The United States is the world’s leading warden.
It has more people incarcerated in prison and jail in absolute numbers and as a proportion
of the population than any other country in the world.
So it incarcerates about 700 per 100,000 people in prison or jail.
This is about five to 12 times the rate of other Western countries and Japan.
We’ve got about 160,000 people who are serving life sentences in the United States now and
a number of them who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole in some
cases equals the entire prison populations of other large countries.
In my state alone of Pennsylvania, we’re spending as much to send somebody, keep someone
in a state prison as to send them to college in some of the leading colleges or universities
in the state for the year.
There’s a political issue about the legitimacy of the political system that locks up so many
people and disproportionately locks up so many people of color and so many people who
are poor.
Up until the early 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was fairly stable and it didn’t gyrate
too much up, too much down and was in keeping with other Western countries in Europe — maybe
a little bit on the high side.
The reasons why we got here — the immediate reasons are that the United States began passing
much more punitive legislation and police and prosecutors began using their discretion
in a much more punitive direction.
The underlying causes of this are the political response to a spike in crime between the mid-1960s
and the mid-1970s when homicide rates doubled.
And then the politics became kind of like a broken thermostat where crime didn’t keep
escalating and escalating, but there was a perception that crime kept escalating and
it was very useful for political purposes to exploit crime data and what we call law
and order politics.
And this was a period when the Republican Party saw potential for inroads in the South
as the Democratic Party cracked up or divided over the civil rights movement and civil rights
legislation.
Talk about law and order became a coded way to talk about racial issues because with the
civil rights movement — you couldn’t talk in such a racially charged terms as you once
were able to do.
And so there was this punitiveness or this emphasis on law and order as a way to drum
up votes both on the part of the Republican Party and then, to some extent, the Democrats
following along also.
We’ve had mass incarceration for a number of years now.
These extraordinary levels of incarceration.
We’re now beginning to talk about the carceral state and how it’s penetrating or metastasizing
into the wider society.
So we need to visibly see the problem.
We then also need to humanize the people who have served time or who are currently serving
time.
And one of the things that we’ve lost in this country, which we actually once had in
our history, is a distinction between someone who committed a violent offense, but is no
longer a violent offender.
And we seem unable to forgive people who have committed serious crimes even though often
these are crimes of passion; these are crimes under the influence of drugs, under the influence
of alcohol, under the influence of mental illness.
And we have many people who are being locked up literally for their lives even though they
don’t pose a threat to public safety.
It influences all of our lives because it influences how public benefits are allocated.
It influences definitions of citizenship.
So we have many people — not only do they serve their time but once they leave it’s
still as if they have an F — "felon" as sort of the scarlet letter for the rest of
their lives because they’ve served their time, but they’re not allowed to vote; they’re
not allowed to get welfare benefits; they can’t get food stamps.
They may not be able to get student loans.
They may not be allowed to live in certain places.
And they may not be permitted to get licenses for certain jobs, even jobs like hairstylist,
which many people learn in prison.
They learn how to be barbers and then they come out, they can’t get licensed because
they have a criminal conviction and they face extreme discrimination when they come out.