Prison Policy No Longer Invisible

This was surprising to me: grassroots action last week protesting the Governor's prison policy.

Busloads of protesters fighting the construction of new penitentiaries swarmed the Capitol on Wednesday, while inside the statehouse, the simmering politics surrounding the prison overcrowding crisis boiled into full view.

The protesters attacked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to build 78,000 new prison and jail beds, saying that $11 billion worth of "bricks and mortar and debt" are no substitute for true reform.

Instead, the demonstrators — some dressed in orange prison jumpsuits and standing in makeshift cells — said lawmakers could quickly thin the inmate population by releasing geriatric and incapacitated convicts and by sanctioning thousands of parole violators in their communities rather than in state lockups.

I would add revising sentencing guidelines through a newly-created independent commission, but just the presence of these protesters at all suggests that this issue will not be as invisible as it has been in previous years. Which makes sense, as we're two months from a court-imposed deadline to do something about overcrowding.

And good for Gloria Romero for stepping out on something that will win her no friends in the voting public, but is simply the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, political fireworks were flying over a decision by Senate Democrats to place a moratorium on bills that would lengthen criminal sentences and thereby exacerbate prison crowding.

The maneuver infuriated Republicans, but Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Senate Public Safety Committee, said it could not be "a business-as-usual year" in Sacramento given the overcrowding emergency.

"The Legislature bears a share of the responsibility for the crisis, and we must accept that," Romero said. "We can't keep having bills fly out of committee like pancakes just because we want to appear tough on crime."

There have been over 1,000 such bills in the last 30 years. They look good on glossy mailers and they can easily be used as a club to damage opponents. But they have a major indirect impact on our quality of life.

And this mass incarceration is a symptom as well, a function of increasing inequality in the Bush years. As the chasm between haves and have-nots grows, desperation leads to increased crime. And then the imprisonment itself keeps the snowball rolling down the hill:

Imprisonment does more than reflect the divides of race and class. It deepens those divides—walling off the disadvantaged, especially unskilled black men, from the promise of American life. While violent criminals belong in jail, more than half of state and federal inmates are in for nonviolent crimes, especially selling drugs. Their long sentences deprive women of potential husbands, children of fathers, and convicts of a later chance at a decent job. Similar arguments have been made before, but Western, a Princeton sociologist, makes a quantitative case. Along the way, his revisionist account of the late 1990s detracts from its reputation as an era of good news for the poor…

The 1990s were said to be a time when rising tides finally did lift all boats. Western warns that part of the reason, statistically speaking, is that many poor men have been thrown overboard—the government omits prisoners when calculating unemployment and poverty rates. Add them in, as Western does, and joblessness swells. For young black men it grows by more than a third. For young black dropouts, the jobless rate leaps from 41 percent to 65 percent. "Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990s economic expansion," Western warns. Count inmates and you also erase three quarters of the apparent progress in closing the wage gap between blacks and whites.

The increased recidivism rate and the drive to incarcerate more and more for longer and longer walls off opportunity to families on the wrong side of the race and class divide. Prison policy is job policy, poverty policy, family policy, education policy, and so on. It took a massive crisis to get anyone to focus on it, but I hope that in the future, we can understand it in these terms.