the law leads to "complete
loss of citizenship rights" for a considerable segment of the
population. At the same time, it is worth noting that prisoners
count towards the population count and therefore to the
political representation (under political districting rules)
and related state and federal funding allotments granted not to
their home communities (disproportionately urban) but to
(disproportionately rural) regions and communities that host
prisons. An investigation by The Chicago Reporter - an
excellent local public affairs magazine - finds that mass
incarceration's interaction with the geography of prison
construction, political districting rules and federal budgetary
procedures to cost Chicago's Cook County nearly $88 million in
federal benefits between 2000 and 2010 (see Molly Dugan,
"Census Dollars Bring bounty to Prison Towns," available online
at
http://www.chicagoreporter.com/2000/8-2000/prison/prison.htm).
Corrections, Indeed: The Color of Prison and Ex-Offender Nation
Let's be clear, however, about who exactly is most prone to
socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement through
incarceration and related felony-marking. Beyond its sheer
magnitude, the most striking aspect of America's prison and
broader criminal supervision boom is its heavily racialized
nature. As the penal population has risen, it has become
significantly less Caucasian: non-Hispanic whites accounted for
42% of state prison inmates in 1979 but less than a third by
the end of the 20th century.
One group is most especially targeted: Blacks are 12.3 percent
of US population, but they comprise roughly half of the roughly
2 million Americans currently behind bars. Between 1980 and
2000, the number of black men in jail or prison grew fivefold
(500 percent), to the point where, as the Justice Policy
Institute (2002) recently reported, there were more black men
behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the
US. On any given day, Chaiken reported, 30 percent of
African-American males ages 20 to 29 are under correctional
supervision - either in jail or prison or on probation or
parole.
The incarceration rate for African-Americans is 1,815 per
100,000 compared to 609 per 100, 000 for Latino-Americans, 99
per 100,000 for Asian-Americans, and 235 per 100, 000 for
American whites. For black adult males the incarceration rate
is a remarkable 4, 484 per 100,000, compared 1, 668 per 100,000
for Hispanic males and 1,318 per 100,000 for white males.
Roughly one in ten of the world's prisoners is an
African-American male. In mid-year 1999, 11 percent of Black US
males in their 20s and early 30s were in prison and 33 percent
of Black male high school dropouts were in prison or in jail.
Especially chilling is a statistical model used by the Bureau
of Justice Statistics at the turn of the 21st century to
determine the lifetime chances of incarceration for individuals
in different racial and ethnic groups. Based on current rates,
it predicts that a young Black man age 16 in 1996 faced a 29
percent chance of spending time in prison during his life. The
corresponding statistic for white men in the same age group was
4 percent.
Consistent with these findings, nothing is more likely to
predict high incarceration totals and rates at the state level
than the possession of a disproportionately large black
population. Also worth noting, race is the single largest
factor determining which states deny voting rights to felons
and ex-felons. The higher the black composition of a state's
prisoner population, the more likely that state is to
disenfranchise its officially marked "criminal element."
A recent New Left Review essay by left sociologist Loic
Wacquant is titled "From Slavery to Mass Incarceration." The
experience of incarceration is so ubiquitous and commonplace in
the African-American experience today that Wacquant can make a
compelling case for designating mass imprisonment as a
full-blown historical stage in the evolution of structural
racism in the United States. Meanwhile, criminologists Dina
Rose and Todd Clear found Black neighborhoods in Tallahassee
where every resident could identify at least one friend or
relative who has been incarcerated. In predominantly Black
urban communities across the country, incarceration is so
widespread and commonplace that it has become what Chaiken
calls "almost a normative life experience."
The phenomenon of heavily disproportionate Black mass
incarceration is fraught with a savage historical irony. At the
very moment that American public discourse in racial matters
has become officially inclusive - even David Duke now has to
deny that he is anti-Black - the US is flooding its expanding
number of cell blocks with an ever-rising tide of Black people
monitored by predominantly white overseers.
There is a widespread false belief among whites - ironically
reinforced by the demise of open public racial prejudice - that
African-Americans enjoy equal and color-blind opportunity. "As
white America sees it," write Barbara Diggs-Brown and Leonard
Steinhorn in their sobering By the Color of Their Skin: the
Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (2000), "every
effort has been made to welcome Blacks into the American
mainstream, and now they're on their own… 'We got the message,
we made the corrections [white Americans claim, P.S.] --- Get
on with it.'"
Corrections, indeed: as the racially skewed demographics of the
American "correctional" system suggest, the US in the age of
mass incarceration is giving a darkly colored twist to the
noble Christian notion that we are "our brother's [today 'our
brothers'] keeper."
A Policy-Driven Reality
At first blush, an outside observer from another country or
planet might observe America's prison numbers and conclude that
the United States experienced a significant upsurge in violent
crimes, disproportionately committed by African-Americans,
during recent decades. This would be a reasonable inference
from the extreme measure (by both historical American and
contemporary global standards) of mass and racially disparate
incarceration over the last 25-30 years. Contrary to the "law
and order" rhetoric cultivated by many politicians and
policymakers, however, there has been no clear or consistent
pattern of rising criminality, including violent criminality,
that might explain the upward trend of America's prison
numbers. "Since 1980," journalist Vince Beiser notes, "the
national crime rate has meandered down, then up, then down
again, but the incarceration rate has marched relentlessly
upward every single year." During the 1990s, indeed, the US
incarceration rates rose dramatically in spite of crime rates
that fell, thanks largely to fairly robust economic growth
during the "Clinton boom." "Crime is Dropping," noted the
well-regarded public affairs journal Illinois Issues, "but the
prison population isn't."
The black crime rates have been consistently higher than the
white crime rate, consistent with blacks' lower socioeconomic
status and related higher stress levels and weaker social and
familial structures, but there has been no massive upsurge of
black criminality that could even remotely explain the
skyrocketing black incarceration rate.
The central factor is that imprisonment in the US has
"changed," in Pager's words, "from a punishment reserved for
only the most heinous offenders to one extended to a much
greater range of crimes and much larger segment of the
population [emphasis added]. Recent trends in crime policy have
led to the imposition of harsher and longer sentences for a
wider range of offenses, thus casting an ever widening net of
penal intervention." It is largely for this reason that the
majority of Americans entering the inherently violent space of
America's "prison nation," where as many as 7 percent of
inmates are raped, now do so for nonviolent crimes. Between
1980 and 1997, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) reports, "the
number of violent offenders committed to state prison nearly
doubled (up 82 percent)," but "the number of nonviolent
offenders tripled (up 207 percent)." People who committed
nonviolent crimes accounted for more than three fourths of the
nation's massive increase in prisoners between 1978 and 1996.
The Justice Policy Institute estimates that there are currently
more than 1.2 million nonviolent criminals behind bars in the
US.
These trends have impacted black communities with special
harshness. While blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug
users, they account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug
offenses. They comprise 42 percent of those held in federal
prison for drug charges and 62 percent of those in state
prisons. Not surprisingly, white drug offenders are much less
likely than their counterparts to serve time in prison. Blacks
constituted more than 75 percent of the total drug prisoners in
America in one third of all states according to a report issued
in 2000 by the prestigious human rights organization Human
Rights Watch. In my own state, Illinois, the respected
international human rights organization Human Rights Watch
reported that "blacks constituted an astonishing 90 percent of
all drug offenders admitted to prison in Illinois" in 1996. By
2000, the percentage had barely fallen to 89 percent, making
Illinois number two in the nation in terms of this key
disparity.
Chicago Story
Reflecting these dark realities, there is now a growing and
increasingly respectable academic and policy literature on
"racially disparate mass incarceration" - liberal academic and
foundation terminology for the racist prison state - and
related issues of mass black criminalization and "prisoner
reentry." The literature bears dramatic titles like The Race to
Incarcerate, Incarceration Nation, Lockdown America, Prison
Nation, Cell Blocks Over Classrooms, Travels in a Prison
Nation, "Color Bind," and the like.
My own study released last year is part of this literature.
Titled The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in
Chicago, Illinois and the Nation, it's full of shocking details
on how and why the penal system has become a central part of
the institutional framework that produces racial and related
socioeconomic inequality in the United States. Among the worst
revelations:
* As of June 2001, I learned, there were nearly 20,000
more black males in the Illinois state prison system than the
number of black males enrolled in the state's public
universities. There were more black males in the state's
correctional facilities just on drug charges than the total
number of black males enrolled in undergraduate degree programs
in state universities.
* By 2000, I learned and reported, Illinois' prison
population had reached nearly 46,000 and the number of
correction facilities had mushroomed to 27. Illinois' rising
state prison (IDOC) population (94 percent male) stood
suggestively close to the falling number of households
(predominately female-headed) in the state receiving public
family cash assistance - 46,801. Nine years before, the number
of prisoners in Illinois made up less than 15 percent number of
the state's welfare families. The report section in which I
included this data was titled "From Welfare to Prison State."
* Black male ex-prisoners, I found, are equivalent in
number to nearly one quarter (24 percent) of the black male
workforce in the Chicago area. Black male ex-felons are
equivalent in number to 42 percent of the black male workforce
in the Chicago area.
* In the finding that most interested reporters, I
reported that ten very predominantly black Chicago zip codes
(including five on the city's West Side and four on the South
Side) received 25 percent of Illinois prisoners released in the
years 2000, 2001, and 2002. I determined that released
prisoners are returning to the same highly disadvantaged
communities from which they came prior to incarceration. The
top 15 zip codes for prison releases contain 10 of the city's
top 15 zip codes for poverty, 11 of the top 15 zip codes for
unemployment, 10 of the lowest 15 zip codes for median income,
and 10 of the lowest zip codes for possession of a high school
degree.
There is, I noted, a significant racial disparity in mass
incarceration's labor market and related economic development
consequences in Illinois as throughout the country. The prison
construction boom - fed by the rising "market" of black
offenders - is a significant source of jobs and associated
local economic multipliers for prison-hosting "downstate"
Illinois communities. Because of its racially dichotomous
economic and related political and budgetary impact in
Illinois, I argued in The Vicious Circle for understanding mass
incarceration as a form of Reverse Racial Reparations - a form
of radical state intervention that transfers wealth, census
count, earnings, government dollars, voting power and even
campaign finance influence away from the black and into the
white community. The analogy with slavery (including the
infamous "three-fifths" compromise that permitted slave states
to count black chattel towards their Congressional
representation) is hard to miss, though black prisoners
function much more as raw material than as labor under the
modern mass incarceration system.
The Racist Prison State v. National Mythology
My study resonated well in Chicago's black community and among
intellectuals and activists working to rollback American
incarceration. It failed, however, to achieve remotely
comparable recognition in the mainstream media, even at the
local level.
This lukewarm media response is fairly typical, I think, for
those of us who are writing about and against the racist prison
state. There's an epic disconnect between its significance
(well understood especially in the black community) and the
mainstream attention it receives, especially when you recall
that George W. Bush seized power - with historic consequences -
thanks to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands black
ex-felons (real and supposed) in Florida.
"Freedom's Beacon"
The reasons for this disconnect are complex but of the problem
relates to the filtering power of dominant ideology, whose core
elements are shared across the American political class,
including both policymakers and owners and managers of the
nations' media corporations. The full story of policy-driven
racist mass imprisonment and related rampant black felony
marking is richly anomalous for related core and overlapping
American myths that dominant media has no interest in
challenging, particularly in the post-9/11 period of
intensified nationalism and related domestic mobilization for
permanent imperialist war.
One such myth holds that the United States is the natural
homeland, epitome and headquarters of freedom, "the beacon to
the world of the way life should be" - to quote Texas Senator
Kay Bailey Hutchinson justifying her support for the White
House's planned invasion of Iraq in the fall of 2002.
Hutchinson's phrase epitomizes the widespread belief among the
political class that America is the embodiment of human
existence at its best - a God- and/or History-ordained City on
a Hill, one that "stands taller and sees farther" than the rest
of the world, as Madeline Albright put it years ago. This
belief certainly informed a statement made by James F. Dobbins,
Director of the Rand Corporation's Center for International
Security and Defense Policy and a former special White House
envoy during US interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Afghanistan. "The partisan debate" within the US,
"is over," Dobbins proclaimed just before the US invaded Iraq.
"Administrations of both parties are clearly prepared," Dobbins
noted, "to use American military forces to reform rogue states
and repair broken societies."
To counter this toxic national-imperial narcissism and show
that the United States is itself a "broken society," activists
can pick from an empirical embarrassment of riches relating to
inequality, poverty, gun-deaths, suicides, the uninsured and so
on. But few social statistics trump the incarceration numbers
when it comes to tearing down the elite's vainglorious
American-exceptionalist story line, particularly the part of
the dominant trope that identifies the US with "freedom." Even
if media authorities wanted to, it would be difficult for them
to tell the truth on such a graphically counter-doctrinal
horror story at the same time that America's aggressively
nationalist power elite - dominated by the formerly
radical-turned "respectable" right wing - is telling itself and
the world that America is the "single sustainable model" of
societal excellence, specially chosen by God and History to
exemplify and even export its superior, liberating virtues.
"Color Blind America"
A second great myth challenged by the real story on the mass
carceral warehousing and related permanent criminal marking of
millions of African-American citizens and ex-citizens is of
course the related mainstream notion that America has become
for all intents and purposes a color-blind post-racist nation,
where correctives like affirmative action, not to mention
reparations, are no longer necessary. Even the Manhattan
Institute's John McWhorter, who has made a lucrative career out
of arguing that the chief cause of persistent black
difficulties in a generally post-racist America is black
cultural "self-sabotage," acknowledgers that racial
discrimination continues to be a problem in America's
hyper-carcaeral criminal justice system.
The Selective Targeting of the Government "Beast"
Another myth I want to mention is the widely advertised and
much lamented notion of the powerless and cash-strapped state -
the idea that government can't really do anything anymore; that
it doesn't have the strength, the legitimacy, the money, the
wherewithal to carry out key objectives. Tell that to the
nation's mass of prisoners and ex-prisoners.
To break through the last myth, you have to ask whose
objectives American government can and supposedly can't carry
out. In the wealthiest nation on earth, the public sector lacks
the money to properly fund education for all of the country's
children. It lacks the resources to provide universal health
coverage, leaving 42 million American without basic medical
insurance. It can't match unemployment benefits to the numbers
out of work. It lacks or claims to lack the money to provide
meaningful rehabilitation and reentry services for its many
millions of very disproportionately black prisoners and
ex-prisoners, marked for life with a criminal record. The list
of unmet civic and social needs goes on and on. Listen,
however, to what our public sector can supposedly pay for. It
can afford to spend trillions on Tax Cuts rewarding the top 1
percent in the thoroughly disingenuous name of "economic
stimulus." It can spend more on the military than on all of
America's possible "enemy" states combined many times over,
providing massive subsidy to the high-tech corporate sector,
including billions on weapons and "defense" systems that bear
no meaningful relations to any real threat faced by the
American people. It can afford hundreds of billions and perhaps
more than a trillion dollars for an invasion and occupation of
distant devastated nation that poses minimal risk to the US and
even to its own neighbors. And of course, it can afford to
incapacitate and incarcerate a greater share of its population
than any nation in history and to spend hundreds of millions
each year on various forms of corporate welfare and other
routine public subsidies to "private" industry. The American
public sector, in short, is weak and cash-strapped when it
comes to social democracy for the people but its cup runs over
in powerful ways when it comes to meeting the needs of wealth,
racial disparity and empire. It's useful to keep that
distinction in mind when we hear people like the powerful
Republican tax cut maven and political strategist Grover
Norquist say that their goal - and here I quote Norquist - is
"is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it
down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." When
Noquist and his followers say they want to "starve the beast"
of government, they target some parts of "government" for
malnourishment a lot more energetically than others. They are
most concerned to dismantle the parts of the public sector that
serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent
majority of the American populace. They want to de-fund what
the late French sociologist Pierre Bordieu referred to as the
left hand of the state, the programs and services that embody
the victories one by past struggles for justice and equality.
They want to reserve the right hand of the state, the parts
that provide service and welfare to the privileged few and dole
out punishment to the poor, from the budgetary axe.
Their wishes are being met. Under the pressure of a relentless,
well-funded political and ideological campaign led in its most
extreme forms by radically regressive and repressive Repubicans
like Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove, the public sector
is being stripped of its positive social and democratic
functions. It is increasingly reduced to its policing and
repressive functions, which are expanding in ways that are more
than merely coincidental to the assault on social supports and
programs. It is criminalizing and thereby deepening social
inequality and related social problems through self-fulfilling
policies of racially disparate (racist) mass surveillance,
arrest, and incarceration - a perfect homeland counterpart to
its racially disparate (racist) militarization of global US
empire and its attendant social, political, and economic
problems. The well-funded right-led campaign to "starve"
government's left hand produces instructive disparities in
mainstream news coverage. Dominant media covered the terrible
"problem" posed by the supposedly horrendous swelling of the
family cash public assistance rolls so heavily that punitive
"work-first" "welfare reform" became practically inevitable
during the mid-1990s. The huge societal and related budgetary
problems posed by massive, costly swelling of prison, parole
and probation rolls and the related need to move people from
prison and the felony-sitgmatized margins of society into the
labor market and other areas of civil society are non-issues by
mainstream comparison. They evoke only minor concern outside
the communities of color that are most targeted by American
criminal justice authorities. The Liberating Market vs. the
Evil State The rise of "Racially disparate mass incarceration"
also challenges a fourth great American myth, strongly related
to the third. This legend claims that the defining political
and ideological conflict of our time is between the glorious,
liberty-enhancing logic of supposedly "free market" capitalism
on one hand and the dark, decrepit, and deadening hand of the
public sector on the other hand. "The market," we are told
again and again, is the answer to society's problems. It is
very different from the inherently evil, irresponsible, and
authoritarian State, which suppresses the virtuous "freedom" of
unfettered trade and investment - the magnificent world of
freely circulating commodities, capital, and currency. This is
one of the great fairy tales of our age. The real domestic
policy conflict that matters today, as at the beginning of the
Republic and ever since, is not between the state/polity and
the market/economy. It is between one type (aristocratic and
authoritarian) of public policy and political economy and
another type (social and democratic) of public policy and
political economy. The first brand of policy serves the
interests of the privileged few and punishes the poor and many
others as well. It excludes those at the bottom and exacerbates
their pain and stigma. The second, more left-handed brand
serves the social and democratic needs of the majority,
reaching out especially to those who are most disadvantaged and
in need of uplift and assistance - in the name of equity and
justice.
The situation of America's much of America's burgeoning
incarcerated and ex-offender population is an excellent case in
point. Nobody seriously concerned to ameliorate the plight of
the increasingly hyper-criminalized black and urban population
can believe that group is going to usefully served by the "free
market." That not-so free market is no small part of what has
crippled inner city communities, pushing many of their
residents into "crime" (especially drug trading and using) and
(along with some help from racially disparate policing and
sentencing) the criminal justice system in the first place.
Deeply enabled by and reflective state-capitalist public
("trade" and non-industrial) policy, it has removed the
industrial jobs that used to sustain those communities and
denied inner-city people access to the more affluent
communities where jobs and skills have concentrated (insofar as
they have not disappeared overseas or simply been eliminated).
At the same time, the "free" market has precious little to
offer inner-city blacks with criminal records; that population
requires public intervention either to directly engage and
compensate their labor and/or to encourage or compel employers
to hire them.
The dire situation of the people left behind in
hyper-segregated, deeply impoverished, and savagely
de-industrialized communities by racially disparate sprawl,
globalization, and automation calls for aggressive public,
governmental intervention. The only relevant question is what
sort of intervention it's going to be: left-handed or right
handed. Racist mass incarceration, launched under the aegis of
the ineffective and costly War on Drugs, is one such
intervention, a high- and right-handed one with fascist
implications that can only deepen the intertwined cycles of
poverty, racial inequality, violence, crime, inner-city
destabilization, substance abuse and despair. It promotes the
dangerous criminalization of social problems, a perfect
domestic mirror for the dominant foreign policy, which
exacerbates global crises and deepens violence through the
militarization of world political and social issues. It
functions, it is worth repeating, as a method of racially
inverted reparations, distributing a massive share of wealth
from black to white communities that has yet to find its
statistician.
Other Myths
There are other national myths that might be included in a more
extended discussion of how the rise of "racially disparate mass
incarceration" contradicts dominant national narratives: the
notion of hard work and personal moral agency as the key factor
determining one's life condition; the idea that "the criminal
element" bases its behavior on a "rational" cost-benefit
analysis of outcomes, factoring in the likelihood and severity
of punishment to their decisions on whether or not to commit
illegal actions; the notion that crime is rampant (a staple of
the violence-happy news media); the notion that "punishment
works" in the effort to stem problem substance abuse; and the
transparently false idea that all Americans are equally
empowered by the rights granted and subject to the punishments
inflicted by the state. This last notion (long ago ridiculed by
the venerable American working-class slogan claiming that
"money talks and bullshit walks" in and out of the courtroom),
is hard to maintain in a time when (a) corporate crooks are
mildly punished for illegal practices that erased the jobs and
butchered the life savings of tens of thousands of Americans
(or more) while (b) hundreds of thousands of disproportionately
black and poor Americans do hard time under shocking conditions
(including the endemic threat of rape) for nonviolent and
especially narcotic offenses.
Policy, Ideology, and Discourse
There's little mysterious or tricky about what might and should
- from a minimally social, democratic, and racially inclusive
perspective - be done to close the vicious circle of racially
disparate mass incarceration. The standard "liberal" litany of
minimally reasonable policy solutions is loaded with ideas that
make basic social, democratic, budgetary, and common sense,
including: the repeal of mandatory sentencing laws, and the
establishment of new structures for reviewing and revising
state sentencing policies and pointing judges towards the most
effective use of correctional options; the creation of new
prison and post-prison supports and responsibilities for
prisoners and released ex-prisoners; an end to racial profiling
in traffic and pedestrian stop-and-search and surveillance and
to racially disparate practices in the prosecution and
sentencing of drug and other offenders; the creation of a new
policy focus and government agency to coordinate the transition
from prison to work; the elimination of inappropriate barriers
to, and the creation of new possibilities and incentives for,
the appropriate employment of ex-offenders; investment in
treatment instead of incarceration. In an exhaustive social
science research study that has been scandalously ignored by
all but a few policy makers in the US for almost a decade now,
the conservative RAND corporation found that every additional
dollar invested in substance abuse treatment saves taxpayers
$7.46 in societal costs to pay for crime, violence, and lost
productivity.
Policy matters of course, but a big part of the problem - a
reason these minimally civilized policy steps are so hard to
implement - is moral and ideological, reflecting and relating
to the creation and maintenance of dominant homeland
narratives. To roll back the ineffective and costly strategy of
what the Open Society calls "over-incarceration," we need
specific, carefully-crafted policy "fixes." We also needs to
turn off - or, better, learn to critically scrutinize - its
overabundance of reactionary, law-enforcement-worshipping
television shows and news coverage and drop its related nasty
habit of blaming the victims of its radical experiment in
"racially mass incarceration." The rise of Incarceration Nation
is a radical, deeply racist, and partly even fascist state
development, not a tragic and unavoidable response of the state
to terrible behavior on the part of a massive "criminal
element" that needs to be punitively conditioned to act
rationally upon the supposedly remarkable opportunities it
faces in the glorious world of stateless, color-blind
marketplace capitalism.
In the effort to slay this many headed prison beast, we need to
liberate ourselves from crippling doctrinal orthodoxies and
rekindle a basic understanding of the need for constructive and
positive (left-handed) government action across deadly,
socially constructed barriers of race, class, gender, and
power. We need to take our political lives and social
imaginations back from the aristocratic, well-funded
authoritarians who have captured public policy and discourse
and turned them into mechanisms of repression and privilege.
The stakes are not minor. As it is now, we are heading towards
a Brave New World in which permanent American racist war and
empire abroad both feeds on and reflects permanent racist
inequality and repression at home, both imposed in the curious
names of freedom, the market, and democracy.
Paul Street ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is the author of Empire
Abroad, Inequality at Home: Writings on America and the World
(Paradigm Publishers, 2004).
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