USA: The Leader of the Unfree World

[Syt]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/the-leader-of-the-unfree-world/374348/

The Leader of the Unfree World

Mass incarceration, perhaps the greatest social crisis in modern American history, is without parallel on a global scale.

On Friday, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to allow nearly 50,000 nonviolent federal drug offenders to seek lower sentences. The commission's decision retroactively applied an earlier change in sentencing guidelines to now cover roughly half of those serving federal drug sentences. Endorsed by both the Department of Justice and prison-reform advocates, the move is a significant step forward in reversing decades of mass incarceration—though in a global context, still modest—step forward in reversing decades of mass incarceration.

How large is America's prison problem? More than 2.4 million people are behind bars in the United States today, either awaiting trial or serving a sentence. That's more than the combined population of 15 states, all but three U.S. cities, and the U.S. armed forces. They're scattered throughout a constellation of 102 federal prisons, 1,719 state prisons, 2,259 juvenile facilities, 3,283 local jails, and many more military, immigration, territorial, and Indian Country facilities.

Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are staggering. Here's how the United States' incarceration rate compares with those of other modern liberal democracies like Britain and Canada:



That graph is from a recent report by Prison Policy Initiative, an invaluable resource on mass incarceration. (PPI also has a disturbing graph comparing state incarceration rates with those of other countries around the world, which I highly recommend looking at here.) "Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations," the report says, "the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country."

Some individual states like Louisiana contribute disproportionately, but no state is free from mass incarceration. Disturbingly, many states' prison populations outrank even those of dictatorships and illiberal democracies around the world. New York jails more people per capita than Rwanda, where tens of thousands await trial for their roles in the 1994 genocide. California, Illinois, and Ohio each have a higher incarceration rate than Cuba and Russia. Even Maine and Vermont imprison a greater share of people than Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Egypt.

But mass incarceration is more than just an international anomaly; it's also a relatively recent phenomenon in American criminal justice. Starting in the 1970s with the rise of tough-on-crime politicians and the War on Drugs, America's prison population jumped eightfold between 1970 and 2010. (The graph below does not include local or territorial prisons.)



These two metrics—the international and the historical—have to be seen together to understand how aberrant mass incarceration is. In time or in space, the warehousing of millions of Americans knows no parallels. In keeping with American history, however, it also disproportionately harms the non-white and the non-wealthy. "For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones," wrote Adam Gopnik in his seminal 2012 article.

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Mass incarceration's effects are not confined to the cell block. Through the inescapable stigma it imposes, a brush with the criminal-justice system can hamstring a former inmate's employment and financial opportunities for life. The effect is magnified for those who already come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Black men, for example, made substantial economic progress between 1940 and 1980 thanks to the post-war economic boom and the dismantling of de jure racial segregation. But mass incarceration has all but ground that progress to a halt: A new University of Chicago study found that black men are no better off in 2014 than they were when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act 50 years earlier.

The common retort is that people of color statistically commit more crimes, although criminologists and scholars like Michelle Alexander have consistently found no correlation between the incarceration rate and the crime rate. Claims about a "black pathology" also fall short. But police scrutiny often falls most heavily on people of color nonetheless. In New York City alone, officers carried out nearly 700,000 stop-and-frisk searches in 2011. Eighty-five percent of those stops targeted black and Hispanic individuals, although they constitute only half the city's population. Overall, NYPD officers stopped and frisked more young black men in New York than actually live there. Similar patterns of discrimination can be found nationwide, especially on drug-related charges. Black and white Americans use marijuana at an almost-equal rate, but blacks are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession nationally. In Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other Midwestern states, that arrest disparity jumps to a factor of five.

The collective impact of these policies is as rarely discussed as it is far-reaching. Mass incarceration touches almost every corner of modern American society. Any meaningful discourse on racism, poverty, immigration, the drug wars, gun violence, the mental-health crisis, or income inequality is incomplete without addressing the societal ramifications of imprisoning Americans by the millions for long stretches of time with little hope for rehabilitation.

None of this is new information for the activists and scholars who've worked on prison and criminal-justice reform for years. But everyone else has to start somewhere. For the general public, mass incarceration is like the wind: You can't see it, but you can feel it as you hear the leaves rustle. A crucial first step is to denormalize it. This is not the way it has always been—and this is not the way it has to be.

[Monoriu]

I have no problem with locking violent criminals up.  But locking people up for victimless crimes like drug possession does seem counterproductive. 

[Josquius]

Decriminalising/legalising drugs does make so much sense from so many angles.
It really seems though that conservatives make a point of being against it because dirty drug taking lefty hippies are so for it.

[CountDeMoney]

In New York City alone, officers carried out nearly 700,000 stop-and-frisk searches in 2011. Eighty-five percent of those stops targeted black and Hispanic individuals, although they constitute only half the city's population. Overall, NYPD officers stopped and frisked more young black men in New York than actually live there.

I really hate seeing this bullshit use of poor statistics constantly brought up over and over.

[Duque de Bragança]

Surprised it's so high in Portugal, given the liberal and/or lax policies there (drugs for the former, max time is 25 for the latter). France is stricter generally (life still exists along with minimum 20 years), or used to be before the Taubira lax reforms so I am bit skeptical.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Something I feel is crazily never mentioned is:

1. When our high incarceration rate started, we had pretty much the unparalleled highest violent crime rate in the OECD, and by far the highest homicide rate.
2. Now our overall violent crime rate for non-homicides is lower than many other first world countries, while our homicide rate is still higher it has dropped tremendously.
3. No one ever really investigates if maybe all those "non-violent" offenders that got locked up in harsher sentences in fact, maybe were never able to become violent criminals and that's at least part of the decrease in crime rates.
4. Almost all the crimes for which you can be incarcerated in the United States are illegal acts across the OECD, we've just chosen to punish them more harshly. Those punished have all received trials under our legal system. The idea that a high incarceration rate is intrinsically a threat to general liberty does not actually follow, at least for me. Not if the crimes themselves are not some form of intrinsic political freedom. People aren't going to prison for writing controversial articles, or exercising various liberties. Maybe a guy who runs a Ponzi scheme doesn't deserve prison because he's totally non-violent, but no one can seriously argue what he was doing was a valid form of exercising his rights as a citizen and thus it's somehow inherently unjust for society to punish him for it.

Now, just from a cost perspective I've always advocated that anyone but habitual or very severe (big Ponzi scheme) white collar criminals should be punished by fines/community service before prison. Most of those guys it doesn't make sense to spend $35k/year to house them. I've also long been an advocate of making most drugs legal, although entirely synthetic drugs like meth or drugs frequently sold in powder form like cocaine/heroin would need some regulatory infrastructure in place to make sure people aren't selling something that will kill people because it's adulterated (I guess that's theoretically a concern even with stuff like marijuana although it's rare to hear of people contaminated it.)

However under our current laws which lead to a black market, I will say that while locking up people on simple possession is nonsensical, locking up dealers always makes sense. All drug dealers are either intrinsically capable of doing a violent crime, and even likely to do so, or they will not long be drug dealers. At least any dealer beyond the level of someone's "friend" in college who moves a very small amount of stuff. It's similar to the serious booze smuggling types during prohibition, with the money and competition involved those were going to be violent men and it wasn't a real great thing for them to be out on the streets.

[OttoVonBismarck]

As to point #2, the reason that seems at least like part of it to me is there are a lot of studies showing that violent criminals predominantly are males between a certain age range. If guys get sent away for a long stretch because of an initial drug conviction, then are found with a weapon on them and more drugs while on probation and basically end up incarcerated until their 30s, they've basically "aged out" of that period in which they are most likely to be violent inside of the walls of a prison, where they aren't a threat to society.

Obviously that's not the ideal way to handle the situation if you could find some way to get these people out of the cycle of poverty/crime/gang affiliation that likely started back when they were 10-11 years old on their first brush with the law,  but if you can't do that I'm not sure locking them up is a terrible option either.

[Grinning_Colossus]

3. No one ever really investigates if maybe all those "non-violent" offenders that got locked up in harsher sentences in fact, maybe were never able to become violent criminals and that's at least part of the decrease in crime rates.

If we also preemptively locked up all those who drive recklessly or pay their bills late, or all members of the infamously violent 18-25 demographic, crime would fall even further. 

[Syt]

A few stats:

http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339


Percentage of State and Federal Prisoners
Offense               1974    1986    1997     2000     2008     2010
Violent               52.5%   64.2%   46.4%    47.2%    47.3%    47.7%
Property              33.3%   22.9%   14%      19.1%    17.0%    16.7%
Drug                  10.4%   8.8%    26.9%    25.3%    22.4%    21.7%
Public-order          1.9%    3.3%    8.9%     7.8%     11.9%    13.4%
Other/unspecified     2.0%    0.9%    3.7%     0.4%     1.2%     0.6%

[frunk]

As to point #2, the reason that seems at least like part of it to me is there are a lot of studies showing that violent criminals predominantly are males between a certain age range. If guys get sent away for a long stretch because of an initial drug conviction, then are found with a weapon on them and more drugs while on probation and basically end up incarcerated until their 30s, they've basically "aged out" of that period in which they are most likely to be violent inside of the walls of a prison, where they aren't a threat to society.

Obviously that's not the ideal way to handle the situation if you could find some way to get these people out of the cycle of poverty/crime/gang affiliation that likely started back when they were 10-11 years old on their first brush with the law,  but if you can't do that I'm not sure locking them up is a terrible option either.

They are also "aged out" of the part of their life where they could easily develop a non-violent and socially responsible way of living outside of prison.  If it's a matter of risking violent behavior from someone who hasn't previously had any and giving them a chance to be productive in society why would you presume the worst?

[Neil]

A few stats:

http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339


Percentage of State and Federal Prisoners
Offense               1974    1986    1997     2000     2008     2010
Violent               52.5%   64.2%   46.4%    47.2%    47.3%    47.7%
Property              33.3%   22.9%   14%      19.1%    17.0%    16.7%
Drug                  10.4%   8.8%    26.9%    25.3%    22.4%    21.7%
Public-order          1.9%    3.3%    8.9%     7.8%     11.9%    13.4%
Other/unspecified     2.0%    0.9%    3.7%     0.4%     1.2%     0.6%

That's interesting.  It seems that the growth fields have been drugs, and not being properly respectful of the police.

Still, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

[Valmy]

It's all about the War on Drugs.

[DGuller]

To be fair, you can't really conclude that our incarceration rates are excessive solely because other civilized countries have similar crime rates can get away with far lower incarceration rates.  Maybe if we release that excess 80% of the prison population, our crime rates aren't going to be that low anymore.  And other countries don't have the problem of needing to find socially acceptable substitutes to segregation.

That said, we really do have a problem, and to an extent it perpetuates itself because there are so few prohibitions on treating ex-cons as pariahs in the economy.  Well, what alternatives does that leave them?  It's hard to see how we find a solution, though.  It's hard enough these days to find a politician that will be soft on crime;  it's even harder to find his replacement once he's voted out of office because some cute white girl got kidnapped and murdered by the guy that was released due to his policies.

[CountDeMoney]

It's all about the War on Drugs.

Illicit drugs kill people.  From production to trafficking to use.

[Valmy]

It's all about the War on Drugs.

Illicit drugs kill people.  From production to trafficking to use.

Yeah the streets around here are covered with the rotting corpses of dead stoners.