AMERICA'S PRISON SOCIETY

Mass Incarceration Failing in the U.S.

Forty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded in its landmark study
of the causes of racial disturbances in the United States in the
1960s: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one
white -- separate and unequal." Today we are still moving toward two
societies: one incarcerated and one not.

The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that
for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every
100 adults is in jail or prison. According to the Justice Department,
7 million people -- or one in every 32 adults -- are either
incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state
or local supervision.

These figures understate the disproportionate impact that this bold
and unprecedented social experiment has had on certain groups in U.S.
society. Today one in nine young black men is behind bars. African
Americans now comprise more than half of all prisoners, up from a
third three decades ago.

Democratic Sen. James Webb held a remarkable set of hearings last
October on mass incarceration in the United States. In his opening
statement, Webb noted that "the United States has embarked on one of
the largest public policy experiments in our history, yet this
experiment remains shockingly absent from public debate."

The leading presidential candidates have not identified mass
imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the
country's top civil rights concern. Many of today's crime control
policies fundamentally impede the economic, political and social
advancement of the most disadvantaged blacks and members of other
minority groups. Prison leaves them less likely to find gainful
employment, vote, participate in other civic activities and maintain
ties with their families and communities.

Congress recognized some of these barriers recently when, after years
of delay, it approved and sent to the White House the Second Chance
Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law recently. This
legislation seeks to ease the re-entry of prisoners into society by
providing modest increases in support for mentoring programs, drug
treatment, job training and education.

Bruce Western of Harvard soberly concludes in his landmark book
Punishment and Inequality in America that mass imprisonment has erased
many of the "gains to African American citizenship hard won by the
civil rights movement."

At the hearings last fall, Webb underscored a basic truth sidelined in
most discussions of crime and punishment: The explosion of the prison
population wasn't driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way
we chose to respond to crime. Even former president Bill Clinton,
whose administration was an accomplice in the largest prison buildup
in U.S. history, conceded in a keynote address at a University of
Pennsylvania symposium in February commemorating the Kerner
anniversary: "Most of the people who went to prison should have been
let out a long time ago."

A change of heart by Bill Clinton and other public figures will not be
enough to reverse the prison boom. In rare instances, public officials
have been moved by strong personal beliefs to empty their prisons.
During his brief tenure as Britain's home secretary early in the 20th
century, Winston Churchill expressed deep skepticism about what could
be achieved through incarceration, and he began releasing prisoners.
Political leadership has been critical for major reductions in
incarceration in other countries. But in many cases, the public and
experts on criminal justice had to push politicians to begin emptying
their prisons and jails.

It is a national disgrace that the U.S. incarceration rate is five to
12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the
highest in the world.