Glen Loury on Factories For Producing Inmates

Glen Loury’commentary on America’s correctional Leviathan came to my attention in 2009. Though I knew he taught at Brown, I didn’t realize until I watched this video that his primary discipline is economics

The economic perspective is a valuable one in approaching questions of incarceration, class, and race.

How is it, for example that most of the people who go to prison for involvement with drugs are poor and non-white? And how is it that America, with five percent of the world's population, has 25 percent of the world’s prison population?

Loury describes the American criminal justice system as “an engine for producing and reproducing racial inequality. “ In certain neighborhoods, he argues, jails and prisons are essentially “factories for producing inmates.”

The factory works by constantly exposing new generations to a culture of entrenched interaction with the prison system. Young men in these poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods tend to have few positive role models in their lives — in large part because widespread incarceration has taken such a toll on their social networks.

Young men in this setting often become enmeshed with the law themselves and get sent to prison. The percentage of such men who are from racial minorities is far disporportionate to those groups' percentage of the U.S. population as a whole.

Upon returning to the neighborhood after serving a prison term, these men (and a few women) face daunting challenges in finding proper employment. The Great Recession and its high-unemployment aftermath have only added to these challenges.

Yet the Recession has also spurred efforts in some states to reform a prison system that has become too costly to sustain. To use economic parlance, what’s needed is a change in the business model for the whole system.

Mass Incarceration as a Contagious Disease

Apocalyptic imagery, to my mind, is entirely appropriate as a way to describe the state of our criminal justice system. I’ve use my share of it, over the years, in this blog.

A bloated Leviathan.

A colossal uncharted labyrinth.

Pick an over-the-top image, and it can be made to apply to a system in which seven million citizens sit in jail or prison — a number vastly disproportionate to anywhere else in the developed world.

So I was scarcely surprised by the titles of the two books recently reviewed by Michelle Alexander in the Washington Post. A plague of prisons arguably does point to some sort of collapse of the American criminal justice system. In pulblic health terms, mass incarceratoin is indeed like a contagious disease.

As a character in Camus' The Plague observes, "We've all got the plague." We all have it because we all live in this society that created it and continues to perpetuate it.

Budget constraints, and perhaps sheer exhaustion, are finally starting to partially contain the contagion. What will take its place, when the paradigm shifts?

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.

Indiana Considers Sentencing Reform

In 1999, the conservative scholar John J. Dilulio published a Wall Street Journal op/ed piece on incarceration rates. Its thesis was clearly stated in the title: “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.”

Yet for the next decade, incarceration continued to increase. The figure of two million people in jail or prison grew by another 300,000 nationally, to a total of 2.3 million. The cumulative state tab for this has more than quadrupled since 2000, from $12 billion to $52 billion.

Add in those on probation or parole and the round number is now an astonishing 7 million Americans under correctional supervision.

In today’s straightened economic circumstances, keeping so many people under correctional control is becoming less and less sustainable. The Great Recession has already had a profound impact on American life, and is likely to continue to do so for a long time. Prison beds are by no means immune to the ongoing financial pressure states are under.

Developments in the state of Indiana provide a case in point. From 2000 to 2009, Indiana’s prison population grew by 41 percent. Analysis showed that the increase was due not to more violent crime, but to an influx of drug addicts and low-level, non-violent offenders.

Indiana is now trying to turn this situation around. Governor Mitch Daniel’s proposal to give judges more discretion to tailor shorter sentences for non-violent offenders was lauded in a New York Times editorial and is supported by the Pew Center on the States.

How this sensible proposal will play out in the rough-and-tumble of a legislative session is anyone’s guess. Could it be that financial necessity will be the mother of invention? We’ll have to stay tuned as the session unfolds.

Bubbles Do Burst

Veteran corrections scholar Joan Petersilia contributes the first essay to The Wilson Quarterly's examination of America’s bloated correctional system. WQ’s Winter 2011 issue features a gaggle of orange-clad inmates on the cover, with this headline:

The Seven Million: How to Shrink America’s Criminal Population

Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford, offers an essay entitled Beyond the Prison Bubble. She begins by noting that the national number of people behind bars has increased for 37 years in a row.

Yet the very title of her piece contains an element of hope. Bubbles, after all, do burst eventually. And when they do, it’s never the same again.

The Seven Million

Last summer it was Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, analyzing the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

Now it's The Wilson Quarterly, a thoughtful, respected publication from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, covering similar ground.
Why, WQ asks, are seven million American either in jail or prison or on probation and parole? And what should be done about it?

These are the broad questions this blog has been trying to answer, in one way or another, since I launched it in December 2008.

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.

On The Wane At Last, After a 30-Year Epidemic?

A staggering 30-year-long increase that may finally be abating.

The American prison population?

Perhaps. But in this case, I was referring to the AIDS epidemic.

Release From Rampant Incarceration

As a late-wave Baby Boomer, when I think of a cover of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released, I think of The Band.

Tonight, I'm adding another band, to go along with The Band.

Wilco.



Viewing the song through the prism of this blog, I was particularly struck by these words:

I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released

The imagery of the sun setting in the West and rising in the East points to the way historical events often play out in cycles. Could it be that American sentencing policy, which has been so harsh for so long, is poised for a swing of the pendulum toward a more balanced approach? An approach more like the rest of the world - or at least the America of 30 years ago.

Maybe I'm naive, but I second the sentiment of Dylan's song. Release from the ideological blinders that brought us here could happen any day now. In fact, publication by the respected journal Daedalus of an entire issue on the subject of mass incarceration suggests that day may indeed be dawning.

American Football, American Incarceration

To the rest of the world, football is soccer. Why American football is called football here, when kicking the ball is actually an unusual occurrence, is I suppose a question for historians of the game.

My interest at present is to throw out a totally speculative theory that may help explain the outlier status America occupies internationally in the size of its prison population. In case you didn't know, ours is gargantuan, unlike any other country in the developed world.

Could it be that our passion for the violent game of American football, with its frequent, terrible injuries, has something to do with the ideology of inflicting pain on so many millions of people through (in my view) excessive incarceration?

In other words, does one type of American exceptionalism (quasi-religious devotion to American football) contribute to another (off-the-charts incarceration that makes us a nation of jailers)?

This question crystallized in my mind when I happened to read that Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Michael Vick was knocked out of last Sunday’s game with an injury – and wasn’t the only QB to have suffered this fate. In the St. Paul Pioneer Press, right next to the Vick story (“Eagles lose Vick to injured rib, chest”) was the account of the Chicago Bears’ Jay Cutler going down as well. “Giants KO Cutler, bully Bears,” was the boxing-speak headline about that football game.

What triggered my speculation, I think, was that Vick only recently returned to the NFL after serving 21 months in federal prison for animal cruelty. He had gotten the starting job for the Washington game because the quarterback who opened the season for the Eagles had – you guessed it – been injured.

We live in a culture swathed in superfluous violence. Why should we be surprised that incarceration rates are astronomical? Or that the death penalty lingers on in most of the states, like a specter haunting the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?

Glenn Loury, the Town Crier

How did America's astonishingly large increase in incarceration happen? By any empirical measure, the U.S. is a wide outlier in imprisonment rates not only compared to the rest of the world, but compared to our own past. The rate has exploded in the last 40 years, from 100 per 100,000 of the population to nearly 700 per 100,000 today.

And why has this not gotten more attention? To me, it's been the elephant in the room in America since the end of the Cold War. But the economy was so strong that the governing powers could pay for the prisons - and they did, creating a huge industry. Eisenhower famously warned of the military industrial complex. Who could have forseen then that dealing with a prison industrial complex would become an equally daunting challenge?

Finally, however, the wall of silence around the incarceration escalation is starting to crack. In 1999, the conservative scholar John J. Dilulion opined in the Wall Street Journal that 2 million prisoners was enough. Two years later, in The Culture of Crime Control, David Garland described the spread of ever-wider coercion exercised through the correctional system.

More recently, Glenn Loury, a sociologist at Brown University, has taken up the role of - in his words - town crier, warning of the dangers to our society of mass incarceration.

The sheer numbers numbers are huge - 2.3 million in jail or prison on a given day, and nearly another 5 million on probation or parole. So it absolutely is, in the term used in the current issue of Daedalus, mass incarceration.



And yet, as Loury remarked to the privileged, predominantly white kids he teaches at Brown, it is also not really mass incarceration in the sense that it affects everyone equally. It is hyperincarceration of certain elemoents of the population, particularly racial minorities.

Daedalus and Mass Incarceration

Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, has devoted a special issue to "mass incarceration."

The classical connotations of the journal's name are not without irony when the topic is America's bursting-at-the-seams prison population. For it was Daedalus, the prototypical craftsman, who designed a peculiar form of prison (the labyrinth) to contain a a very particular fearsome creature (the Minotaur - half man, half bull).

Can Daedalus, the journal, turn the tables on its namesake and provide a forum for solutions that will help unlock the labyrinth of America's correctional system?

Prison Grove: All These Broken Lives

The idiosyncratic rock singer Warren Zevon forewent invasive cancer treatment to finish his final album, The Wind. One of the tracks was a haunting meditation on life (and impending death) behind bars called Prison Grove.

"All these broken lives," sang the dying Zevon, backed by Bruce Springsteen and other long-time friends. Suffering and the sounds of an inscrutable fate permeate the song.



The macabre had long held a strong fascination for Zevon. Throughout his career as a solo artist, his oeuvre often included songs whose stories spilled out into over-the-top violence. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, Werewolves of London, Excitable Boy, and so on.

But though the material sometimes seemed lurid, Warren Zevon was not engaged in nihilistic posturing. In a violent world, it was more like a recognition of reality. Laying bare the skull beneath the skin, to acknowledge our common human vulnerability.

So to me it was perfectly fitting, on his final album, for Zevon to acknowledge the terrible pain inflicted across America by out-of-control incarceration. When Zevon released Excitable Boy in 1978, the U.S. prison and jail population was slightly over 500,000. Thirty years later, it had risen seven-fold, to 2.3 million. Prison Grove reflects the agonizing toll that this unprecedented increase has taken on so many lives.

Swimming in a Sea of Incarceration

Susan Sontag's son, David Rieff, published a memoir about his mother's death. After two previous bouts with cancer, Sontag succumbed to leukemia in 2004 at age 71. David, her only son and, liker his mother, a writer by trade, tried to give voice to his feelings a few years later in a slim book with a jagged-edge title, Swimming in a Sea of Death.

Years before, Sontag, one of the leading literary luminaries of her era, had written a widely discussed memoir of her own about dealing with cancer. Illness as Metaphor came out in 1978, the year I graduated from high school and started college. Though I did not read it, her essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn sits on my bookshelf, and her novel The Volcano Lover lies packed away in a box somewhere. So much to read, so little time.

The reason I decided to pick up Rieff's book is that I, too, am dealing with the lost of a beloved parent. My father died of liver disease in October 2007, at age 76. How he got that disease, we'll never know. Other than the small portions in communion wine, he did not drink alcohol. Yet he did of a disease often associated with acute alcoholics. The irony of this injustice still aches in my heart, and it's the type of irony that Sontag explored in her essays.

As I began reading Rieff's memoir, one question stood out. He asks himself whether he is overreaching in seeking to assign some special meaning to the feverful intellectual passions of his mother's final years. He wonders where she had some sort of presentiment that her time was drawing short. Then he catches himself: "Or is all of this just that vain, irrational human wish to ascribe meaning when no meaning is really on offer?"

Somehow this search for meaning reminded me of America's 2.3 million people in jail or prison. What does it mean, for each of those lives, to be locked up? And what does it mean for us, as a society, that we engage is such wholesale incarceration? To me, the answer that "it is what it is" is no answer at all.

AARP-Eligible and Incarcerated

Over 200,000 people over the age of 50 are incarcerated in the U.S.

That's why, on Christmas Eve last year, Human Rights Watch called American prisons "nursing homes with razor wire."

Given the low recidivism rates of older offenders, and their astronomical healthcare costs, one might think compassionate release would be used more often. But our culture, for a generation now, has unrelentingly insisted on getting its pound of flesh - year after aging year.

A Surfeit of Laws, A Surfeit of Prisoners

The Economist magazine on America's love affair with lock 'em up.

Tolle lege!

What Went Up Can Come Down

Correctional populations have gone up so steadily for so long that it had come to seem almost like a law of nature.

Over a decade ago, when the total number of people in jail or prison reached 2 million, the conservative scholar John J. Dilulio opined that this was (finally) enough. Further increases were not likely to enhance public safety and might even diminish it, as wholesale incarceration decimated the social stability of so many neighborhoods.

Yet the number of inmates continued to go up - from 2 million in jail or prison in 1999 to 2.3 million in 2009.

In several states, however, the relentless budgetary pressure wrought by the Great Recession is forcing a rethinking. Indeed, in some states the numbers are actually starting to come down.

Michigan is a case in point. On my recent trip to Grand Rapids for a board meeting of Prison Congregations of America, I learned that the statewide prison population has gone down from 51,000 to 45,0000 in a matter of months. State officials have prioritized reentry for ex-offenders (or, as one prison ministry volunteer called them, "returning citizens"). As a result, what once seemed immutable is now in a condition of rapid change.

2.3 Million and Counting

In 1999, conservative scholar John J. Dilulio opined in the Wall Street Journal that 2 million inmates in jail and prisons across America were enough.

By year-end 2008, it was 2.3 million, according to the annual report released this month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The 0.8 percent rise from 2007 to 2008 was the lowest rate of increase since 2000, but the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one year still increased from 1.54 million to 1.61 million.

The increase is not inexorable. It is the result of specific choices by real human beings in 50 states, the Distict of Columbia, and in the federal system.

How do we turn the Titanic around? Well, the relentless recession has forced a degree of clarity about sentencing and correctional policies across the country. The prison population was actually down in 2o states this year.

Keep an eye on the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States, which is tracking these developments. There will surely be much more to come in 2010.

Inspiration From Citizen Havel

Vaclav Havel, a playwright by profession, spent five years in prison for resistance to the Communist regime in Czechoslavakia. But in 1989, when waves of change swept Eastern Europe, he became one of the leaders of the "Velvet Revolution," and the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia.

A remarkable documentary film, Citizen Havel, follows his career as president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992, and of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.



At one point, the dissident-turned-president explains why it is necessary to speak out against a particular political practice that is based on false premises. When lies are not confronted, he argued, they can become the truth.

In the context of this blog, which is largely devoted to criminal justice issues, my question is this: Is America's off-the-charts incarceration rate (2.3 million in jail or prison) based on the false premise that this level of incarceration actually improves, rather than harms, public safety?