Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
He reports that the clear cause of increased incarceration is this: prosecutors now bring charges against two out of every three people arrested. That's double the charge rate from 20 years ago.
Brooks states that he doesn't know why the change has occurred, and reports some of the theories he has heard.
One of the facts he cites is that just 20% of incarcerations are from drug charges. He dismisses that as not the cause, which is plainly correct. I would nitpick and say that it is a potential contributing factor worth examining more closely to see how much of that 20% is due to less-serious charges.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/opinion/david-brooks-the-p...
1. Why is prison time measured in years?!? I can't even list all the things I've done in the last year. I can't imagine being confined to a few square blocks for ten or twenty or thirty times that length of time, especially when it does not only cause loss of freedom (which was supposedly the only intent) but a greatly reduced quality of life (e.g. endangerment, and even small things like having worse meals all the time).
2. Why is prison even considered for young people? People do stupid things when they're young; they don't always know better. You can't tell me that someone who's 20, who's barely had a chance to live alone for "years", should suddenly be told to spend "years" living with strangers for (most likely) some petty crime. Great recipe for development there.
3. Why do we have bail? Oh, you're rich? Great, leave; otherwise, stay in jail until your trial. And since the system is so damned efficient, who knows how long that will be. Oh, and those in charge occasionally forget about people[1] after they're detained.
4. Why isn't community service the number one penalty for most crimes, especially minor offenses? And, why isn't the bar being significantly lowered for what constitutes a minor offense?
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/05/us/california-forgotten-prison...
Here are some crimes I've seen in the news:
* A man was shot and killed during a robbery while he was getting robbed. He begged for them to not shoot him and they put one more bullet in his chest. The perps were 15. http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Arrest-Questioned-...
* A kid at a local school was gang beaten by other students, had teeth knocked out, and was concussed. He was beaten because of a "mistaken identity" Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjC7yd1OaAk
So what should be done in the case of these offenders? If not jail, then what? Clearly these perpetrators are too dangerous to coexist in civilized society. So there has to be some form of punishment, and some form of separation. I would be ok with sending them to work on a farm instead of prison, but I'm pretty sure that others would describe that as being "forced labor camps" and would rail against that too.
I'm not saying that the situation completely excuses a severe punishment but when you looked at stories like these, did you even wonder:
- Maybe this kind of robbery has happened to them, or to their friends, family or neighbors. It's not hard to imagine someone turning cold after seeing bad things happen to loved ones.
- Maybe they know something that the store owner did and it was a kind of "mob justice". (I'm not justifying them shooting the guy. Yet, based solely on the knowledge that the owner was begging for his life, you don't know enough about the situation to understand why the kids shot him.)
- Are these things happening because of other factors? Economics are frequently a reason. I can imagine giving a lot less of a crap about society if I was dirt poor and I couldn't see any way to make it better.
I think the first solution they should consider is if they can make the perpetrator's life better. Prison makes it undeniably worse; ironically, if being poor got them into prison, they'll probably be even worse off after prison (what with people refusing to hire convicts and such).
The dominant social policy of the last 65 years has been that crime and disorder can be cured by addressing "root causes" which means material deprivation, lack of school funding, lack of housing, a school curriculum that was not culturally attuned, etc.
So first in the 50s, 60s and 70s they built public housing, upped welfare spending, eliminated corporal punishment in the schools, and greatly reduced punishment and police enforcement. Here is a poster from the time: http://www.newyork.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/a...
This was a disaster. The welfare spending incentivized women to not get married and to stay on the dole, because you would lose benefits if you got married or got a job. The public housing was not policed at all and was destroyed by the rougher element in the population. Crime skyrocketed. Youths would commit muggings at gun point and end up back on the streets with nothing more than probation.
Then there was a ham-fisted backlash starting in the mid-1970s but really coming into effect in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately, rather than emphasis consistent discipline and enforcement from the get go, the backlash was more about "three strikes" and using drug offenses as proxy crimes. Even in schools, getting tough meant suspensions, which is not much of a punishment to a roguish street urchin.
So if you look at the situation now, you have kids growing up in homes which are violent and where they don't get punished if they roam the streets and bully other kids. Then you have those kids go to schools that are full of disorder, and where if they cause trouble they just sent to the principals office and then go right back into the classroom. Or maybe they get suspended for a few days. Big whoop, that is only a punishment if you care about school. Gangs are allowed to openly sell drugs on the street. So by age 15 your role models are gang members, you have never been subject to real discipline, you have been fighting others or being assaulted your whole life. And then they commit some heinous crime. At that point, the 15-year-old cannot be permitted to coexist in normal society. Giving them money or something is not going to magically make them civilized when they have spent their live growing up in a barbarous environment. It's not the 15-year-old-murderers fault in the cosmic sense that he was born into such a wild environment. But the fact remains that he his too dangerous to be permitted to roam the streets freely.
But of course I absolutely agree that the problem needs to be addressed earlier. We need to figure out a way that these kids are an environment with order, that is with safety, security, and discipline from the day they are born.
- Slavery and racism (and it's consequences over several generations starting out as uneducated, dead-poor, suspect below second-rate citizens when freed, and held down with several tactics, from Jim Crow laws and plain old segregation until the 70s, to lack of finance options, poorly funded school districts, employee discrimination, etc.
- Profit, from mass incarceration, the private prison complex, and the whole thing.
- Crappy laws (three strikes, drug laws, etc).
- An increasingly touchy and litigation happy society (from right wing "tough on crime" people, to P.C. advocates pushing against though crimes, etc).
- A state increasingly intervening and regulating all previously free aspects of life, down to collecting rain water in your own yard...
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/figure_...
You seem to be suggesting that more criminals behind bars leads to lower crime. Is there any evidence that this is true? Could this be a coincidence, or could there be some other factor lowering crime? Are you jumping to conclusions based on your own favorite narrative?
The OP similarly lists two facts and then jumps to the same conclusion: Crime rates have plummeted, and we are all much safer than we were decades ago. (Therefore) our incarceration system working?
I think to make that claim one must "show one's work".
It could be aliens, but Occams razor. Criminals cannot commit crimes if they are in prison. It is quite revealing that people willfully deny that and the narrative is the cop is the perp and the perp is the victim.
We should not take definitions at face value.
The author's response to the review is equally long and detailed [0]. I recommend reading both if you have the time.
[0]: http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/response-michael-javen-f...
* The people who elected "tough on crime" DAs and politicians.
* The DAs who got every conviction they could and the harshest sentencing possible to show how they're "cleaning up the streets."
* The politicians who voted for mandatory minimum sentencing.
* The judges for being punitive rather than rehabilitative.
* The media for painting a very distorted picture of modern America.
The US is never going to fix itself as long as it continues to be a culture of fear, blame, hate, and ignorance.
I understand people in a democracy want control of their social fate, but, in many cases level headed reason based on studies and good policy would be better.
I'm glad were having a moment of sanity when it comes to drugs, addiction, and law.
And lest it not be clear, most people of all ethnicities who saw drugs as a plague saw jailing of offenders as the primary solution to the problem. That's to say people of few means but able to avoid the drugs issue also saw this as a law and order get them off the streets issue --in some ways because it was the only answer available.
Or, ya know, perhaps there's a reason why some culture have insanely higher incarceration rates than others?
The shocking thing about incarceration rates in the U.S. is not just the fact that it quadrupled from 1960 to 1995, it's that even with that increase, the growth in incarceration didn't catch up to the growth in violent crime until about 1998.
It is easy to put the blame on "evil racist cops" and whatnot, it is much harder to stop ignoring the issue that a small part of the population represents a vast amount of the criminals and start thinking about real solutions. What are the causes of the violence? There is welfare to those who need it, there are opportunities for those who work for it. Is it an economical issue, a social/cultural one? Perhaps prison life is "comfortable" compared to working your ass off, perhaps education is lacking, perhaps a bit of everything, and so forth...
That's not true. At least not when it comes to drug use, blacks and white use drugs at similar rates [0]. Asymmetric enforcement is another explanation.
[0] http://c1.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/pic_corner_07101...
Legislators, DAs, judges and police adjust their behavior when sentences feel out of whack with the crime. Unfortunately, that empathy goes out the window when the people in charge are sentencing "other" people, who they don't empathize with.
Poor, uneducated people live by one set of laws, and middle-upper class people live by another set of laws.
I believe that the law enforcement strategy is a concentration on drug dealers; prosecution of users is pretty much incidental, used to enhance sentences for other crimes as much as anything else.
If prosecution of dealers is the policy, then you'd need to show that blacks and whites sell drugs at similar rates. I have no idea whether or not that's true...
"Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference)."
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/30/w...
I don't think that's right [0]:
"[M]arijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana."
So more than 44% of all drug arrests between 2001-2010 were for possession. It may be that blacks arrested for possession carried much more than whites because they were dealing and whites were just using. I haven't been able to find any numbers on that.
Drug use is a small part of why someone is getting arrested..especially to the point of a prison sentence. A chart showing that just as many whites and blacks tried an illegal drug (smoking weed is still illegal in most states) doesnt really tell us anything.
Even if you did isolate those factors, it's still not really an answer to "why does this happen more here than there?" You're answer is, essentially, "because it happens more often there."
Edit: After rereading the second paragraph I realize that you do seem to be pointing towards solutions to the root cause of crime rates, but I find the first statement confusing in light of that.
A kid actually said this, "Writing is important so that when I grow up and I'm in jail I can write my kids like my dad writes me." because every man in his life is a gang member who sells drugs or is in jail. What the hell do you think he's going to grow up to be? It sure seems like he knows.
I'm certain that racist policing is a problem but it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the problems we have. If it's just the police why don't you(not specifically you) go raise your family in North St Louis. You can kiss them goodnight to the sound of gunshots.
And it seems like everyone just ignores it. I don't really have a point. I'm just confused and frustrated. I don't understand why the US has a seemingly permanent underclass that gets completely ignored.
Because there are lots of instances of people living in deep poverty without killing each other at ridiculously high rates. Most people in China or India are more materially deprived than those living in the American inner-city, yet the neighborhoods there are much, much safer. Philadelphia in 1890 was much poorer, and much more unequal, yet the homicide rates were 10X lower. Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.
We are a savage species and crime is the default. What prevents crime is civilization. What you see in the black inner-cities is an utter void of civilization.
There were white (mostly Irish) inner city areas with a complete void of civilization, such as old southie, but those areas are less prevalent these days. That said there is lots of degeneracy among the white population in some areas too. I'd call those areas more of a partial void of civilization rather than an utter void of civilization.
You've described the scene: poor and predominantly African-American neighborhoods oftentimes lack stabilizing social networks. I mostly agree with this description. I might not call it a "void of civilization," but I will agree that there's a difference between West Oakland and Berkeley.
I am asking a different question. To be blunt, which contributes more to the current lack of "civilizing influences" in inner-cities: that the actors involved are black, or that the actors involved were born into the same lack of "civilizing influences" 20 years earlier?
"I am asking a different question. To be blunt, which contributes more to the current lack of "civilizing influences" in inner-cities: that the actors involved are black, or that the actors involved were born into the same lack of "civilizing influences" 20 years earlier?"
To be even more blunt, I take it you asking whether black genes matter more or whether the environmental conditions matter more? It is not really possible to answer that question along a comparative axis of "more or less." With most human traits, genes determine both the slope of the improvement curve and where the improvement curve plateaus. Environment determines where one is along that curve. I cannot throw a javelin 80 meters. Which matters more, genes or the fact that I have never trained to throw the javelin? That's not really a well put question. I'm sure with training I could throw it 40 meters, I highly doubt I have the genes to ever be able to throw it a world-class 80 meters.
Similarly with African-American neighborhoods -- I think they have the genes to have peaceful, orderly neighborhoods because such neighborhoods have existed in the African-American population before. I am pessimistic that there will ever be an African or African-American Pudong or Silicon Valley, because I don't think the concentration of genes are there. I would love to be proven wrong, but I think more evidence backs that view than not ( https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... )
Most likely, there are statistical differences in gene frequency that make average behavioral traits differ between the races, all things being equal. I say that, because the world looks exactly like you would expect, were that hypothesis to be true. When you compare races, such as the Han Chinese, the Irish, and Africans, the Chinese tend to be the most orderly, regardless of where they live (China, Singapore, Taiwan, the American Chinatowns, etc) whereas those of African descent tend to have higher rates of crime and disorder, no matter whether it be Johannesburg, Belize, Rio, Liberia, Jamaica, Haiti, or Madison, Wisconsin. Worldwide, race predicts crime better than anything else.
But given the right conditions, Chinese can be quite disorderly. And we have proven cases in the past of black communities being quite disorderly. So regardless of the genetic tendencies, the outcomes are malleable.
Robbery and homicide are the two most clearly defined and well reported crimes. Robbery because the victim can see the offender, and has an incentive to report it to get the goods back. Homicide because it is very hard for the police to ignore a body.
* According to surveys of robbery victims, the offending rate of blacks is 6 times higher than that of whites. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus06.pdf
* According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, homicide offending rates for blacks are 8 times higher than for whites.
The proportion of blacks in prison is not at all out-of-line with the proportion of serious crime committed.
If any enemy country had these outcomes, we wouldn't talk about police psychology or the comforts of prison life. We'd talk about the nation's distribution of power (history of slavery and dominant "white" race, systematic inequality, etc) and figure it out with cold rationality.
So I suppose unionization in industry is caused by bosses selecting for socialist employees?
A plant that is native to this ecosystem.
It's the most absurd thing I can think of when it comes to America's war on drugs.
Since you accusing me being a simpleton, you are going to have to explain what you mean.
If the point was to try to understand the reasons for incarceration period, then fair enough, "people committing crimes" would be good enough an explanation. But I think the debate is more centered around "massive incarceration", which implies that there is something special about the rate of incarceration in the USA and that people are trying to understand why that is that the USA are putting so many people in prison for petty offenses, drug use and myriads of other controversial reasons. It also questions the reason why some minorities are so disproportionately represented in that carceral population and whether or not there is a system in place to target them specifically in the response to crime in the country.
I would like to apologize if the phrasing of my answer was a tad snarky, I just found that you were addressing the topic with way too broad a brush for an issue that is so extremely serious, far-reaching and bordering on institutional social management.
It's a shining example of marketing having a negative impact on public discourse.
<sarcasm>You can't blame poor people for not having access to the immunity bankers have.</sarcasm>
When prisons are privatized and profit-driven, what motivation does one have to keep people away from them? This is not a co-incidence that the US has a high rate of incarceration and the prisons are privatized. From what I see and hear, there is little effort in rehabilitating prisoners, they're just being punished.
Does anyone know the rate of US prisoners re-offending? I'd wager that it's quite high compared to other countries where rehabilitation is the prime purpose of prisons.
Sometime in the late 1990's, the incarceration rate caught up to the violent crime rate. Crime rate started going down in the late 1990's, while incarceration rate started to go down only in the last few years. It's reasonable to argue that the for-profit prison industry has played a role in keeping incarceration from decreasing in step with crime.
In practice, that isn't what happens. "Government" is not some monolithic hive mind entity, it is a bureaucracy of competing interests (and often fiefdoms) that sometimes work against each other. The representative crafting the budget might want to spend less money on prisons so he can spend it on something else, but the DA and the prison warden don't want their budgets reduced. Plus, the DA wants to be able to point to all the "dangerous criminals" she took off the streets when it comes time for re-election.
That is not true.
It's possible that despite private prisons being a small minority, with a small minority of the prisoners, they wield a disproportionate influence on the system. That is, in lobbying for whatever policies benefit them, they're willing to accept the result of grossly overburdening the entire system, taking that as collateral damage so that their little corner of it will always be full.
Again, I don't think that's the case. But it could be.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...
Are drugs laws the cause of "mass incarceration" of blacks in the United States?
The review article does not offer any statistics. Here are some from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (a federal agency belonging to the DOJ) about state prisoners with sentences over one year (state sentences of less than a year are general served in county jails).
Only 4% of black state prisoners are sentenced for cases where the most serious offense is drug possession.
Only a further 11.9% of black state prisoners are sentenced for cases where the most serious offense is other drug crimes including trafficking.
58.3% of black state prisoners are sentenced for cases where the most serious offense is violent crime (including 12% for murder)... 16% for property crimes... 9.5% for public order crimes.
States account for over 92% of prisoners. Though over 50% of federal prisoners are sentence for cases where the most serious offense is drug crimes.
If no one was sentenced for cases where drugs crimes were the most serious offense, then 85% of black state prisoners would still be imprisoned. So, that wouldn't solve the problem of black "mass incarceration" in US state prisons.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statics http://imgur.com/sE1D137 http://felonvoting.procon.org/sourcefiles/USBJS%20-Prisoners...
This is a gross misunderstanding of the war on drugs that only takes into account the percentage of people who are in prison simply for drug charges. There is a lot more drug-related crime that would not exist if no one was imprisoned for drug crimes anymore so the statistic is simply useless.
The illegal drug market will always exist, regardless of legalization. Why? Anything legalized will be regulated and taxed and many people will still find it easier to go around both.
Drugs arent special as you say, but they also arent the cause of the violence. Gangs will still be violent and kill each other. It will just be over something new. So yes, we might see a decrease in drug-related violence (im still not convinced of this though), but we will see an increase in violence related to something else being traded on the black market.
I also have a hard time seeing crack or meth being legalized when many people still sue the cigarette companies for giving them cancer. I think tort reform is also needed.
You're ignoring that legal things, even when taxed are cheaper and safer than illegal things. Legalizing something kills the black market for that something. The reason is simple and obvious, real markets tolerate real business and real business out competes illegal business because it doesn't have to markup the product to make up for the overhead of being illegal which is what makes up the majority of prices for drugs on the black market.
Drug dealers don't tolerate competition under threat of violence and charge as much as they can and have to make up for product lost to law enforcement, real business has to compete with other businesses on price driving the price down to reasonable levels and also delivers a better safer product.
Are sexist laws the cause of mass incarceration of men in the US (and in other countries)?
There are laws with racist and sexist underlying reasoning and disparate impacts and the legal system does have a racist and sexist slant to it. There are also decently fair laws that are broken at unequal rates due to sexual and racial differences in society (those differences themselves often caused by social racism and sexism).