A few weeks ago I had a long catch-up call with an old friend from back East. My friend is a long-time progressive activist, a man of conscience and principle. We are both former English literature teachers, so we always share our latest readings. One of these was Sasha Abramsky’s American Furies, which describes the social, political, religious and economic forces that have helped create our state of mass incarceration. As I described the book to him, I also shared my anger and disgust at this American gulag, of which Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are only variations. My friend quietly interrupted me with “truth be told, these people deserve to be in prison.”
How many of you out there agree that people in jail “deserve” to be? The unspoken assumption is that anyone in jail has been proven to be a bad person who needs to be removed from society for our general safety. There also seems to be a generally shared assumption that, once in prison, a person will never come out again. Ask yourselves who goes to jail. What crimes send people to jail? For how long? Who commits crimes, but ends up either avoiding jail or spending less time than the norm? What is the role of a prison in improving the social behavior of the person imprisoned? (All of this factual information is easy to find, but I will share some of it in future columns, as well as tell you where to find more information to answer your own questions.)
Perhaps you are all too informed to share this harsh judgment, but I guarantee that the general public certainly tends to this view. Perhaps more painful is that the majority of elected officials make policy, law, and budget decisions based on their assumption that the public wants punishment and incarceration and that voters will cut short the public career of any elected official who dares oppose this harsh view.
I invite you all to start thinking about a fundamental question which any person struggles with every day. How do we react to behavior of which we disapprove?
How should we respond when our child violates a boundary we have drawn for them? If our neighbor makes noise late at night or allows trash to accumulate around her own house or cuts our trees that are close to or just over the property line, what should we do? When the kids in the neighborhood gather in the local park on summer nights to party, drink, smoke dope, just hang around, do we call the police and report gang behavior? Or do we recognize that superior force and possible weapons use are more appropriate in the face of potential or real violent behavior? (Do we define non-violent conflict resolution as a legitimate police function in addition to its paramilitary role?) In short, what social tools do we possess to manage outbursts of boundary-violating behavior?
In most of our conversations about the justice system, public or among friends, the debate focuses on false dichotomies: punishment or rehabilitation, toughness or softness, innocence or guilt, among a host of other mutually exclusive pairs. The one constant--unexamined and undebated--is the social institution of the “justice system” of police, courts, lawyers, judges, and prisons, as if its existence were some act of nature, some key ingredient in human society. We treat imprisonment as a critical tool for the management of antisocial behavior, whether we believe in the rehabilitative role of incarceration or in the punishment value of time behind bars.
As a society we have accepted prison as a universal tool for the “correction” of bad behavior, whether it serves the ends of justice or it adds to or diminishes public safety.
At the end of this first post, I want to ask you to begin thinking about what it means to put people into jails for behavior of which we disapprove. Search your own knowledge about who goes to jail and why. Do you know how much we spend on the justice system as a whole? What share of the King County or any county’s budget pays for the justice system (police, courts, jail, prison)? How does that compare to what we spend on human development activities and social amenities? If you worry about the public budget for roads and schools and parks and libraries, why aren’t you concerned with what we spend to keep people behind bars?
Progressives have much to learn about the justice system, how it both reflects the rest of our social institutions and also how it interacts with them. I look forward to exploring these issues with you. Ask the hard questions and we can learn together.
Ron Ein can be contacted at ronaldein@comcast.net