One Nation Behind Bars

One Nation Behind Bars
By Kevin Lawrence Pitts

“There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville

Americans often times fail to recognize or even realize the signs of fissures and fractures in the American democracy. A recent example of a small fissure in American democratic ideals was the publishing of a study on recent imprisonment data conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Center which stated that “more than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.” With an estimated 2.3 men and women in prison/jail America leads the entire world in the overall percentage of citizens that it incarcerates.

At this junction, the facts are very clear, we have mired ourselves in a “War on Drugs”, which was declared in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, that has responsible, in large part, for imprisoning millions and filling our prisons and jails with the bodies of racial minorities. For instance, in the mid-1990s, 7% of African-American males were incarcerated, and the rate of imprisonment for African-American males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight. What makes these statistics even more perplexing is that the vast majority of these African-American males can be classified of “non-violent” offenders. As author Daniel Lazare highlighted in his Nation article entitled, “Stars & Bars”, “In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession…accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.”

The health of our democracy depends upon our ability to take heed of the rights and dignity of all citizens, even those who have violated our nation’s laws and in this regard we have failed. In what began as reasonable efforts in the past decades to curb the rise of drugs and violence in urban centers across America, has devolved into a war on the lower income communities. This “war” has ripped apart homes, destabilized neighborhoods and has created an even more cyclical and vicious deterioration of entire cities of black and brown citizens.

And the tax payer continues to pay for America’s unhealthy and unwarranted obsession with being “tough on crime”. A New York Times article on the Pew Report highlighted that, “In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 percent increase when adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the Pew report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.”

The financial burden of the prison industrial complex continues to grow and as a nation we must not only ask what will be the final financial cost but what will be the final moral cost for imprisoning so many. Many of whom, upon release will be locked out of the legitimate job market and often more hardened criminals than when they entered the system.

There has been no real significant decrease in violent crime that can be directly tied to our nation’s lust for John Wayne style “eye for an eye” justice yet the imprisonment rates continue to climb. There needs to be a shift in policy and public sentiment that balances the need to punish and detain those offenders who rip apart the community with gun violence, intimidation, and poisonous drugs with the need to reinvest in these offenders through illegitimate and purposeful rehabilitation behind bars. We were brave enough to start the “war on drugs” and start this title wave of imprisonment, let’s be brave enough to re-conceptualize where the war has gone wrong and have the heart to admit that our democracy can no longer stand for such gross injustice.