This is Kenneth E. Hartman, Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project. America’s got a prison problem, a big prison problem that isn’t going to be fixed by a few timid reforms around the edges. Even after the slight declines of the past few years, this country’s incarceration rate remains far and away the highest in the world. Higher than any country in the history of the world, in fact. And the money being spent on prisons is positively obscene, money that’s being poured down a drain, wasted and denied to the pressing problems of a country with thousands of crumbling schools, too few hospital beds for poor children, and a social safety net full of gaping holes.
Of course, the true cost of prisons is a veritable state secret, but it’s certainly well north of $100 billion a year. For that amount of money, the people have purchased 10 million children who have been forced to deal with parental imprisonment, many millions of their fellow citizens, mostly people of color, almost exclusively the poor, permanently deprived of their voting rights, and a hidden system of punitive institutions scattered across all 50 states with a total population that would make it the fourth largest city in the country; bigger than the populations of 15 of the states. The federal government admits to almost 7 million people under some form of criminal justice control – the second biggest city, the 13th largest state.
Decades ago, Angela Davis coined the term “prison industrial complex” to describe what was then the nascent rise of the carceral state in this country. As late as the 1990s, when I was writing opinion pieces for California newspapers, editors refused to publish that term, seeing it as lefty propaganda, as radical ramblings, as paranoid. Today, the mainstream media often uses “prison industrial complex”–a triumph for honesty, yes, but also a sad testament to the growth of prisons. No one without their own ax to grind denies the explosion in prisons these days.
The real issue is what to do about this problem. For many well meaning reformers, a strategy of nibbling away at the edges has been embraced. Here in California, bills have been proposed that aim to de-institutionalize women, juveniles, non-violent offenders, drug users, and the elderly. While the rest of us don’t begrudge anyone slipping out of the shackles of imprisonment, this approach raises a troubling question: what about the rest of prisoners, the ones who don’t fit into one of these ‘deserving’ groups?
Most of us aren’t in one of these deserving categories. Should we therefore be subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment? Is it then reasonable to sentence us to terms of imprisonment that stretch out beyond the horizon of our lifetimes? Are we somehow irredeemable? Not worth the effort at restoration and rehabilitation? Like it or not, that is the implicit message of this approach to criminal justice reform.
And nowhere is this unreasonable and unfair message pushed more than in the death penalty abolitionist movement. Here in California, a recent failed proposition would have abolished the death penalty and replaced it with life without the possibility of parole. Deeper still, it offered to the voters an explicit promise that no one serving life without the possibility of parole would ever, ever get out. On their websites, the civil rights group trumpeted how serving forever in prison was actually a worse form of suffering than a lethal injection. Bottom line, they were willing to assure the death in prison of close to 4,000 men and women in trade for ending what they don’t like, based on the outright statement that we deserve to die in prison because we aren’t deserving of being treated as fellow human beings.
Those of us who have struggled from inside Mother California’s concrete and steel empire surely didn’t expect to get shanked in the back from our left flank. In the upcoming couple of years before the next elections, all of us who are committed to fundamental reform of this failed system of injustice need to sit down and do some serious soul searching. Is the goal of reform to bring home all prisoners, or is it to only bring home a few? Is the goal of reform to end mass incarceration, or is it to just shrink the prison state down a little? Is it wrong to torment, torture and traumatize all human beings, or just a few deserving humans?
The actions of the broad community of reformers will answer these questions. Remember, while you’re thinking about all of this, that our peer nations, other industrialized democracies, have been able to create societies just as safe and stable, more so in most cases, without imprisoning so many of their citizens. As former United States Senator Jim Webb observed, “Either we’re a particularly evil people or there’s something wrong with our criminal justice system.” We are not a particularly evil people. The criminal justice system, the prison industrial complex, well, that’s a different matter altogether. This is Kenneth E. Hartman, Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
