6/2/2003
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Why Does the “Land of the Free” Have the Highest Rate of Imprisonment in the World?
We pride ourselves as being the “land of the free,” as being the leader of the
“free world,” and claim that our military actions are aimed at both protecting that
freedom for ourselves and extending that freedom to other nations.
One obvious opposite of “freedom” is imprisonment where the government
physically constrains you, exercises direct control over every aspect of your life, and
deprives you of most of the rights of citizenship.
Strangely enough, our “land of the free” leads both the “free world” and the unfree world in the rate at which we imprison our citizens. It is not even a close race with
the totalitarian regimes of the world. A comparison with the “police states” of the world,
the brutal thugs who have seized power, the repressive theocracies, and the remaining
communist states shows that we imprison a larger percentage of our population than
any of these regimes we understandably sneer at.
The latest statistics from the US Department of Justice shows that we have over
two million people now locked up in American jails. There were 702 prisoners per
100,000 population. Russia, run by the ex-secret police chief of the old communist
regime and battling economic and social breakdown and organized crime comes in
second at 665 prisoners per 100,000. We imprison our citizens at three times the rate
the ayatollahs in Iran do and seven times the rate those “authoritarian” Germans do.
What is going on here? Why does the richest country in the world, a country that
is instinctively suspicious of government power, a country that considers itself the
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modern birthplace of democracy, use the ultimate police powers of the state against its
citizens more than even the most ruthless dictatorships in the world?
Part of the answer is provided when we look at whom it is we imprison. Black
men in their twenties and early thirties are eight times more likely to be in jail that white
men in that age class: one in eight young black men are in prison; only one in 63 young
white men. A startling forty percent of black high school dropouts age 22 to 30 are in
prison.
We are using our prison system to contain the consequences of racial inequality
in our country. Because it is not “people like us” who are being locked up but those
dangerous “others,” it does not cross our minds that something is wrong here. Our racial
ambivalence is given a politically tolerable cover, namely “criminal element.”
There is a demographic and economic overlay here that also helps explain the
appalling situation in which we as a nation now find ourselves. In the post-WW2
suburban economic boom, our urban centers, where our Black and Latino populations
were concentrated, were stripped of their manufacturing and retail shopping bases. As
those activities moved to the suburbs, employment opportunities for center city
minorities disappeared.
This happened at the same time that the post-War baby boom was giving us a
exploding population of children. Without secure employment opportunities, young
center-city males did not, could not, marry. Female-headed households and the poverty
associated with them became the norm.
This is not to say that young males simple sat idle, engaged in no economic
activity. The opposite was true. With normal employment unavailable, they responded
with considerable entrepreneurial energy, bringing a complex informal and mostly illegal
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economy into existence. Our drug laws combined with an increasingly affluent and
pleasure-oriented white majority created incredibly profitable business opportunities for
those trapped in our center cities.
This laid the basis for the explosion in prison populations. Young males have
always been more likely to commit crimes. They tend to feel that they are invulnerable,
that daring and challenges to authority are an assertion of their masculinity, and that
they have little to lose. Because our population of young people was booming, our
population of potential lawbreakers was too. In addition, drug use, other than the
approved alcohol and tobacco use, expanded into the affluent middle class. Our public
policy response was the mindless “war on drugs” that has been no more successful
than prohibition was earlier in the century.
What the war on drugs was successful at was locking up our young people. Of
our two million prisoners, 450,000 are in prison not for selling drugs but for using drugs.
Three-quarters of those are Blacks and Latinos even though the drug use rate is no
higher among those groups that among whites. To these prisoners can be added those
associated with the violence and crime stimulated by the high profits our anti-drug laws
create.
Our high rate of imprisonment appears to be tied to three things: first, the
impoverishment of our central cities as a result of economic change; second, continuing
racial discrimination that prevented center city minorities from following the relocating
jobs; and third, our approach to recreational drug use that has created commercial
business opportunities that police action has utterly failed to restrain.
In short, we have used our police and our prisons in place of equitably solving
our own, homegrown, social problems. That is the real scandal in the “land of the free.”
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