AN AMERICAN GULAG

Conservatives who don't like the government conducting "social
experiments" should be having conniption fits over the U.S.
incarceration total, which just hit 2 million. The U.S. jail and prison
population has doubled in just 10 years - equaling the growth of the
prison population in the previous 90 years - with 461 of every 100,000
Americans now serving a jail or prison sentence of at least one year
Most of those locked up are in for drug use, drug dealing and other
non-violent offenses, and fully half of them are African-American.

Arguments that blacks who do the crime must be prepared to do the time
- and that the U. S. criminal-justice system is not racist through and
through - are easily countered by statistics on prison and drugs. About
75 percent of the nation's drug dealers and users are white. Yet blacks
make up 75 percent of U.S. drug prisoners. Overall, blacks are nearly
seven times more likely to end up behind bars than whites are.

The lock-'em-up strategy for dealing with socially problematical people
along with dangerous criminals is the system's thoughtless and
politically craven response to a crime rate that began rising in the
1960s. Long sentences were mandated by the legislatures and billions of
dollars poured into building more jail cells. It's a mindlessly
emotional approach to crime that Governor Paul Cellucci continues to
promote in the commonwealth.

The crime rate has indeed fallen, probably in some small part as a
result of the soaring incarceration rate. An improved economy, shifting
demographics, better policing, and the decreasing popularity of crack
cocaine have also cut crime, however, and many corrections experts
concede that prison life actually contributes to crime. Life behind
prison walls is so dehumanizing that wayward young people who otherwise
could have been saved often leave prison as deeply damaged human beings
incapable of any existence except as criminals. In these cases, prisons
become crime factories.

Meanwhile, the prison-industrial complex has taken on an eerie life of
its own, with privatization of prisons spreading and the industry's
lobbyists contaminating the legislative process in much the way the
military-industrial complex corrupted national spending decisions
during the Cold War. Even some law-and-order conservatives in the
legislatures are questioning whether the $40 billion taxpayers shell
out annually on incarceration is money wisely spent. Every dollar
dedicated to adding jail cells is a dollar not spent on schools, drug
education and treatment, supervised probation, and other programs that
steer young people away from lives of crime.

The Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, has declared a
moratorium on state executions, following the appalling disclosure that
13 death-row inmates had been wrongly convicted. Nationally, 81 people
in 21 states, all convicted of murder, have been found innocent and set
free over the past 24 years, some only hours before they were to have
been electrocuted, gassed or poisoned to death by the state. Capital
punishment is a far more evil "social experiment" that has gone
tragically wrong in the United States, although it is meaner and
socially dumber than mass casual incarceration only in degree.