TREATING MEDICAL PROBLEMS WITH INCARCERATION

If you knew nothing about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama
other than that Clinton is a 60-year-old white woman and Obama is a
46-year-old black man, you could still calculate the odds that each
was in prison.

It won't come as any surprise that someone like Obama is, in this
crude comparison, more likely to be found behind bars than someone
like Clinton. What should shock people is how much more likely we are
to incarcerate a 46-year-old black man than a 60-year-old white woman.

Here's one way of picturing the answer: During football games, the
University of Michigan's stadium hosts about 111,000 people. If you
filled the place with randomly selected 60-year-old white women,
around 10 of them would turn out to be prison inmates. If you did the
same with 46-year-old black men, about 5,500 would be current
residents of our prisons and jails.

In other words, if we took into account only race, gender and age,
Obama's chances of being in prison would be 550 times higher than
Clinton's. Here's a good question for a presidential debate: "Do you
think 46-year-old black men are 550 times more likely to deserve to
be in prison than 60-year-old white women?"

I derived these statistics from a report published by the Pew Center
last week. The report got a lot of media attention when it revealed
that one out of every 100 American adults is in prison. That's
startling enough, but not nearly as shocking as the fact that more
than 10 percent of black men between the ages of 20 and 40 are incarcerated.

But of course other factors also play a powerful role in determining
whom we choose to lock up and for how long. The most important of
these is socioeconomic class. Poor people go to prison, while people
with money, with rare exceptions, don't.

The extent to which we ignore that reality is highlighted by a
glaring omission in the Pew Center's otherwise excellent analysis:
There literally isn't a word in it about poverty. One would never
guess, from reading the report, that a key factor in determining
whether you go to prison and for how long is if you use powder
cocaine rather than crack, or if you rob the U.S. Treasury instead of
a gas station, or if you are represented by a team of private lawyers
rather than a single overworked public defender.

I assume the report's failure to mention such matters involves a
strategic silence. It's hard enough to get Americans to focus on the
amazing explosion in the size of our prisons (we have 400 percent
more people behind bars than in 1980) without upsetting people
further by pointing to the role that class bias plays in these developments.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the prison
population continues to grow, despite a plunge in crime rates over
the past 15 years. Nearly 1 million Americans are behind bars for
non-violent crimes - many of which are "crimes" only because of what
political scientist Scott Lemieux has labeled "the war on (some
people who use some) drugs."

The report does mention some encouraging developments. Even Texas,
where voters have had an almost unlimited appetite for paying taxes
to build and staff more prisons, is finding the costs of locking
people up so high that it's beginning to experiment with alternatives
to prison.

The most rational alternative would be to stop treating drug use as a
criminal offense. A small minority of users of mind-altering
substances become addicted to those substances. They should be able
to get medical help for what ought to be considered a medical
problem, instead of one of the main justifications for keeping 2.3
million Americans behind bars.