The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

We lock up more people for longer time periods than any other democratic nation in the world. And the effects of this mass imprisonment are not limited to the roughly 2 million people who now spend time as inmates in the average year. The effects extend to entire communities, and to American society as a whole.

These two volumes, collections of essays by academics of various stripes and advocates in the field of corrections, attempt to document and describe those effects-social, political, economic, racial, and other. By far the more readable of the two is Invisible Punishment, edited by Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a well- regarded Washington-based advocacy group, and Meda Chesney-Lind, a professor of women's studies at the University of Hawaii and a former vice president of the American Society of Criminology.

A few telling citations from the introduction to their volume give a sense of the deforming power of America's love affair with incarceration:

* "More than three quarters of a million black men are now behind bars, and nearly 2 million are under some form of correctional supervision, including probation and parole. For black males ages twenty-five to thirty-four, at a time in life when they would otherwise be starting families and careers, one of every eight is in prison or jail on any given day."

* "The collective portrait of prisoners is very telling. Three- quarters have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, one-sixth a history of mental illness, and more than half the women inmates a history of sexual or physical abuse. Most prisoners are from poor or working-class communities, and two-thirds are racial and ethnic minorities."

* "For African-American children overall, the family experience of imprisonment is now almost commonplace, with one out of every fourteen having a parent in prison."

* "Legislators have increasingly adopted ever more punitive measures against those who have been convicted of a drug offense....[T]his has led to the bizarre situation whereby a convicted armed robber or a rapist can apply for higher education or welfare benefits, but a drug offender cannot."

As these citations suggest, America's minority communities- especially the black community-have taken the brunt of the impact of mass incarceration. They have taken it in very practical, physical ways, like the removal of a huge percentage of young black men from the pool of potential workers and marriage partners. They have taken it in more subtle ways as well, such as the disqualification from voting, and thus from citizenship, of thousands of black ex- convicts (see presidential election, Florida, 2000), and the removal of imprisoned men and women from the rolls of the unemployed-a practice that makes the nation's jobless statistics look better than they otherwise would.

But the distorting effects are not limited to African Americans or to issues of personal freedom, citizenship, and loss of liberty. In an essay titled "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," Tracy Huling, a filmmaker who produced a well-received public- television documentary on a rural prison town, describes how "prisons have become a 'growth industry' in rural America." "Since 1980," Huling writes, "the majority of new prisons built to accommodate the expanding U.S. prison population have been placed in nonmetropolitan areas, with the result that the majority of prisoners are now housed in rural America."

This means, most obviously, that inmate populations, which are largely black, Hispanic, and urban, are overseen and regulated by guards and administrators who are mostly white and unfamiliar with minority cultures, and who, in fact, have been encouraged to think of the bad fortune of the inmate groups as their economic salvation. Indeed, Huling captures this pernicious reality perfectly in the quotation of a retired prison guard in Coxsackie, New York:

We struggled, myself and a brother, two sisters, my mother...to keep the farm in the family and keep it going. And we barely made a living. So that's what made me appreciate the [prison] job so much, that it was a lot easier and the money was secure. Before I even started the job, they was always telling me, the worse things get out in the world, the better things get in jail. You'll always have a job.

Not for nothing does Jesse Jackson call the results of mass incarceration the "prison-industrial complex." Like the interlocking, mutually supporting interests of the military- industrial complex against which Dwight Eisenhower warned so presciently in the 1950s, the interests at play in the
prison- industrial complex virtually assure that, whether crime goes up or down, there will be a steady supply of inmates to fill the prisons we have built at great expense. Too many jobs and fortunes depend on it.

Imprisoning America is more academically dense than the Mauer- Chesney-Lind volume, and a harder read. Much of it repeats the findings of the other book and, indeed, there is some overlap among the authors. But of particular value are the essays in part 1 on the effects of mass incarceration on the family life of those imprisoned and their children. One hopes that state and federal legislators will read these findings and be guided by them as they make prison policy for the future.

Together, these two volumes focus long-overdue attention on the reverberations created by the outcries of the last three decades: "Three strikes and you're out." "Do the crime and you do the time." "Lock 'em up and throw away the key."

If only the whole business were so easy, so pat. Unfortunately, in our feverish attempts to solve one problem-what we thought of as out-of-control crime-we have given rise to several others. And they may prove every bit as dangerous and expensive as the original problem.

Don Wycliff is public editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Copyright Commonweal Foundation Feb 11, 2005