THE PRISON PARADOX

While America puts more and more young blacks and Hispanics in jail, the
neighborhoods they leave behind grow even more unstable.

Inside the tangled culture of the Prison Generation--and what can be done
to try to reclaim lost lives.

GROWING UP, she never much thought of the law, but of late she has thought
of little else. An attractive, well-coifed woman of 44 given to
conservative suits and sweeping statements, Toylean Johnson has immersed
herself in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure the way some people bury
themselves in the Bible. Johnson, however, is not a lawyer; she's a
hardworking single mom who has watched one male relative after another
carted off to jail. Her brother is serving hard time in Louisiana. Readell,
her oldest son, 25, is doing a 17-year hitch in Texas. A youth she took in
when his own mother was imprisoned is serving a four-year term. Only
through luck and Johnson's perseverance have her two youngest sons, 23 and
18--arrested but not yet locked down for the long haul--escaped the fate of
so many of their peers.

Johnson, a senior support specialist at a Houston medical center, estimates
her legal fees and other prison-related costs in the neighborhood of
$50,000 and rising.

Her dilapidated home with its paint-starved paneling only hints at how
difficult this period has been. She has taken out a second mortgage,
drained her savings and cashed out her retirement. She has acquaintances
whom prison has left similarly strapped. "I personally know of at least 40
or 50 kids... who are either locked up, who've been in prison and are back
on the street or on paper [parole]," she says. "All of my kids' friends
have been arrested at one point, place or time for something or little of
nothing."

Her calm tone cannot hide her bitterness. And her perspective is the
dominant one in Sunnyside, a rundown area south of downtown Houston filled
with weeds, ramshackle homes, churches--and the unmistakable scent of
neglect.

It is a place, like so many in urban America, within spitting distance of
and yet isolated from the mainstream middle class; a place where dreams of
affluence compete with the reality of poverty and where the police seem as
likely to harass as to help. At a time when the country enjoys record
prosperity, when even many of those once on welfare are working, this is
the America the good times have left behind: neighborhoods where prison
time can seem as inevitable as the rain, and only the lucky ones escape the
storm. "Before you know it, you're caught in the system," says Johnson,
"and you don't get a second chance."

Never before have so many Americans--roughly 14 million--faced the
likelihood of imprisonment at some point in their lives.

Some 2 million are currently behind bars. Due to sentencing reforms and
stiffened criminal penalties (especially for drug abuse), more people than
ever are serving longer terms. In Texas the total inmate population has
grown nearly 500 percent in less than a quarter of a century.

Upwards of 220,000 people are incarcerated there. Only the much larger
state of California (with 240,000 prisoners) has more residents locked down
than the Lone Star State. And though California's total prison population
dipped slightly for the first time in decades this year, it seems poised to
resume its upward climb.

Fearful of the emergence of young so-called super-predators, Californians
this March passed an initiative targeting underage offenders. As a result,
in the next five years the state will send an estimated 5,600 youths to
adult prisons who normally would have gone to the Youth Authority or county
jails.

The general trend extends far beyond California and Texas. America's rate
of imprisonment is the highest on the planet, since we recently passed
Russia, our only real rival, according to an analysis last month by
Washington's nonprofit Sentencing Project. We have become, to put it
bluntly, a nation of jailers. And for that we are literally paying a steep
price.

Between 1985 and 1996, total expenditures on state-prison activities more
than doubled, going from just under $13 billion to over $27 billion.

We are also paying in less apparent ways, in the currency of lost human
connections, including those between parent and child. Two percent of
America's children must now visit prison to see Mom or Dad.

No one is seriously suggesting that America throw open the jailhouse door.
Victims have a right to justice.

And any society must protect itself from those who would rob, rape and
otherwise violate the innocent; so prison will always have a place in a
civilized world.

But what happens when incarceration is so widely used that it becomes a
powerful cultural force in itself?

When it shapes millions of Americans' lives, and affects the outlook (and
stability) of entire communities? One need look no farther than Sunnyside
to get some sense of what that means.

Santino, Toylean Johnson's 23-year-old son, was first picked up in 1996, on
an aggravated-robbery charge.

The case (rooted, Santino claims, in mistaken identity) was eventually
dropped, but not before Santino lost his security-guard job after spending
two months in jail. In his next run-in with the law, Santino was charged
with assaulting and intimidating a witness.

It took Toylean three weeks to raise the money to pay his $30,000 bond.
This case also went no-where. But by then Toylean had exhausted all her
financial reserves. Meanwhile, Santino was fired yet again. "I've adapted
to the possibility I could get jacked up in the legal system at any time,"
says Santino. "That's the way I live."

That fatalistic attitude is not at all peculiar to Santino--or to Texas.
"Growing up in other neighborhoods, you probably are used to taking a
vacation for a week or two with your family.

But right here our vacation is when you get locked up," says Gerardo Lopez,
a 22-year-old former member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang of Los Angeles who
now works with Homies Unidos, a group that counsels young men from the
streets. "Law enforcement wants there to be an endless stream of kids going
back and forth to prison.

They don't want us to get along. That would be an end to the overtime for
them," says Hector, founder and director of No Guns, a gang-outreach
program in Los Angeles.

No doubt the vast majority of police and prosecutors are committed to
fairness and evenhanded justice.

But the deeply held sense that the forces of the law are arrayed against
them has led many young men--and, increasingly, young women--to adopt a
certain blase bravado about committing crimes and doing time. Robert
Naranjo, a counselor for No Guns who spent much of his youth in trouble
with the law, recalls, "Prison was no big deal for me or for my
neighborhood. My cousins were all incarcerated... My aunt took pride in my
cousin coming out of Tehachapi [state prison]. He came out built."

In some neighborhoods, prison has become such a part of the routine that
going in can be an opportunity for reconnecting with friends.

A onetime drug dealer from Maryland recalls his panic upon conviction.
Having heard horror stories about young men abused inside, he fretted over
how he would fend off attacks. Once behind bars, he discovered that the
population consisted largely of buddies from the 'hood. Instead of
something to fear, prison "was like a big camp," he says.

For Shawna McNeil, a 27-year-old former crack user, incarceration was a
break from a troubled life. She went to prison in Pennsylvania after
setting fire to a building because the landlord had put her out. She now
recalls her time behind bars as "the best two years of my life; three hots
and a cot. I didn't have a care in the world." She did miss her three
children, she concedes, but she refused to let them visit: "I didn't want
them to see me being dragged out of the visiting room."

After release, McNeil found her way to CBC Career Institute, a Philadelphia
program that prepares people for entry-level jobs. Most of its students are
not ex-offenders; they are more likely to be welfare recipients trying to
make the transition to the work world.

Yet even for those students who don't have records, prison seems an
all-but-unavoidable presence.

One recent eve-ning, sociologist Elijah Anderson visited a CBC class and
asked whether any students knew people in jail. Practically every hand went
up. "Every other guy on the block has been to jail," said one young woman.

And women get involved with such men at their peril. "They don't want you
to succeed," one participant explained.

Anderson worries about prison culture and its values contaminating entire
communities, making it difficult for even the best-intentioned parents to
protect their children.

Dina Rose, a sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New
York, has an even broader set of concerns.

In high-crime communities that are socially isolated and racially
segregated, she fears that locking up ever more people may be so damaging
to neighborhood social cohesion that it destabilizes the very areas it is
supposed to make safe.

Rose has done her most extensive fieldwork in Tallahassee, Fla. With
colleagues Todd Clear, Kristen Scully and Judith Ryder, she has focused on
some of the city's most crime-ridden areas, including Frenchtown, a onetime
community of black "freedmen" that dates back to the 1840s.

Long caught in an economic free fall, Frenchtown has lost its once funky
charm. The blocklong stretch of Macomb Street where Duke Ellington, Ray
Charles and other big names made music into the wee hours of the morning is
today an empty, grass-covered lot. The neighborhood's young professionals
are long gone, their place taken, in large measure, by convicted felons.

Some longtime residents reckon that about 5 percent of the community's
combined population goes in and out of prison on a revolving-door basis.

That estimate is borne out by gender ratios: in one Frenchtown area
identified by Rose and Clear, males made up barely 43 percent of the area's
1,579 residents--a statistic attesting to the high rate of imprisonment
among the neighborhood's young men. "I don't think you're going to find
anybody in the neighborhood who doesn't have a relative who's in prison or
been in prison," says Kenneth Barber, a Frenchtown native who served four
years on a 1972 heroin-dealing conviction. "If most of the men in the
community are incarcerated, you leave women to be community leaders and
raise the families when it should be the other way around."

In parts of Frenchtown, Rose and her colleagues theorize, incarceration has
reached a tipping point--that dangerous locus at which new arrests no
longer reduce crime but drive the crime rate up. The reason, they
conjecture, is that arresting huge numbers of people so disrupts the social
network that community ties crumble and therefore can no longer keep crime
in check.

Rose Co. estimate the mathematical tipping point in the areas they have
studied to be in the vicinity of 1 to 1.5 percent.

That is to say, up to the point where 1 percent or more of a community's
residents are imprisoned per year, locking people up seems to drive the
crime rate down. But once that point is reached, the crime rate goes in the
opposite direction.

Speculative and preliminary though their conclusions are (and the
researchers stress that they do not know precisely where the tipping point
is), Rose and her colleagues find the implications troubling for a society
that tends to believe tough policies alone can win the war on crime.

Some people in Frenchtown share the researchers' sense of unease.

If parents go to prison, "the children will follow," warns G. V. Lewis, a
49-year-old Baptist minister who works with the Florida State Commission on
Human Relations. The implications of parental imprisonment stretch far
beyond Frenchtown. In 1999 nearly 1.5 million children had at least one
parent in state or federal prison (up from less than 1 million in 1991).

And if the high incarceration numbers aren't troubling enough, there is the
painfully manifest racial component of the current prison buildup. The
figures are so skewed that they even taint the good racial news, such as
statistics showing black unemployment at historically low levels.

If so many black men were not in jail, the unemployment numbers would be
much higher, argues George Cave, an economist associated with the Joint
Center for Political and Economic Studies. Once the figures are adjusted
for incarceration, there has been "no enduring recovery in the employment
of young black high-school dropouts," note Princeton sociologist Bruce
Western and his colleague Becky Pettit of the University of Washington.

Statistics only hint at the sense of futility felt by many black and Latino
men who see prison as their special preserve, who believe the predominant
police function is neither to serve nor protect but to put them in cages.
Santino Johnson likens the atmosphere on the street to that on the
television show "Wild Kingdom," with the cops in the "king of the jungle"
role and poor black men as the prey: "When the lion comes on the scene, all
the antelopes run, and then it's whatever the lion wants to pick."

Police prejudice or tactics certainly cannot be blamed for all the legal
troubles faced by young minority men. There is also the fact that blacks
and Latinos disproportionately live in communities where desirable options
seem few and where voices summoning them to their own destruction are all
too plentiful. Jesse, 31, who grew up in the Midtown area of Los Angeles,
found those voices irresistible. Although he was raised in a two-parent,
deeply religious household, he fell in with a gang as a teenager and ended
up serving time in both state and federal prisons for selling drugs.

But even when such neighborhood dynamics are taken into account, many
recent studies bolster the suspicion that there is a pervasive, fundamental
and race-based inequity in the system.

An analysis earlier this year by the Justice Policy Institute found that
white youths in the Los Angeles area were much more likely than nonwhites
to be treated leniently by the criminal-justice system. Another study, by a
coalition of juvenile-justice research and advocacy groups, found that
nationally, in every category of offense, minority youths were more likely
than whites to be waived from juvenile to adult court.

Blacks also make up the vast majority (nearly two thirds) of those sent to
state prison for drug offenses, though white drug users out-number them by
more than five to one, according to Human Rights Watch. "You can talk all
you want about individual behavior," says Los Angeles civil-rights attorney
Connie Rice. "But we incarcerate poor kids for things that middle-class
kids get counseling for." One reason is that middle-class kids have greater
access to competent lawyers.

Toylean Johnson recounts the story of Gerald, a teenager whose mother was
in prison on a drug rap. Feeling sorry for the boy, Toylean's son brought
him home and Toylean didn't have the heart to turn him away. Eventually
Gerald was charged in a shooting.

Witnesses claimed he was nowhere near the scene at the time, but he
accepted a plea bargain for a four-year term. Why? "He didn't have the
money to defend the case," says Johnson.

Readell (who was recently transferred to Colorado City Prison in El Paso)
is currently appealing a drug-case conviction. An admitted drug abuser,
Readell got caught up in a drug sting operation because, as he tells it, he
was innocently hanging out with the wrong people.

Those people were in league with a crooked cop in the business of ripping
off drug dealers.

When the cop got busted, so did the friends and Readell. In his initial
statement, the dirty cop claimed he didn't even know Readell. But when the
cop pleaded guilty, his story changed. Jurors were so troubled by
inconsistencies that they could not reach a verdict. On the second
go-round, after deliberating for 20 minutes, a jury of 11 whites and one
black convicted Readell, having heard from a string of police officers and
an alleged accomplice--a five-time felon.

But even if one assumes that people like Readell are fully guilty of the
crimes for which they have been convicted, does incarceration of such
nonviolent criminals serve much of a purpose?

As a society, our answer has been something of a collective shrug.

We have no choice but to lock them up, we have said in effect, especially
if we believe that they are beyond redemption.

Indeed, in 1974 sociologist Robert Martinson authored a hugely influential
essay that effectively endorsed that view. "What Works? Questions and
Answers About Prison Reform," published in The Public Interest, essentially
concluded that nothing works, that the very idea of rehabilitation was a
sham. Martinson's article was so influential because, among other things,
it reflected the spirit of the time--a frustration with coddling
wrongdoers, an anger at the spiraling crime rate. The same spirit spawned
New York's so-called Rockefeller laws, harsh measures that gave hard time
to those involved with drugs.

That early salvo in the nation's war on drugs set the stage for much of the
legislation that was to come. Martinson's gloomy analysis provided much of
the intellectual rationale. By 1979 Martinson had changed his mind, but the
hard-line movement that his early ideas informed had taken on a life of its
own.

The targets of that movement--America's criminal class--did not vanish
behind bars never to be seen again.

More than 585,000 inmates will be released this year, up from 424,000 in
1990, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. And some of them
are better for the experience. Deforest Simmons, a former drug abuser who
has spent 13 of his 48 years in various Florida prisons, credits time
behind bars with turning his life around.

Out of prison for more than a year and drug-free for six, Simmons, now a
freelance home-improvement consultant, says prison "was a basis for me to
change.

I was able to reacquire... discipline during my time in prison." But for
every ex-inmate who talks of prison as a valuable turning point, there are
a hundred others who see it as a way station to a ruined life. As Chito, a
former Los Angeles gangbanger, observes, "Going in and out of jail... makes
you hate yourself.

It makes you bitter."

What happens as those embittered souls return to society?

And can we somehow stop from adding millions to their ranks?

Such questions were conspicuously neglected by the major-party presidential
candidates this year, but they cannot be ignored forever.

Motivated by apprehension, logic, compassion and love, Americans across the
political landscape are searching for answers. Some are even trying to
resurrect the idea of rehabilitation.

After studying programs at prisons in five different states, Ann Chih Lin,
a political scientist and University of Michigan professor, has concluded
that rehabilitation can work. In a new book Lin suggests that effective
programs require the support of both prisoners and staff.

And they don't simply teach job skills, but also assist in reintegrating
individuals into a society that has become foreign.

That might call for planning, years in advance, for inmates' eventual
release--and putting them in touch with institutions and people on the
outside who expect them to do something other than steal or smoke crack
once they get out.

A host of transition programs already exist outside prison walls. They tend
to be run by social workers, religious groups, prisoner advocates and, in
some cases, ex-cons themselves. Bodega de la Familia, a nonprofit
organization on New York's Lower East Side, works not just with
ex-offenders but with their families. Bodega's leaders are convinced that
the entire family of an ex-offender needs help--and that close relatives
can provide an anchor that a solitary parole officer cannot.

Other programs attempt to intervene before prison (or death) has claimed
another young life. In 1998, in a violence-plagued Chicago West Side
community where gang violence is pervasive and incarceration is routine,
the Chicago Boys and Girls Club and Mount Sinai Hospital jointly launched
Within Our Reach. Dr. Leslie Zun had grown weary of seeing victims of
violence (generally gang-related) carried into his hospital.

So he collaborated with Boys and Girls Club consultant Jodi Rosen to take
advantage of those young patients at a particularly vulnerable moment in
their lives--at the point when they were literally lying on their backs,
recovering from their wounds, and (he hoped) ready to re-examine their
lives.

While still in the hospital, willing participants undergo a lengthy
interview and evaluation process.

A caseworker aggressively tracks them for several months and tries to
engage them in productive activities, such as job training, while helping
to steel them against the voices in the street summoning them to their own
destruction.

Even prosecutors and judges are grappling with ways to turn things around.
In June the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals proposed help
rather than prison for thousands of nonviolent drug addicts.

If the proposal works as planned, low-level offenders will get rigorous
inpatient drug treatment. If they stay clean, they can avoid incarceration.
"It's a shame they have to come to us for intervention. But we've got them.
And we know we can help them," said Judge Judith Kaye.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., the Kings County District Attorney's Office, in
collaboration with a wide array of social-service providers and
law-enforcement agencies, has launched a prison-reclamation effort of its
own. The initiative, quarterbacked by Deputy District Attorney Patricia
Gatling, arose from concern that crime was rising in certain Brooklyn
neighborhoods even though it was down overall. The D.A.'s office concluded
that two factors were responsible: gang activity and the re-entry of
thousands of ex-cons. "These were individuals who had no access [to
resources]... coming from communities that were not stable, going back to
those same communities," observes Gatling. ComALERT (Community and Law
Enforcement Resources Together) tries to connect ex-cons with help for drug
addiction, job counseling, "whatever it takes," says Gatling, to bring some
stability to their lives.

And for convicted gang members, who would otherwise be serving sentences of
40 years to life, it offers a precious second chance to get on track.

Though the program started small (with 17 gang members and roughly 300
ex-offenders), Gatling has ambitious plans for expansion. "I have 3,000
people returning to Brooklyn every year," she says. "I've got to get in
gear." She sees the program eventually touching most of those 3,000 lives,
as well as reaching inside prison walls--beginning the process of
reintegration before the felon is released. "This will break the cycle of
recidivism," says Gatling, who points out it might also save the state
money. (It can cost up to $71,000 a year to house an inmate in New York's
Rikers Island.) It also, in Gatling's view, recognizes a simple reality:
"You can't incarcerate your way out of the crime problem."

Canada came to that realization early.

In the 1980s the Correctional Service of Canada redefined its mandate.

It now defines its job not primarily as punishing people but as safely
reintegrating of-fenders back into the community as law-abiding citizens.

Under its philosophy of reintegration, Canada's recidivism rate has dropped
to less than half of what it was two decades ago. "If we became harsher...
we actually think that it would prevent us from dealing with the factors
that lead to more offenses later on," says Ole Ingstrup, Canada's
commissioner of corrections, who instead advocates what he calls "the
restorative model."

Canada's style, of course, is not ours. We believe in making people pay for
their crimes, in protecting the weak from the vicious.

We believe in justice. And we believe in simple truths.

So much so that we might find it hard to accept this complex possibility:
that our strivings to protect society may have weakened it. At the very
least, our policies have arguably hurt certain communities. But they may
also be doing deeper damage, for they fuel the notion that we can afford to
throw human beings away. And they discourage us from asking whether it is
morally or economically justifiable to invest so much in locking lost souls
down and so little in salvaging them. In fact, a strategy of human
reclamation may be the only thing that makes sense in the long run, not
only for those fated to spend time locked down, but for the communities to
which they seem destined to return--communities that now are doubly damned:
to suffer when wrongdoers are taken away and yet again when they come back.