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NY Review of Books, MAY 26, 2016 ISSUE
Our Awful Prisons: How They Can Be Changed
by Adam Hochschild
Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About
America’s Prison Crisis
by Jeff Smith
St. Martin’s, 272 pp., $25.99
Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil
Rights Struggle of Our Time
by James Kilgore
New Press, 264 pp., $17.95 (paper)
The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
by Naomi Murakawa
Oxford University Press, 260 pp., $105.00; $26.95 (paper)
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass
Incarceration in America
by Elizabeth Hinton
Harvard University Press, 449 pp., $29.95
Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics
by Marie Gottschalk
Princeton University Press, 474 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Some time ago, I was at a book festival in Finland. When there was a
free day, the publisher who had invited me asked if there were any
sights I would care to see. I said I’d like to visit some prisons.
Finland locks people up at well under 10 percent the rate we do in the
United States, a gap far more dramatic than all the differences between
the two countries’ populations could explain. I was curious to see what
prisons in this society looked like.
Kerava Prison, the first of the two that I saw, was in the countryside
half an hour’s drive north of Helsinki. Its governor—by design, the
title has a civilian sound—was a warm, vivacious, gray-haired woman
named Kirsti Nieminen, a former prosecutor. On this wintry morning, she
had about 150 prisoners in her charge, all men. Her office wall was
lined with portraits of former governors, the first a heavily bearded
one from the 1890s. Next to these was a framed drawing from a
prisoner—Snoopy typing a letter, which she translated for me: “Dear
Governor, please give me a leave!”
The rough equivalent of an American medium-security prison, Kerava had
barbed-wire fences, bars on some windows, and plenty of locked doors.
Some convicts worked in greenhouses outside the walls, but only if they
were trusties or under guard. Most resemblance to American prisons ended
there. In the greenhouses the inmates raised flowers, which were sold to
the public, as were the organic vegetables they grew. As we walked,
Nieminen pointed out a stream where prisoners could fish, a soccer
field, a basketball court, a grain mill, and something she was
particularly proud of, a barn full of rabbits and lambs. “The
responsibility to take care of a creature—it’s very therapeutic,” she
said. “They are always kind to you. It’s easier to talk to them.”
For an hour or so, I had coffee with half a dozen prisoners. Marko,
thirty-six, wore a visor and had tattoos and said he was here for a
“violent crime” that he did not specify. Jarkko, a burly
twenty-six-year-old, was doing three years and ten months for a drug
offense; Reima, thirty-six, blond and tough-looking, was in for robbery.
Kalla, at forty-eight the eldest, had committed fraud; Fernando (his
father was from Spain) was twenty-six, convicted of armed robbery and
selling heroin; Harre, twenty-seven, was doing five years for selling
Ecstasy. Also sitting with us, and helping with translation, were
Nieminen, a young woman from the national prisons service, and two of
Kerava’s teachers, also both women. No armed guards were in sight, and
both officials and convicts wore their own clothes, not uniforms.
This was still a prison, however, and at 7:30 each evening the inmates
were locked in their two-man cells. These were not large but somewhat
more spacious than those I’ve seen in American prisons, each with a
toilet and sink in a cubicle whose door closed. Prisoners were allowed
TVs, stereos, and radios. Down the corridor were a shower room and
sauna—something no Finn could imagine being without.
Prisoners were assigned jobs, but most spent much of their day in
classes on subjects including auto repair, computers, welding, cooking,
and first aid. A library held several thousand books—more than you would
find in many American high schools—and inmates could use the national
interlibrary loan system to get more. I attended a cooking class and
shared a tasty lunch its students had prepared: Karelian stew, which
included beef, pork, potatoes, and cranberries.
All this was obviously another world from the overcrowded and
underfunded prisons of the United States, where classes, if they happen
at all, are often a slipshod afterthought. When the former Missouri
state senator Jeff Smith was sentenced to a year and a day in a federal
prison in Kentucky, he hoped that as a Ph.D. who had taught at
Washington University in St. Louis, he would be put to work teaching.
Instead, as he writes in his book Mr. Smith Goes to Prison, he was
assigned to the prison warehouse loading dock, where he observed and
took part in the pilfering of food by both inmates and guards. A month
from the end of his stay he was finally transferred to the education
unit—and told to sweep out classrooms. A computer skills class consisted
of the chance to sit at a computer for thirty minutes, with no
instruction whatever; at a nutrition class, a guard “handed out a
brochure with information about the caloric content of food at
McDonald’s, Bojangles, and Wendy’s and released us after five minutes.”
Particularly at the college level, an effective prison education
program, like the well-known one run by Bard College, can cut the
recidivism rate—in the US 67.8 percent after three years—down to the
single digits.1 The Bard program, for example, offers classes leading to
a college degree. They are taught by professors from Bard and other
campuses and attended by nearly three hundred inmates in six New York
State prisons. A debating team drawn from these students won national
attention last year when it beat a team from Harvard. Reducing
recidivism through such efforts not only is humane but also saves money,
since keeping someone locked up is hugely expensive; it costs New York
State more each year to house and guard a single prisoner than the total
tuition, room, and board for a Harvard undergraduate. You would think
that budget-conscious legislators would act accordingly, but reason has
never played much of a part in American prison policy.
In his book, Smith spends far too much time telling us about the
campaign spending law violation that put him behind bars. Some of what
he writes recalls many other American prison memoirs: he describes de
facto racial segregation, rapes, etiquette (never sit on someone else’s
bunk), and the underground economy. Prices for pornography, cell phones,
and other contraband rose sharply when snow on the ground made
footprints visible or when a notoriously vigilant guard was on duty. And
contrary to the film The Shawshank Redemption, in which the character
played by Morgan Freeman wryly observes, “Everyone in here is innocent,”
Smith says that few prisoners make that claim. Instead they blame their
fate on the “snitch” who turned them in.
For me the most moving part of the book is its picture of what prison
does to families. Smith points to research showing that “half of all
incarcerated fathers lived with their children, a quarter served as
primary caregivers, and over half provided primary financial support.”
When a man goes to jail, his family shatters:
While I was waiting to use a phone, it was hard to avoid hearing their
anguished phone conversations with ex-girlfriends who controlled access
to their children, with rebellious teenagers who—lacking a male
authority figure at home—were in some cases following in their fathers’
footsteps, and with dying parents far away.
One of Smith’s workmates, known as Big E, had been an ace basketball
player and was serving seventeen years for possession of crack cocaine.
One Saturday in the television room there was none of the usual haggling
about which sports game would be watched. Big E’s son, a college
freshman, was playing, “and Big E, the best shooter on the compound, had
never seen his son play.” He had been in prison since the age of nineteen.
How did we get to the point where a nineteen-year-old who has done
nothing violent can be put away for almost as long as he has lived,
where prisons break up millions of families, and where we have a larger
proportion of our people incarcerated than any other country in the
world, even Putin’s Russia? We have so many prisoners that the American
unemployment rate for men would be 2 percent higher (and 8 percent
higher for black men) if they were all suddenly let out. Our jails are
so packed that through the website www.jailbedspace.com wardens and
sheriffs can look for space in other facilities if their own is full.
Arizona and California have even considered plans to house inmates in
Mexico, where costs are lower.
New books on the subject of prison range from James Kilgore’s clear,
lively, and well-illustrated handbook to highly academic works by Naomi
Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton, who are both intent on showing how much
liberals helped lay the foundation for the mess we’re in. The best of
the recent studies is Marie Gottschalk’s carefully documented book
Caught. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive analysis of our
shameful crisis.
The two most conspicuous parts of the story are, first, the unwinnable
war on drugs, and second, the Republican tough-on-crime politicking that
reached its climax with the notorious Willie Horton advertisement in
George H.W. Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign. (The ad
attacked Michael Dukakis for having supported the weekend furlough
program that gave Horton, a convicted murderer, the chance to commit
additional violent crimes.) But Democrats helped build the prison system
as well. Starting in the 1940s, looking for ways to stop the lynching of
blacks and their abuse by police in the South and fearing a recurrence
of the World War II–era race riots in the North, liberals pushed for
more professional training for law enforcement officers.
The southern Democrats who then controlled Congress transformed these
efforts into giving block grants to states. As a result, police
departments received more money and more advanced hardware with which to
do business as usual. Liberals also pushed for standardized sentences
that would curb the discretionary powers of racist judges. But the
mandatory minimums have now become cruelly high, and the definition of
crimes, with no mention of race, ended up with vastly greater penalties
for possession of crack cocaine (used mostly by blacks) than for
possession of powdered cocaine (used mostly by whites).
The 1960s brought immense social turbulence and a sharp rise in almost
all types of crime. Quick to moralize against disorder and drawing on
the deep American reservoir of racism and paranoia that previously drove
lynch mobs, politicians promised a ruthless response. New York Governor
Nelson Rockefeller sponsored drug laws that put several generations of
men, largely black, away for decades. Authorities across the country
acted so harshly in part because the United States chooses a sizable
proportion of its judges and almost all of its district attorneys and
county sheriffs by popular election—something that would be considered
bizarre almost everywhere else in the world. (One recent study of
Washington State judges found that the sentences they passed out
lengthened by an average of 10 percent as reelection day approached.)
By the time Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, he and
congressional Democrats were determined to show that they were tougher
on crime than Republicans. The following year Congress passed the
brutally severe Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the
Federal Death Penalty Act, which, among other things, added some sixty
offenses to the list of capital crimes.
The prison boom has also been a chance to make money. One private prison
company alone, the Corrections Corporation of America, today runs the
country’s fifth-largest prison system, after those of the federal
government and the three biggest states. The less money such
corporations spend on staff training, food, education, medical care, and
rehabilitation, the more profits they make. States, at least in theory,
have a financial incentive to reduce recidivism, but for private
prisons, recidivism produces what every business wants: returning
customers. No wonder these companies push hard for three-strikes laws
and similar measures. In 2011, the two biggest private prison firms
donated nearly $3 million to political candidates and hired 242
lobbyists around the country. Another industry with a vested interest in
keeping prisons full, writes Jeff Smith, is that of food wholesalers,
who know that this market of 2.2 million people is powerless to protest
if much of the food delivered to them is well past its sell-by date.
The prison-industrial complex is now as deeply rooted as its military
counterpart. With both corporate profits and government salaries at
stake, it will be equally difficult to shrink or transform. There is
much talk just now of how politicians on both the left and right agree
that our prisons are too full. More than twenty public figures, ranging
from Ted Cruz and Scott Walker to Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden (an
architect of the wider application of the death penalty in the 1990s),
have contributed to Solutions, a new anthology calling for reducing mass
incarceration.2 Marie Gottschalk, however, shows why none of the
proposed solutions—such as Cory Booker’s recommendation to assign judges
“more discretion in sentencing” or Cruz’s call to reduce mandatory
minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders—either singly or
together, is going to reduce the proportion of Americans in prison to
anywhere near what it was fifty years ago.
Gottschalk agrees that our drug laws are absurdly punitive. But “if all
drug cases were eliminated, the US imprisonment rate would still have
quadrupled over the past thirty-five years.” And it is true, she agrees,
that there are appalling disparities in how different races are treated
before the law. Hispanics are more than twice as likely to be in prison
as whites, and blacks more than five times as likely. But she shows that
even the rate at which white Americans are locked up is more than four
times that of all prisoners in multiethnic France. Clearly the penalties
for many nonviolent offenses should be more lenient. But that alone, she
points out, is not sufficient, for nearly half of those behind bars in
America are there for violent crimes.
Too few officeholders, she says, are willing to take two necessary
steps, each of which means reversing decades of political rhetoric. One
is to acknowledge that for a wide variety of crimes, prison sentences
accomplish nothing. Communities ranging from Brooklyn to Oakland,
California, have made encouraging experiments in “restorative justice,”
in which convicted criminals are sentenced to apologize to those they
hurt, repay people they robbed, and take part in improving the
communities they have harmed.3 But promoting such programs is not a
promising path to election for most district attorneys.
The other urgent task, in Gottschalk’s view, is to ensure that when we
do have to send people to prison, they have much shorter sentences. It
used to be that a life sentence meant that a well-behaved American
prisoner was likely to be released after ten to fifteen years—a
recognition that aging has far more influence than length of time served
on the likelihood that someone might commit another crime. But mandatory
minimums and other disastrous results of tough-on-crime campaigns mean
that US prisons are filled with people serving several consecutive life
sentences, or life without parole—a punishment that virtually did not
exist half a century ago and is almost unknown in the rest of the world.
“The total life-sentenced population in the United States is
approximately 160,000,” Gottschalk writes, “or roughly twice the size of
the entire incarcerated population in Japan.” And some alleged reforms
are meaningless: “The governor of Iowa commuted all the mandatory life
sentences of his state’s juvenile offenders but declared that they would
be eligible for parole only after serving sixty years.” This reminds me
of a similar act of clemency by King George IV of Britain in 1820, when
five members of the revolutionary Cato Street Conspiracy were sentenced
to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. The king remitted the last two parts
of the sentence to mere beheading.
Breaking the pattern that has so many men, women, and teenagers wasting
their lives in custody also demands bettering their opportunities for
education, jobs, and much more on the outside. It is telling that the
Nordic countries, with some of the world’s lowest imprisonment rates,
are highly developed welfare states and far more egalitarian than the
United States. Programs that promise inmates “a second chance” on
release, Gottschalk writes, mean little when “many of the people cycling
in and out of prison and jail were never really given a first chance.”
This is all too true. But much as I would like to see Nordic social
democracy replace our own wildly unequal distribution of wealth and
opportunity, that day will not come soon, if ever. We cannot wait until
then to drastically reduce the number of people we have in prison. Even
counting white prisoners alone, the United States has well over twice as
many people, per capita, locked up as Spain, where 20 percent of the
population is out of work and the welfare state is weaker than in
Scandinavia. And we have more people per capita of any single race in
prison than South Africa, where the unemployment rate for the black
majority is catastrophic and the welfare state barely exists.
Was there ever a country that was enthusiastic about imprisoning people
but changed its ways dramatically? Finland did so. In 1950, with a
prison system and criminal code that had changed little from their
origins under the Russia of the tsars, Finland had a higher
incarceration rate than we then had in the US. One hundred eighty-seven
people out of every 100,000 were behind bars, while we had only 175. A
long series of reforms—not without their hard-line opponents—brought the
Finnish rate of incarceration far down just as our own soared. Today we
have 710 people per 100,000 in prison in the US, compared to fifty-eight
in Finland.4 “One important idea that emerged,” write two scholars of
Finland’s changes, “was that prison cures nobody. As a result policies
were enacted that prison sentences should rarely be used in smaller
crimes and other penalty systems should be developed instead.”5
Although the prisons I saw in Finland certainly isolated inmates from
the outside world, much that happened inside them seemed directed toward
making sure that released prisoners could return to society. With
special permission, someone with half his sentence completed could leave
Kerava Prison on weekends. Everything possible was done to ease that
transition. The diploma you get on completing one of the classes, for
instance, is certified by an outside organization; it doesn’t say you
received your training in prison.
A host of services within the prison addressed the problems that landed
men in trouble in the first place. There were programs for anger
management and drug rehabilitation, as well as both individual and group
psychotherapy. Prisoners could also take part in a twelve-step program
similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, and a three-times-a-week class in life
skills. And there was a series of speakers, copied from Sweden: former
convicts who shared their experiences of readjusting to the world.
A released prisoner in the United States is frequently barred from
voting, public housing, pensions, and disability benefits, and is lucky
if he receives anything more than bus fare and, according to Jeff Smith,
a routine farewell from a guard: “You’ll be back, shitbird.” In Finland,
before a prisoner is released, a social worker travels to his hometown
and makes sure that he will have a job and a safe place to live. Small
wonder that Finland’s recidivism rate is far lower than our own.
1
The rate can be calculated in different ways, but in a recent Department
of Justice study, this was the proportion of some 400,000 prisoners from
thirty states who were arrested for a new crime within three years of
being released from prison. The full report can be found at
www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mschpprts05.pdf. ↩
2
Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, edited by
Inimai Chettiar and Michael Waldman (Brennan Center for Justice, 2015). ↩
3
For more on restorative justice, see Helen Epstein, “America’s Prisons:
Is There Hope?,” The New York Review, June 11, 2009. ↩
4
Melissa S. Kearney and Benjamin H. Harris, “Ten Economic Facts About
Crime and Incarceration in the United States,” Brookings, May 1, 2014.
Other calculations give slightly different figures. ↩
5
See Ikponwosa O. Ekunwe and Richard S. Jones, “Finnish Criminal Policy:
From Hard time to Gentle Justice,” The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons,
Vol. 21, Nos. 1 and 2 (June 2012), p. 178. ↩
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