American Gulag -hearing the cries of our children

Jail timeApril 26, 2005

On its face, the rate of incarceration in the United States speaks of a social pathology so large that most people don't see it.

The pathology is not in the level of criminality in the United States. It is in the crude and destructive way that the nation has chosen to respond to behavior that does not necessarily require jail time.

The United States imprisons more people as a percentage of population than any other nation — more than Russia, China or other nations noted for the brutal treatment of their people. One out of every 138 Americans is in jail — a total of 2.1 million.
In 2004, 61 percent of inmates were racial minorities. One-eighth of all black men in their late 20s were in prison.

That is an enormous cost to millions of individuals and to communities and society. These numbers provoke the question: Are we so lawless as a nation that we require massive imprisonment to maintain order? Or do these high numbers exist for political reasons?

The war on drugs and the larger campaign against crime in the 1980s and 1990s are principally responsible for the increase in the number of jailed Americans. Like other states, Vermont has watched its jails fill up and has had to build new ones, which just as quickly filled up. Corrections budgets have become an enormous burden on the states, and prison building and operations have become big business.

Politically, it was hard to resist get-tough policies. Racism is not as overt as it used to be, but latent racism finds expression in acquiescence to policies that lead white people to shrug passively as the jails fill up with poor black men. The presumption is that they deserve it. They are drug users. They have committed crimes.

But the jailing of small-time drug users is a choice, and the question is whether long terms in jail for the possession of a small amount of drugs have any relation to justice. Vermont has taken steps in recent years to cut back on the jail time resulting from drug use. The state has begun to establish drug courts to steer defendants toward treatment instead of jail. And the Legislature is examining sentencing policies that might be overzealous and self-defeating in the battle against drugs.

There are those who will argue that the decline in crime in the past decade proves that it is useful to lock up the bad guys. It is an argument with a whiff of the Soviet Union about it: employing the machinery of the state to engineer social control, irrespective of the justice of individual cases. And the decline in crime may well have more to do with demographics than anything else. Even so, the number of inmates is increasing even as crime has been falling. It appears the machinery of social control is eating up a huge segment of our communities.

Why do we tolerate such a policy? For one thing, the poor lack a significant political voice. And it is hard to argue for lenience in an atmosphere when toughness against crime is the prevailing mood. Where is the constituency for a message to go easy on drug users?

And yet gradually, some states are scaling back on policies that have created an American gulag. America, the leader in freedom, need not be the leader of imprisonment.