Prisoners Of Prisons

The Pew Center on the States has released a much-reported-on study detailing trends in imprisonment in the US. That study found that one in every 31 adults is in prison or on parole or probation. States paid $47 billion in 2008 to keep people locked up or on the prison leash. This took $9 out of every $10 spent on corrections. Most prisoners are Black and male, with great disparities existing between racial groups and between the numbers of men and women locked up. Oregon is a top spender if we think of correctional spending as a percentage of general fund dollars. States typically spend about $29,000 a year on prisoners, $2750 on people on parole and $1250 on people on probation. We have 7.3 million people in the system in one form or another while crime rates continue to decline.

The standard conservative argument is that crime rates continue to decline because penalties have stiffened. Maybe. Since conservatives do not typically cite reliable studies to prove their point it is hard to say. We can also accept that there is a link between stiffer penalties and a drop in crime and still not buy in to the argument that more people need to be locked up. Community policing, educational programs, restorative justice programs and programs which link offenders and victims in recovering what has been lost could also logically be seen as part of a crime-preventative stiff-penalty system.

As Angela Davis reminded us in her great talk at Reed College last week, Black people end up in prison in disproportionate numbers because African-American communities experience more surveillance than other communities do. It also needs to be said that many laws now on the books do not belong there and are selectively enforced or should be tied to less severe penalties. In fact, the connection between almost any crime and someone forfeiting a given number of years of their life in exchange marks a peculiar and illogical commodification of human experience.

We are driven to the point of fear by the media and the prison-industrial complex, which has a real economic stake in imprisoning more people for longer periods of time even when crimes and crime rates drop. Prisoners perform work for lower wages, privatized prisons are run for profit, prisons hold people who might otherwise be in the job market and the prison-industrial complex itself is a major employer and producer of goods and services. That industry has Kevin Mannix as its chief spokesperson in Oregon. He was quoted today in a pass-the-buck speech as saying that victims of crime want people locked up for long periods of time. The questions that come to mind in response to Mannix are who ever gives us the real involvement in the justice system as victims or perpetrators, what alternatives exist and how do we collectively expect to deal with having locked up so many people for so long in the future.

I think if we ask a random number of citizens who do not consider themselves criminals to honestly assess whether or not they have ever done anything which might have landed them in jail, a fair number of people will respond that they have. The line between criminality and citizenship is often a thin one. Luck, class, race and privilege determine who falls on which side of that line and how long they stay there. An ever-increasing number of people in society can no longer think of the criminal as "other" and are no longer strangers to the criminal justice system or the people trapped in it.

The Partnership for Safety and Justice is beginning to get a handle on these issues. Check out their website here.