Amazed by the Numbers

Round numbers are supposed to be easier to get your mind around. But it’s hard to do that, when the round number is one American in every 100 behind bars.

The American prison system currently holds about 1.6 million people. Jails confine another 735,000 more, according to latest data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The jail figure is down slightly in the last few years. But when the number of prison inmates is added in, the total number of people confined in correctional facilities approaches 2.4 million.

It’s not so much a system as a set of systems, consisting of 50 states, the District of Columbia, the feds, and various local governments — particularly jails at the county level.

With so many decision makers, it’s hardly a vast conspiracy. The cumulative effect, however, is Leviathan-like in size. Scholars now call it mass incarceration.

This Leviathan is a labyrinth for many who are inside it. With prison terms so long and rehabilitation resources so scarce, it must seem like being stuck in a maze, trying to get out.

Indeed, mass incarceration has also become a labyrinth in policy terms. But no Theseus is in sight, to slay, or at least tame, the beast our society has created out of fear and malign neglect.

The closest we’ve come is Sen. Jim Webb, whose sensible proposal in 2009 for a national commission to review sentencing policy and practice went nowhere fast.

Instead of a single national hero, how about a host of heroes at the state and local level? In the dark maze, they could be a thousand points of light.

The Sense of a Blog's Ending

I’ve had a good run with this blog. I launched it in December 2008, choosing the domain name on Blogger of Righteous Harvest. The name was meant to signify biblical roots and restorative justice aspirations.

I later inserted the title Piercing the Panopticon. This was intended to take on the issue of America’s excessive reliance on prison as a means of resolving social conflict.

Over the last 3-plus years, I’ve tried to tackle topics of large import. In several posts, I took up California’s prison overcrowding crisis. In others, I delved into Michel Foucault’s analysis of the power dynamics underlying the ascendancy of the modern prison.

In 2009, I eagerly followed Sen. Jim Webb’s efforts to create a national criminal justice review commission. In due course, I commented on the failure of his proposal to go anywhere in Congress.

The reasons for this failure became clearer in 2011, when Daedalus and Wilson Quarterly published themed issues on the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

Since joining the board of directors of Prison Congregations of America in 2010, I’ve increasingly attempted to articulate the value of prison ministry — for people on both sides of the walls. Piercing the Panopticon began to take on a new meaning for me: fostering hope in the light of Christ among those in the figurative darkness of prison.

It’s time for me to reboot my blog to focus more clearly on prison ministry. During Lent, I intend to post a few more times here on Righteous Harvest, seeking to sum up the themes of the last three years. I’ll do so, however, with the sense of an ending.

Paradigm Shift Shall Surely Come

This blog turned three yesterday.

Depending on how one measures, that is arguably a fairly long time. Senator Jim Webb’s proposal for a national sentencing reform commission, for example, has come and gone.

By broader measures of duration, however, three years is not that long at all. The dominant paradigm of mass incarceration remains very much in place in American criminal justice.

Yes, there are some reform experiments underway in cash-strapped states that can longer afford to lock so many people up for so long. But the fundamental focus on prison and punishment remains very much in place as 2011 draws to a close, just as it did in 2008 when I put up my first post.

Paradigm shift shall surely come to American corrections. It just won’t come on cue, merely because one year gives way to another.

Webb Hasn't Given Up On Sentencing Reform

Jim Webb hasn’t given up on sentencing reform. He did announce in February that he’s retiring from the Senate when his term ends next year. In June, however, he published a Huff post essay reiterating the case for fundamental changes iu criminal justice policy and practice.

The talking points are painfully familiar to anyone who follows this under-reported issue. For example, let’s start with this: Why does a country with 5 percent of the world’s population hold 25 percent of the world’s prison population?

As Webb has pointed out, this figure could be taken one of two ways. It could be that we have a disproportionate share of bad actors in America. Or it could be that our criminal justice system is badly broken, so that is no longer able to distinguish between good and bad as it once did.

Which, dear reader, do you think it is? I’ve stated my view repeatedly in this blog for 2 ½ years. But I’d like to know your thoughts too.

Incarceration of the Masses

Philosophy beings in wonder, Socrates famously said.

Two millenia later, Descartes said it begins in doubt.

I have Socratic wonder at the enormity of American incarceration, as well as Cartesian doubt.

Two years ago, when introducing his proposal for a criminal justice reform commission, Senator Jim Webb asked it this way. Are Americans more evil than virtually every other people in the world, justifying such high incarceration rates? Or has our sentencing and corrections system gone terribly wrong, locking up people who really dont' need to be behind bars?

To my mind, the latter is true. Due to an out-of-control drug war and other ideological factors, the American prison population is preposterously high. Prison used to be reserved for the worst of the worst. Now, among the lower depths of the population, it's an expected rite of passage.

This is a plea for recovery of the ability to be shocked, and to ask the right questions again. "To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand," wrote Ortega y Gassett in The Revolt of the Masses. By expressing my surprise at a society that puts 2.3 million people in jail or prison , I am trying to understand.

Reform Needs a New Champion

Senator Jim Webb announced a few weeks ago that is leaving the Senate after only one term.

What will be the fate of his proposal for a national criminal justice reform commission, once he's gone?

I, for one, hope the idea finds a new legislative champion. Sentence Speak, a blog hosted by Families Against Mandatory Minimums, remains hopeful as well.

Criticism

Rereading Real Presences, George Steiner's probing essay into the metaphysical underpinning of aesthetic expression, reminded me why I'm doing this blog.

"All serious art, music and literature," Steiner wrote in 1989, "is a critical act." It is critical because it makes a statement that runs counter to the usual way of the world. Art offers a critique of life; "it says that things might be (have been, shall be) different."

So true! American incarceration rates have not always been so stratospherically high. They will probably not be so high in the future. They certainly do not have to be so high. They should be lower because, as Senator Jim Webb says, we are not such an evil people that we need to keep over two million of our fellow citizens in jail or prison at a given time.

If, then, incarceration rates should be lower, what should they be? And how do we get from here to there? To my mind, the answer that could be taken from the title of an old REM song - Can't Get There From Here - simply will not do.

BJS Compiles the Numbers, Year-end 2009

The report released today by Bureau of Justice Statistics on the 2009 year-end prison population was a mixed bag.

The remarkable news is that, for the first time since 1972, the total state prison population went down. The decrease was not large − slightly less than 3,000 inmates (2,941) in a total state inmate population of 1.4 million. But the first drop in 38 years, even if small, is notable evidence of the Great Recession, if not necessarily of a rethinking of the underpinnings of sentencing policy.

And yet, despite the state decline, the overall U.S. prison population still kept going up, as the federal figure increased by 6838 to 208,118. The federal increase was 3,897 more than the state decrease, putting the combined state and federal total at 1,613,656 on December 31, 2009, according to BJS.

As Doug Berman noted in his sentencing blog, it’s scarcely a surprise that the one jurisdiction constitutionally able to run a deficit went in the opposite direction from budget-strapped states.

I would add a further thought, with a nod to Jim Webb’s ongoing effort to initiate a real dialog about fundamental sentencing reform. If reform is driven only by fiscal realities, and not also by a revisiting of the mass-incarceration model itself, the results are not likely to amount to much.

To be sure, cost is important. The more important question, however, is what purposes are served by mass incarceration? Intoning the words “public safety” endlessly is not an answer. It is a tautology − maybe even a boondoggle.

A Blue Ribbon Silver Lining?

It takes time to turn the Titanic around. And when a country has 2.3 million people in jail or prison, that's a Titanic-size problem.

Last March, Senator Jim Webb introduced a bill to create a national blue-ribbon commission to examine possible sentencing reforms. Ten months later, it has passed the Senate Judiciary committee on voice vote.

Doug Berman, the dean of criminal justice blogging, sees a possible silver lining in the chnaged power dynamics in the Senate following the special election in Massachusetts. It may be that, with health care no longer so front and center, other priorities may get the attention they have long deserved. If so, criminal justice reform should certainly be at or near the top of that list.

A Time to Fight for Sentencing Reform

In late March, when Senator Jim Webb introduced a bill in the Senate calling for sentencing reform, Doug Berman’s sentencing blog was brimming with comments. Not surprisingly, a number of them reflected the reflexive vitriol that for too long has passed for discourse on criminal justice in America. Others, however, saw Webb as that exceedingly rare figure: a politician of genuine courage.

Tonight I went online to learn more about Webb’s background, and Elizabeth Drew’s article in the June 26, 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books did not disappoint. It was chuck full of information − such as Webb’s legendary boxing match at West Point against Oliver North, the famously gung-ho figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

Though he grew up as a Democrat, Jim Webb broke with the party over President Carter’s grant of amnesty to Vietnam War draft evaders. Webb was a Marine rifle platoon commander in Vietnam, where he won two Purple Hearts, and later served as President Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. His military upbringing is also reflected in a plainspoken manner and a strong personal code of honor. That code of honor helps him recognize when the military is being misued, and led to his opposition to George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

"Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight," the Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn sang in the 1980s, after a visit to Central America when it was besieged by civil wars. As we look to the fall, and battles in Congress over health care reform and so much else, there will be ample occasion to put that notion to the test, and to apply the title of Jim Webb’s 2008 book: A Time to Fight.

Beyond the Politics of Fear

No one wants to compromise public safety. A government’s most fundamental duty, after all, is to protect its citizens. Quite appropriately, then, Senator Jim Webb and other legislative leaders chose a law enforcement official to lead off the first hearing on Webb’s proposal to create a national criminal justice study commission charged tasked with recommending comprehensive, system-wide reforms.

Chief William Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there would be more, not less, public safety with a proper reform of the justice system. “It is not enough,” he said, “to continue to churn people through a broken and ailing system with no forethought and no long-term solution.” America has been doing that for three decades, giving a country with five percent of the world’s population a bloated prison system with 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

How did it happen? In his chapter on “The Politics of Fear” in his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore asks why we have become so vulnerable to appeals to fear. Though he does not deal with domestic criminal justice issues directly, his reasoning applies equally as well to them as to the Bush Administration’s “war on terror.” Gore argues that our democracy’s immune system — its ability to neutralize falsehood by exercising reason — has become weak. A free press is a crucial part of this system, but it has failed just as miserably in questioning America’s incarceration policies as it did in questioning the war in Iraq.

The only way to move forward is to regain a better balance between fear and reason. Let's start by admitting that the capacidty for fear is hardwired in the brain, with reason centered in the parts of the brain that evolved more recently. Accordingly, there will always be a strong emotional element in society's response to crime. This is not only due to the “fear factor," a tabloid tendency to focus on serial killers and notorious incidents like the Texas cop who tasered a great-grandmother during a traffic stop. It's because when people are harmed by crime, or there is a threat of harm, it naturally elicits an emotional response.

To reform the criminal justice system properly, we need to stop relying so h eavily on heuristic shortcuts like “three strikes and you’re out” and reclaim the capacity for both empathy and rational problem solving. Those qualities, no less than fear, are fundamental human capacities. Fascinating brain research continues to emerge, for example, about how "mirror neurons" contribute to feelings of empathy.

In July 2007, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Cherthoff claimed he had a “gut feeling” that there might soon be another terrorist attack on American soil. Well, he was wrong, and his statement played into the hands of the terrorists by making many Americans more fearful than was really necessary. As a friend put it to me yesterday over lunch, you can’t keep the threat level on orange for eight years; it just wears you out, and you become the boys who cried wolf.

Today, in national criminal justice policy, the Webb proposal offers a chance to look critically at what the threats really are. They are indeed real, but an over-reliance on prison to produce public safety has arguably made us − as a book on Bush’s response to 9/11 was titled − “less safe, less free.”

"Plush" Prison Conditions?

Working for a legislator is no easy task. In 1997, when I began working as a nonpartisan researcher for an oversight agency at the Idaho State Legislature, the agency director was candid with me about the dynamics of the work. Our little agency was to be an island of objective analysis in the sea of conflict that was the legislature.

This conflict-based model of legislative politics was a little hard for me to accept at first. Though I could certainly understand it at the national level, in big country like ours, it seemed reasonable to think things might be different in a small state of barely over a million residents whose legislators were overwhelmingly of one party. The joke was that all of the Democratic legislators in Idaho could fit in a phone booth, and considering that Republicans outnumbered Democrats 35-5 in the Senate, this was not too far from being the truth.

In practice, however, politics in a polity of any size involves the clash of interests, not only between parties, but sometimes within them. Conflict is inevitable and its resolution is not always pretty — a reality often summed up in Bismarck’s dictum that no one should know how laws or sausages are made.

With this understanding of politics as my point of departure, my expectations were relatively modest when I contacted my congressperson, U.S. Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) in late March. I asked him to offer a bill in the House comparable to the one offered in the Senate (S. 714) by Jim Webb and Arlen Specter to create a blue ribbon panel to review US sentencing policies and recommend reforms. I thought I’d get a noncommittal response, perhaps a form letter, saying he was considering the issue. Instead, I received a voice mail from a staffer packed with peripheral, partisan comment.

Rep. Kline’s staff person told me that he would pass along to the representative my interest in prison reform, but he didn’t stop there. He added that the real problem was coddling criminals, keeping them in “plush” conditions while even military families must struggle to pay their bills in a tough economy.

My question had been a straightforward one: Would Rep. Kline support a House companion to S. 714? Yet here was his staff person, leaving a voice mail implying that the real problem was inmates living a life of leisure, maybe even playing tennis, on the taxpayers’ dime. He would have done his job better if he’d simply said he’d share my concern with his boss, instead of trying to redefine the issue as being about pampered prisoners.

On a Moving Train

Though I majored in history and later earned a master’s degree in it, I did not hear of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States until 2000. I can, however, recall the exact moment when I did. Along with several other members of a research and evaluation team from the Minnesota Department of Corrections, I was returning to St. Paul from a site visit to the sex offender treatment center at Moose Lake. A colleague of mine happened to mention Zinn’s People’s History as a remarkable book that every American should read. After mentally filing her recommendation away, my interest was piqued years later when I noticed my wife had added You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train — a documentary about Zinn and his work — to our Netflix queue.

As shown in the film, Zinn has few illusions about the difficulty of challenging the powers that be on issues like racial injustice, prolonging the Vietnam War, or invading Iraq. Over and over again, history has been written by the winners, those who subscribe to some variation on Frederick the Great’s theme that God is with the big battalions. Yet Zinn still finds history hopeful, because it shows us that even the most unjust structures are not forever. Who would have thought a generation ago, for example, that apartheid would crumble, with Nelson Mandela released from prison and lionized around the world? Seen not from the perspective of the dominant groups but from below, history also contains many “fugitive moments of compassion,” Zinn says — moments that can inspire us to laudable acts of our own.

A recognition of our role as citizens in the unfolding story of American democracy is a good place to start as our cash-strapped nation grapples with the consequences of the past generation’s prison boom. An ever-rising tide of incarceration is not inevitable. History teaches at least that much, and each of us has a part to play in creating the future. That is why I sent an e-mail last week to U.S. Rep. John Kline, encouraging him to offer companion legislation in the House to S. 714, the bill sponsored in the Senate by Jim Webb, Arlen Specter and others to create a national criminal justice commission. The commission's task would be to study the issues in depth and recommend reforms in America’s sentencing laws and correctional policies.

Laws like those that impose Draconian penalties for low-level drug possession are not immutable holy wit. They are made by humans and can be changed by humans. Indeed, the process of doing so can itself be empowering. I'm not so naive as to think that writing to my congressperson (a cliché of civics 101) will change the world all at once. Maybe it will help to do that, maybe it won’t. After all, the prison industrial complex is a powerful force, and the political dynamics of any meaningful sentencing reform are unpredictable. The point is that, as psychologist Diana de Vegh says, "taking action frees you from the paralysis that comes from accepting what is called reality." Rep. Kline, if you happen to read this post, you can consider the note I sent about Sen. Webb’s bill a declaration of epistemological independence.

That Delicate Balance

After the Obama administration announced the ouster of Rick Waggoner, the embattled CEO of once-proud carmaker General Motors, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm said on National Public Radio that Mr. Waggoner was being made a “scapegoat” for the company’s — and our economy’s — problems. On one level, this is obvious hyperbole, trying to ascribe victim status to a very highly compensated executive who will decidedly not need to worry about where his next meal is coming from, much less being put to death as a symbolic sacrifice for our collective gas-guzzling sins. Digging deeper, however, it seems to me that Gov. Granholm’s statement hints at a mythological level beneath America’s current economic crisis.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche speculated about how the art form of tragedy may have grown out of opposition between competing Dionysian and Apollonian elements in nature and culture. The wild revelry of the Dionysian, with festivals and the fermentation of strong drink, is at odds with the austere Apollonian order of law and reason. (How music fits into this schema is yet another question.)

Nietzsche’s conceptualization reamins controversial, but the basic tension between Dionysian and Apollian elements can still be applied to today's issues. For too long, year after year of Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve, the spigot on the national kegger stayed open as the Dionysian dance of derivatives and other dubious financial instruments continued. Despite Enron and numerous other corporate scandals, Apollonian regulation was often treated with outright scorn (as Thomas Frank details in The Wrecking Crew). In Adam Smith's theory, the free market has an invisible hand, but in practice an orgiastic economy based on excessive credit, lax oversight, and rampant Ponzi schemes is not providential. When the bubble burts (as it always does), Dionysus moves on to the next party, leaving others to pick up the pieces.

As we do this, with compassion for those suffering from the economic fallout, finding the right combination of Dionysian and Apollonian elements is crucial. As with the Constitution itself, it's a matter of striking "that delicate balance." The dynamism we’re depending on to lift all our boats won’t come with too much top-down regulatory order. But going back to an unsustainable spending spree isn't a viable option, either.

Criminal justice reform will be an important part of the broader balance-striking cum national renewal that is now our task. With more than one in every one hundred adults behind bars, America has been on a Dionysian incarceration binge undertaken under the façade of Apollonian order. Senator Jim Webb has introduced a bill in the Senate for a national commission to grapple with the issues, and The New York Times opines (rather too sweepingly) that it’s time to stop “wast[ing] money by putting the wrong people behind bars.”

No one says change will be easy or that it is assured. For a generation, charges of being “soft on crime” have silenced those looking for a more thoughtful approach. But as Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller asked at a meeting of his state’s sentencing commission in the summer of 1999, “How about tough AND smart on crime?” Liberal ideology doesn’t necessarily have all the answers about how to do this, and The Times overplays its hand by asserting it’s merely a matter of putting the right people away — presumably the proverbial “worst of the worst.” In practice, much of the problem of the expanding prison population has to do with the length of stay in prison, not solely who should be sent there in the first place. The debate is joined, however, and here’s hoping someone steps forward soon in the House to offer a companion bill to Senator Webb’s.