The Bitter Irony of Mass Incarceration

"A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

Winston Churchill coined this  phrase in 1939 to describe Russia. It became widely known during the Cold War.

Could it be applied to America's prison boom?  For there is a mysterious element to how the U.S., in only one generation, become an international outlier on incarceration rates.

To be sure, there are many reasons for the unprecedented increase in inmates.Two years ago, a special issue of Daedalus on mass incarceration probed them in considerable depth.

The irrationality of America's entire epic jailing exercise, however, cannot be denied. To paraphrase Churchill, American mass incarceration is a riddle wrapped in a bitter irony. The nation that says it loves liberty so much takes so much of it away from its own citizens.

Looking Back on Baghdad and Paths Not Taken

Pure, unmitigated, raucous, ecastatic joy on the streets of Cairo. The soldarity of the people deposed an entrenched strongman who had spent nearly 30 years consolidating his power.

Could it have been like this in Iraq?

Both President Bushes made sure this would not happen.

In 1991, following the American-led ouster of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, much of Iraq rose in revolt against Saddam Hussein's dictatorial rule. Yet George H.W. Bush, as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces, allowed Hussein to send helicopter gunships to suppress the uprising.



Twelve years later, George W. Blush recklessly blundered into an Iraqi intervention with planning so non-existent as to be criminally negligent. As Garrison Keillor noted, he was like Melville's Ahab - without the grandeur - hell-bent on sinking his own ship for his own incrutable reasons.

Charles Ferguson has documented much of this folly in his powerful 2007 dbocumentary No End in Sight. Unlike the ironic Erasmus, however, there is no praise; only justifiable blame for the clueless W, chicken-hawk Cheney, and arguably insane Rumsfeld.

Franken's Senate Win: How Ironic

Al Franken is now serving (rather quietly) in the U.S. Senate, after spending months in a protracted recount battle with his Republican opponent and devoting two full years before that to full-time campaigning.

During the campaign, Franken's past as a satirist and (official or unofficial) Democratic spokesperson in the political Culture Wars came under intense scrutiny. Betty McCollum, a Democrat who represents the St. Paul area in the U.S. House, called a sexually explicit essay he wrote for Playboy "radioactive." Republicans pored over writings, especially Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, trying to find over-the-top statements they could use to portray Franken as "angry."

The Republican strategy didn't work. Their candidate, Norm Coleman, appeared more and more to be a hollow man. By contrast, Franken increasingly came across not as irrationally angry but as righteously passionate about giving working people a voice in Washington, just as Paul Wellstone had done until his untimely death in 2002.

About two weeks before the election, the Star Tribune ran a lengthy profile of Franken that ultimately turned on the concept of irony. A reporter asked him whether it was ironic that the Republicans were trying to use his earlier ironic statements against him. Franken thought for a moment and said it wasn't ironic at all − then laughed.