Tag Archives: mass incarceration

January 2023 in Review

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We’re now 1/12th of the way through 2023. Is this really the fabulous science fiction future we were promised? Well, at least the Earth is not a smoking ruin, at least most parts of it.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: How about a roundup of awful things, like the corrupt illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court, ongoing grisly wars, the CIA killed JFK after all (?), nuclear proliferation, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration, Guantanamo Bay, and all talk no walk on climate change? And let’s hope there is a special circle of hell waiting for propaganda artists who worked for Exxon.

Most hopeful story: Bill Gates says a gene therapy-based cure for HIV could be 10-15 years away.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Genetically engineered beating pig hearts have been sown into dead human bodies. More than once.

mass incarceration

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Maybe I’ve finally put my finger on what bothered me about Black Lives Matter. Of course I’m not in favor of police brutality and nobody should be. Police brutality is a huge problem for the people on the receiving end of it, and it needs to be addressed. Addressing it would only remove drop from the bucket of violence and injustice in this country. We need to identify and address root causes of violence and injustice, but maybe that is too vague a concept for people to be marching in the streets about. Mass incarceration is concrete – we hear the numbers frequently, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. For every 100 or so people you see walking on the street, there is one American in a federal, state, or local jail. And some of those people on the street are on probation and parole. Add in friends and family of all those people, and a huge proportion of the population is affected, certainly enough to get a march together.

So what can we do about it? Just trying to reason it out, I would first identify things that don’t need to be crimes, and don’t make them crimes any more. Drug use and possession come to mind – unless you are selling drugs to children, you are really only hurting yourself and/or other consenting adults, and this should be dealt with through the health care system (we need a health care system!). Go ahead and legalize prostitution. Gambling is pretty much legal already. There might be other things in this category I haven’t thought of. Next, find non-violent ways to treat non-violent crimes. For example, address property crimes by taking away property.

Finally, you come down to just violent crimes, and violent criminals do need to be taken off the streets. But you can try to find ways to reduce and prevent crime rather than just treat the symptoms. Ultimately, as suggested in this Brennan Center for Justice report, the answer is to look at all those approaches and programs that have been tried on a small scale, follow the evidence, and then try to scale up the ones that have been proven to work. Things that have been tried include “deferred-sentencing diversion programs, pre-booking diversion programs, and alternative court models, including mental health and drug courts.”

This is hard, but unlike say, education, mass incarceration is pretty easy to measure and determine if we are making progress or not.

perspectives on police violence

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People, from activists to the police themselves, have differing perspectives on police violence. Trying to see things from someone else’s perspective, even someone you strongly disagree with, is the first step toward tolerance, and the first step toward maybe possibly changing someone’s mind.

Barack Obama made this statement on Twitter in response to George Floyd’s death:

…it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station – including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day – to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.

Barack Obama

FiveThirtyEight discusses a poll (by the Pew Research Center) of police officers which indicates that most of them do in fact believe that they do their jobs in a fair and unbiased way, and that they are largely misunderstood. Black and female officers are somewhat more likely to dissent from this majority view.

In that survey, 67 percent of officers said they thought the deaths of black people in encounters with the police were isolated incidents, compared with 31 percent who said those deaths were part of a broader pattern. The public,3 by comparison, had almost exactly the opposite reaction — only 39 percent of Americans said the police killings of black Americans were isolated incidents, while 60 percent said they were part of a broader pattern. (More recent surveys of the public also indicate that around 60 percent of Americans think that these incidents are part of a broader pattern.)

FiveThirtyEight

Activists feel differently. Here is an article in the Intercept from Chenjerai Kumanyika, an activist based in my home city of Philadelphia.

A more historically informed and honest engagement with policing will have to confront a painful but urgent reality: The job of the modern police in America has been to reinforce a racist social order since its beginnings in the 19th century. Regardless of the good intentions of any individual police officer, the history, economic incentives, and culture of the police in every era, in every city in the United States, make this clear. 

Intercept

These viewpoints are all valid in the sense that they are based on some combination of evidence, personal experience, and sincere belief.

I still think a lot of issues between the police and African-American communities come down to the war on drugs, at least in the modern post-Jim Crow, post-redlining era. Think of Prohibition – outlawing something with an enormous demand raises its price so that the people providing it, newly criminalized, are willing to take up arms and engage in violence to realize the profits involved. In that situation, the government will either be too weak to enforce the law, or it will respond by arming and engaging in overwhelming force itself to stay in control. That is the story of Prohibition, of the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America, and of the War on Drugs. I believe the culture of the organizations charged with enforcing the law evolves to enable and rationalize the actions that are necessary to maintain control by force, and unfortunately bias against the people on the other side becomes part of that.

The way out is to end the War on Drugs once and for all. Then all the funding and weapons and violence will no longer have a purpose. The police-court-prison-industrial complex is a powerful organism and it will fight to preserve itself.

Philadelphia prison population might be cut by a third

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I found this news pretty surprising:

Philadelphia’s prisons hold on average more than 7,000 inmates each day – the highest incarceration rate of any major American city.

The powers that be want to cut it by more than a third, 34 percent to be exact, during the next three years.

Part of that will call for addressing racial bias in the justice system… “Folks cannot get what they need in the way of drug treatment, counseling, job training, social skill training behind bars,” said Mayor Jim Kenney.

The article goes on to quote judges who agree with this. It’s certainly good news. If so many people involved in the system agree that one-third of people in prison are there because of racial bias, are nonviolent, and don’t need to be there, and it can really be fixed so quickly, what took so long?