Incomplete Thoughts: Mass Incarceration

2007-12-26T07:56:28-06:00

A friend who knows a lot about how and why the criminal justice system works in the United States put it into context for a group of folks a few weeks ago. Paul says we assume that prison conditions are bad, the issue is the number of people who will be subjected to them. Mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented social experiment of the modern American era, made more effective because there is no centralized plan. And there's no natural force to stop or contain it.

Hundreds of thousands of people much like you and me, like the people we stand next to in line at the market, or chat with in waiting rooms, are locked up today because they don't fit in to post-industrial capitalism. And because they are in the part of the working class -- they are black or brown -- that needs social controlling, from capitalism's point of view.

Paul identifies three specific legal dynamics at work -- expansion of crime definitions, lengthening of sentences, and tightening of parole requirements. The result is Death by Incarceration for literally tens of thousands of young African American (and increasingly Latino) men. Alternative "reforms" like boot camps, which were sold as ways to keep youthful first offenders out of prison, instead confined kids whose violations would formerly have earned them parole.

This massive expansion of incarceration can only be addressed through sentence reform, in Paul's view, and he knows that any such attempt is dead on arrival, even though he believes there is a basis for a bipartisan criminal justice policy. He thinks the third of us who are opposed to the death penalty, the two-thirds who are opposed to criminalization of marijuana, and the majority who recognize that racial disparities are apparent, egregious, and abhorrent add up to a bipartisan perspective that is nowhere reflected in public policy.

As hard-bitten as his own prison experiences have made Paul, I think his analysis misses how fundamentally powerful mass incarceration has been in shaping political dynamics in this country. Think of the hundreds of thousands of African American men (and women) removed from community life. From family life. From civic life.

The divide between your own vision of how society should be and the decisions that produce war and mortgage defaults and crippling credit policies is most likely a gaping chasm -- think how much more power our voices would have if so many of them were not locked up.

Ta, Kate

Voting Rights - Getting Them Back

2007-12-01T07:11:16-06:00

I met a woman a few weeks ago who has been working on a voting-rights project in The Bronx for several years now. She said that 48 of 50 states strip felons of voting rights and that 5 million potential voters are legally denied that basic right.

Worse, 10 to 15 million ex-offenders believe they cannot vote because of widespread misinformation. And, in New York alone, nearly 40 percent of voting officials believe that convicted felons can never regain the ballot, which is not true.

Maggie believes activity around voting rights in the 2008 national election is especially important because of what follows in 2009 - local elections. And I agree with her. Locally made decisions have far greater impact on people's daily lives than national ones.

The election shenanigans in Florida and Ohio were very important to the Right-wing - it took control of resources and decision-making power on a vast scale. I would argue though, that widespread, ongoing electoral theft is most instructive in reminding conservatives all over the country that despite the democratic majority, power can be held onto and - especially in the South - regained.

It's a national issue, but one we'll have to fight state by state over many decades. As you think about independent political activity for the 2008 campaign, consider how to create opportunities to surface this crying issue and lay some local groundwork.

I suspect it will be up to radical forces to attend to the most basic work of democracy and future political power. Ta, Kate

Kate Stacy's blog

Incomplete Thoughts: Mass Incarceration

Voting Rights - Getting Them Back