Views » April 29, 2003

Throwing Away the Key

By Salim Muwakkil

The Department of Homeland Security, the new cabinet post with the Teutonic inflection, was created last January to assuage Americans’ fears of future terrorist attacks. But while we focus our attention on external threats, we’re ignoring homegrown forces that imperil our nation’s security much more profoundly than suicidal Islamic cults. These forces are being generated by an incarceration epidemic that has earned this country the dubious title of the world’s largest jailer.

Figures released last month by the Justice Department revealed that as of June 30, 2002, the number of inmates in American prisons and jails had exceeded 2 million for the first time in history. There were 1.35 million prisoners in state and federal prisons and an additional 665,000 in local jails, the report noted. The United States not only imprisons more people than any other nation, our incarceration rate of 702 inmates per 100,000 residents is also the highest in the world. “We have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, but we’re only 5 percent of the world’s population,” says Kara Gotsch of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

The most destructive feature of this skyrocketing incarceration rate is its dramatic racial disparity. Among black males 25 to 29, 12.9 percent were in prison or jail; only 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group are incarcerated. The report calculates that at least 29 percent of all black men will have spent some time behind bars over the course of a lifetime. And although the number of black women inmates is much lower than black men, there are five times as many black women inmates than their white counterparts.

According to the Sentencing Project, a research group that advocates alternatives to prison, these rates of incarceration have increased despite sharp drops in violent crime rates since 1994. The relentless increase in inmates “can best be explained as the legacy of an entrenched infrastructure of punishment that has been embedded in the criminal justice system over the last 30 years,” says Malcolm C. Young, the project’s executive director. Drug offenses account for nearly 60 percent of the federal prison population, the group noted.

Our nation’s penal system is a grotesque charade that has abandoned all pretense of penitence or any notion of rehabilitation. It has become instead an apartheid system used to warehouse “surplus” populations that society has forsaken.

The other side of this incarceration epidemic, of course, is that these inmates one day will come home. They already are returning in record numbers. In 2001, state and federal prisons released 630,000 inmates, about four times the figure 20 years ago. Since prisons are little interested in rehabilitation or education, most of these ex-inmates are unskilled and unqualified for living-wage jobs. They return to mostly poor communities that desperately lack resources and post-prison services.

Their records pretty much disqualify them from anything but a job in the underground economy. In Illinois, for example, citizens convicted of felonies are barred from 57 occupations, including hospital workers, barbers, beauticians, nail technicians and many other jobs that don’t require the high school diplomas most inmates never received.

A new study released in April found that 52 percent of the 30,068 inmates released from Illinois prisons in 200l came back to Chicago, and 34 percent of those ended up in six poor, high-crime neighborhoods—adding to the woes of the communities and the inmates. The study, sponsored by the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, found that ex-inmates have few options for employment, housing or rehabilitation.

The Urban Institute study is just one of many released in recent years that detail the destructive machinery of a criminal justice system that is stripping the African-American community of precious human resources. It’s part of a larger social dynamic that tracks growing numbers of African-American (and to a lesser extent, Latino) youth into economic marginality, to the underground economy and ultimately to the criminal justice system, where recidivism becomes a chronic problem.

A report released last year by the Justice Policy Institute titled “Cellblocks or Classrooms” found that in the past two decades the population of black male inmates grew three times as fast as the number of black men enrolled in higher education. The study made clear that society’s investment priorities produce commensurate results. During the ’80s and ’90s, it noted, state and local spending on corrections grew at six times the rate of such spending on higher education.

Another noteworthy new text on this subject is Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, a collection of essays published last year by the Sentencing Project. The collection presents a wide-ranging investigation of our corrosive corrections system from a variety of perspectives. The structural pressures that have transformed the corrections system into a “prison-industrial complex” become glaringly apparent after reading this book.

But despite the studies damning the racial biases and self-defeating consequences of the U.S. prison-industrial complex, policy-makers seem largely oblivious. That will change when this social dynamite explodes in our faces—and that will happen one day soon.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  ll

  Posted by lll on Apr 29, 2003 at 8:11 PM

  Muwakkil has hit upon a great untoold story.
  Somewhow we are unwilling to tackle multiple social problems in American public debate.
  The increase in prisoners and the high jailing rate combined with a lack of rehabilitation of prisoners and a stark racial bias, demonstrates a desparate need for revision of Amerca’s penal system.
  Yet, little do we hear about thoughtful reforms to a this very broken system.
  It seems we are only ready to address an aissue after it has reached an emergency threshold after which it cannot be tolerated any longer without it being a threat to society. 
  Rather, our goals and decision making ought to stem from more long term thinking, and as a result a gradual improvement in dealing with social problems ought to result.
  Yet as Muwakkil shows, we are perhhaps not ready to deal with the violent explosion in prisoners in america nor the causes that result in this high percentage of Americans in prison until the cirisis hits us in the face.

  Posted by Umer Ahmad on Apr 30, 2003 at 11:27 AM

  very interesting and very sad, especially for surplus population groups

  Posted by wallace nixon on Apr 30, 2003 at 4:01 PM

  Great article, however, over 20% of our federal prison population is comprised of hard core illegal immigrants. Many of these prisoners who have snuck across our southern borders have murdered, raped and maimed innocent Americans of all races and creeds. It seems to me that our government needs to secure our borders so these scoundrels DO NOT get into our country or our prisons. I am not anti immigrant, however Mr. Bush, Dashle and almost all of the politicians refuse to address this issue because they do not want to offend the new voting blocks. As an American, I am appalled and ashamed that our country’s security has been compromised in the name of political correctness and political gain. It is ironic that the poor, inner city blacks whom unfortunately contribute an inequitable amount of prisoners to our systems, do not recognize that illegal immigration has resulted in huge budget shortfalls in all the states that has resulted in money being diverted from educational and social programs to support the growing masses of illegals. Common sense dictates that when you add 8-16 million illegals to our systems, and that costs for healthcare, schools and other entitlements wil increase because of it, there will be less money to help the existing inner city poor and needy. Again, it is a shame and in my opinion must be stopped. l

  Posted by chet polwin on May 4, 2003 at 1:04 AM

  President Bush has got to do something about this. With Liberty and jusstice for all I don’t think so

  Posted by JANET BERGER on May 4, 2003 at 1:17 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 12 posts.

Also featured No Justice, No Peace
Stuck in the Middle
A New Deal for Asia

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Salim Muwakkil

• The ‘Post-Racial’ President
  Barack Obama navigates a world where color still matters. Posted on August 24, 2009
• Government-Assisted Terrorists
  On May 20, federal and New York City authorities arrested four men on… morePosted on June 16, 2009
• The Irony of Obama’s Boycott
  America's first black president refused to attend a U.N. conference on racism.Posted on April 30, 2009
• African-Americans Back Burris
  The African-American community's unified efforts to retain Roland Burris as the lone black… morePosted on March 26, 2009
• Will Holder Hold Cops Accountable?
  Eric Holder, the first African-American attorney general, takes over a Department of Justice… morePosted on February 26, 2009