Pubdate: Wed, 27 Feb 2013
Source: Metro Times (Detroit, MI)
Column: News Hits
Copyright: 2013 C.E.G.W./Times-Shamrock
Contact:  http://www.metrotimes.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1381
Author: Curt Guyette

UNLOCKING A MOVEMENT

Mass Incarceration Reaches Epic Proportions in 'The Land of the Free'

There are certain statistics that should make people gasp with horror 
and seethe with outrage.

Here is one of those numbers: 716.

Why that figure in particular? Because it represents the number of 
people per 100,000 who are behind bars in the United States. To even 
begin to understand the full, tragic significance of what that number 
represents, it has to be put in context. It is not enough to know 
that America, the supposed freedom-loving nation that we are, leads 
the world when it comes to the rate of incarceration. Compare that 
rate to communist Cuba, which jails 510 people per 100,000, or Iraq, 
where the number is 115. Or how about Germany, where the number is 80 
prisoners per 100,000 people, or Finland, where it is only 60.

In terms of the sheer numbers of people who are locked up, the United 
States is also the unfortunate leader. By far. With about 2.2 million 
people locked up overall, the U.S. prison population far exceeds that 
of every other country on the planet, including China, which has four 
times as many people as America.

It gets even worse. This is how Adam Gopnik summed things up in an 
article published in The New Yorker last year:

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is 
a fundamental fact of our country today - perhaps the fundamental 
fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there 
are more black men in the grip of the criminal justice system - in 
prison, on probation or on parole - than were in slavery then. 
Overall, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' 
in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago 
under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the 
controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States."

What has us writing about all this is the documentary Broken on All 
Sides, which was shown last week at the Cass Corridor Commons in 
Detroit. About 80 people attended the event, which was hosted by the 
local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and a few other lefty groups.

The film provides an unflinching look at the problems of mass 
incarceration - and how people of color are disproportionately caught 
up in what can only euphemistically be called the justice system - by 
focusing on the situation in Philadelphia, Pa.

Among those featured in the film is Michelle Alexander, author of the 
widely acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in 
the Age of Colorblindness.

Tracing the rise of the prison-industrial complex and its racist 
foundation back to the Nixon administration, Alexander reports: 
"Instead of lynching, we have the 'War on Drugs,' which started with 
the Nixon White House. President Nixon said to [Chief of Staff H.R.] 
Haldeman: 'Face the facts! The whole problem is the blacks. We have 
to devise a system to keep them in check.' Voila! The War on Drugs 
was born, designed specifically with the goal of locking up an 
incredible number of people with Draconian drug laws."

After last week's Detroit screening, there was a panel discussion 
that featured the doc's director, Matthew Pillischer, and three 
others. They talked about the film's relevance here in Michigan, and 
what can be done to reform a system that's taking a terrible toll not 
just on the incarcerated and their families, but on society as a whole.

Even the most knee-jerk proponents of get-tough policies - the 
stone-hearted who remain unswayed by the rampant racism and injustice 
that permeates the current system - can't escape the fact that we can 
no longer afford a system that, as Pillischer's film declares, "is 
broken on all sides."

A Congressional Research Service report released last month drives 
that point home:

"The increasing number of federal inmates, combined with the rising 
per capita cost of incarceration, has made it increasingly more 
expensive to operate and maintain the federal prison system. The per 
capita cost of incarceration for all inmates increased from $19,571 
in FY2000 to $26,094 in FY2011. During this same period of time, 
appropriations for the BOP [Bureau of Prisons] increased from $3.668 
billion to $6.381 billion."

And that's just federal prisoners. Here in Michigan, the cost of 
running the state's Department of Corrections exceeds $2 billion a year.

Those startling expenses speak to an increasingly significant part of 
the equation: privatization and its corruption of the democratic 
system. The Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a Washington, D.C.-based 
think tank, explored the problem in a 2011 report titled Gaming the System.

The report's author notes, "As revenues of private prison companies 
have grown over the past decade, the companies have had more 
resources with which to build political power, and they have used 
this power to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration."

That same point was made during last week's panel discussion by Julie 
Hurwitz, a noted civil rights attorney based in Detroit. She talked 
about how the operators of private prisons, and others that reap 
profits from incarceration - from the phone companies that charge 
exorbitant prices for the long distance calls prisoners make to the 
corporations providing food and other services to inmates - exert 
their influence.

One way that's done is by funding front groups like the American 
Legislative Exchange Council, which produces and promotes model 
legislation calling for more tough-on-crime policies. Implementation 
of those policies inevitably increases profits for the private 
companies, which take a portion of that loot and plow it back into 
yet more efforts to, as the JPI termed it, "game the system" in their favor.

The epitome of this lock-'em-up madness is the so-called "War on 
Drugs" Nixon launched as a way to keep the blacks under control. As 
noted by Detroiter Lindsay Wright-EL, one of two former inmates 
sitting on the panel during last week's discussion, drug use should 
rightly be treated as a public health issue, not a criminal matter.

Instead, we continue locking people away, forever altering the lives 
of individuals, decimating families, and ravaging whole communities.

What can be done to help put an end to a system that Hurwitz 
described as "morally unjustifiable and morally repugnant"?

Change starts with raising awareness. Getting a group of people 
together to watch a film like Pillischer's, and then talking about it 
is a start.

But, as Wright-EL pointed out, that's just the start. Ultimately, 
change will come only through an intense and widespread public 
backlash. It is a problem that needs to be fought in the courts, in 
voting booths, and in the streets.

"That's how you win eventually," Pillischer said. "You do it by 
building a mass movement."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom