STARS AND BARS

How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps
spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration
camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows
they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase)
but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are
guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or
their social class?

Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's
homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and
"supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite
noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the
advanced industrial world.

The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now
stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to
twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European
countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the
United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which,
curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global
warming.

With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation
or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population
under some form of criminal-justice supervision, which is to say one
person in thirty-two. For African-Americans, the numbers are even more
astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind
bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages
of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight.

While conservatives have spent the past three or four decades
bemoaning the growth of single-parent families, there is a very simple
reason some 1.5 million American children are fatherless or (less
often) motherless: Their parents are locked up. Because they are
confined for the most part in distant rural prisons, moreover, only
about one child in five gets to visit them as often as once a month.

What's that you say? Who cares whether a bunch of "rapists, murderers,
robbers, and even terrorists and spies," as Republican Senator Mitch
McConnell once characterized America's prison population, get to see
their kids? In fact, surprisingly few denizens of the American gulag
have been sent away for violent crimes.

In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the
state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5
percent were for murder.

Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the
modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of
bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely
economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32
percent.

If the incarceration rate continues to rise and violent crime
continues to drop, we can expect the nonviolent sector of the prison
population to expand accordingly. A normal society might lighten up in
such circumstances. After all, if violence is under control, isn't it
time to come up with a more humane way of dealing with a dwindling
number of miscreants? But America is not a normal country and only
grows more punitive.

It has also been extremely reluctant to face up to the cancer in its
midst. Several of the leading Democratic candidates, for example, have
recently come out against the infamous 100-to-1 ratio that subjects
someone carrying ten grams of crack to the same penalty as someone
caught with a kilo of powdered cocaine.

Senator Joe Biden has actually introduced legislation to eliminate the
disparity--without, however, acknowledging his role as a leading drug
warrior back in the 1980s, when he sponsored the bill that set it in
stone in the first place.

At a recent forum at Howard University, Hillary Clinton promised to
"deal" with the disparity as well, although it would have been nice if
she had done so back in the '90s, when, during the first Clinton
Administration, the prison population was soaring by some 50 percent.

Although he is not running this time around, Jesse Jackson recently
castigated Dems for their hesitancy in addressing "failed, wasteful,
and unfair drug policies" that have sent "so many young
African-Americans" to jail. Yet Jackson forgot to mention his own
drug-war past when, as a leading hardliner, he specifically called for
"stiffer prison sentences" for black drug users and "wartime
consequences" for smugglers. "Since the flow of drugs into the US is
an act of terrorism, antiterrorist policies must be applied," he
declared in a 1989 interview, a textbook example of how the antidrug
rhetoric of the late twentieth century helped pave the way for the
"global war on terror" of the early twenty-first.

In other words, cowardice and hypocrisy abound.

Fortunately, a small number of academics and at least one journalist
have begun training an eye on America's growing prison crisis.

Since there is more than enough injustice to go around, each has
zeroed in on different aspects of the phenomenon--on the political and
economic consequences of stigmatizing so many young people for life,
on the racial consequences of disproportionately punishing young black
males and on the sheer moral horror of needlessly locking away real,
live human beings in supermax prisons that are little more than
high-tech dungeons.

Their findings, to make a long story short, are that the damage cannot
be reduced to a simple matter of so many person-years of lost time. To
the contrary, the effects promise to multiply for years to come. In
American Furies Sasha Abramsky, a Sacramento-based journalist and
longtime Nation contributor, convincingly argues that the best way to
understand US prison policies is to think of them as a GI Bill in reverse.

Just as the original GI Bill laid the basis for a major social advance
by making college available to millions of veterans, mass
incarceration is laying the basis for an enormous social regression by
stigmatizing and brutalizing millions of young people and
"de-skilling" them by removing them from the workforce.

America will be feeling the effects for generations.

Bruce Western, a Princeton sociologist, offers the best
overview.

He notes in his new study, Punishment and Inequality in America, that
mass imprisonment is actually a novel development. For much of the
twentieth century, the US incarceration rate held steady at around 100
per 100,000, which would put it in the same ballpark as Western Europe
today. But after a slight dip following the liberal reforms of the
1960s, the curve reversed direction in the mid-'70s and then rose more
steeply in the '80s and '90s. Considering that Germany, Sweden,
Denmark and Austria succeeded in reducing or holding their
incarceration rates steady during this period, the US pattern was
highly exceptional. But so are US crime rates.

Between 1980 and 1991, US homicides hovered at between 7.9 and 10.2
per 100,000, as much as ten times the European average. (The rate has
since fallen to around 5.7.) Combined with the crack wave that also
exploded in the 1980s, the result was a deepening sense of panic that
peaked in mid-1986 with the death of basketball star Len Bias from a
cocaine overdose.

Although there was no evidence that crack had anything to do with
Bias's death--police found only powdered cocaine in his car--the
incident somehow confirmed crack as the new devil substance, "the most
addictive drug known to man," in the words of Newsweek, and a threat
comparable to the "medieval plagues," in the considered opinion of
U.S. News and World Report (which would have meant that the country
was facing an imminent population loss of up to 33 percent). Within a
matter of months, Joe Biden had helped shepherd through to victory the
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, an unusually horrendous piece of
legislation that etched in stone the 100-to-1 penalty ratio for crack.

Still, it is always interesting to consider which deaths fill people
with horror and which ones don't. The year before Bias's death not
only saw 19,000 homicides in the United States but nearly 46,000
highway fatalities too, and yet Congress somehow refrained from
criminalizing motor vehicles.

Crack's status as the drug du jour of a certain class of inner-city
blacks should have been the giveaway.

What had Congress in a tizzy was not cocaine consumption so much as
black cocaine consumption, which is why the subsequent repression was
bound to be far harder on African-Americans than on whites.

Although there is no evidence that blacks use drugs more than whites
and indeed some evidence that they use them less, Western notes that
black users are now twice as likely to be arrested for drugs and, once
arrested, more likely to go to prison or jail. None of this is
necessarily racist, at least not in the crudely explicit way we
associate with men in white sheets.

The reason the police concentrate their efforts in black inner-city
neighborhoods, Western notes, is that users congregate there in large
numbers, and buying, selling and using tend to take place in public.
(It's harder to make arrests behind the closed doors of some suburban
McMansion.) If a judge is more inclined to send a poor black defendant
to prison, similarly, it is not necessarily because he or she enjoys
punishing someone with dark skin but because the judge, according to
Western, may "see poor defendants as having fewer prospects and social
supports, thus as having less potential for rehabilitation." If your
weeping parents can afford to send you to private rehab, you're excused.

If not, it's off to the state pen.

Racial and class biases are thus built into the very structure of the
drug war. Western is particularly effective on the economic
consequences of such grossly disproportionate policies.

The standard account of American economic development since the 1970s,
told and retold in countless undergraduate classrooms, is that
economic deregulation and growth have done much to narrow the
once-yawning wage gap between white and black workers.

To quote the New York Times: "Unemployment rates
among blacks and Hispanic people...are at or near record lows.
Joblessness among high school dropouts has fallen to about half the rate
in 1992. And wages for the lowest paid are rising faster than inflation
for the first time in decades." A rising tide lifts all boats, whereas
all that labor-market rigidity has done for "Old Europe" is to saddle it
with persistently high levels of unemployment, an alienated underclass
and riots in the banlieues.

But as Punishment and Inequality in America points out, if US economic
policies look good, it is only because the country's enormous prison
population is not factored into the equation. If workers behind bars
are counted, then it quickly becomes apparent "that young black men
have experienced virtually no real economic gains on young whites" and
that the real black unemployment rate is up to 20 percent greater than
official statistics indicate.

Rather than freeing up the markets, Western writes, the United States
has "adopted policies that massively and coercively regulated the
poor." Where the Danes provide their unemployed with up to 80 percent
of their previous salary and the Germans provide them with 60 percent,
America has deregulated the rich while throwing a growing portion of
its working class in jail.

In Marked, Devah Pager, who also teaches sociology at Princeton, uses
a simple technique to show how mass incarceration has undone the small
amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and '70s. Working with
two pairs of male college students in Milwaukee, one white and the
other black, she drilled them on how to present themselves and answer
questions. Then, arming them with phony resumes, she sent them out to
apply for entry-level jobs. The resumes were identical in all respects
but one. Where one member of each team had nothing indicating a
criminal record, the other's resume showed an eighteen-month sentence
for drugs. To help insure that the results were uniform, the resumes
were then rotated back and forth among the testers.

The Results?

The white applicant with a prison record was half as likely to be
called back for a second interview as the white applicant without. But
the black applicant without a criminal record was no more likely to be
called back than the white applicant with a record, while the black
applicant with a record was two-thirds less likely to be called back
than the black applicant without.

The black applicant with a record therefore wound up doubly
penalized--as a black man and as an ex-con. With the chances of a
call-back reduced to just 5 percent, the overall effect, Pager writes,
was "almost total exclusion from this labor market." Considering that
there are as many as 12 million ex-felons in the United States, a
major portion of them black, the result has been to create a huge pool
of the semipermanently unemployed where one might otherwise not exist.

This is not to disprove sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose study
The Declining Significance of Race caused an uproar when it was
published in 1978. Wilson may have been right: The significance of
race may well have been declining by the late '70s. But thanks to a
government policy of mass stigmatization, it has come roaring back.

This is not only bad news for those arrested but bad news for those
who have to foot the bill for their incarceration and for dealing with
the social problems that labor-market exclusion on this scale helps
generate. But there are other costs too. In Locked Out, Jeff Manza and
Christopher Uggen, professors of sociology at Northwestern and the
University of Minnesota, respectively, point out that only two states,
Maine and Vermont, permit felons to vote while incarcerated, that most
limit felons' voting rights after they complete their terms and that,
even if not legally disenfranchised, some 600,000 jail inmates and
pretrial detainees are effectively prevented from voting as well. All
told, this means that 6 million Americans were unable to vote on
election day in 2004. This is not peanuts.

Nationwide, one black man in seven has been disenfranchised as a
consequence, while in Florida, the state with the most sweeping
disenfranchisement laws, the number of those prevented from voting now
exceeds 1.1 million.

From a right-wing perspective, this is nothing short of brilliant.
After all, what could be better than disenfranchising an unfriendly
racial group while persuading the rest of the nation that the group
deserves it because its ranks are filled with violent criminals?

Since felons and ex-felons tend to be poor and members of oppressed
racial minorities, they tend to vote Democratic. Even though the poor
are less likely to vote than those higher up on the socioeconomic
ladder, Manza and Uggen say there is little doubt that, had the
disenfranchisement laws not existed in Florida in November 2000, the
extra votes would have provided Al Gore with a margin of victory so
comfortable that not even the Republican state legislature could have
taken it away. If the ranks of prison inmates and hence of
disenfranchised ex-inmates had not multiplied since the '70s, much of
the wind would also have been taken out of the sails of the great GOP
offensive.

Americans have not gone right, in other words.

Rather, by taking control of the criminal-justice issue, the right
wing has winnowed down the electorate so as to artificially boost the
power of the conservative minority.

But how did the right gain control of this all-important issue in the
first place?

This is the problem that Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political
science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrestles with in The Prison
and the Gallows, an eccentric but compelling study of
massincarceration's ideological origins.

While taking aim at the usual right-wing villains, The Prison and the
Gallows also goes after various liberals and radicals who,
inadvertently or not, also contributed to the construction of "the
carceral state." Bill Clinton, for example, not only embraced the drug
war and capital punishment--he interrupted his 1992 presidential
campaign to fly back to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for a
mentally disabled prisoner named Rickey Ray Rector--but also endorsed
what Gottschalk calls "a virulently punitive victims' rights
movement," going so far as to call for a constitutional amendment in
1996 as "the only way to give victims equal and due
consideration."

This was important because the victims' rights movement represented an
effort to inject a dose of vengeance into the judicial process and
thereby blur the distinction between the private interest of the
victim and the public's interest in maintaining order and justice.

In Europe, reformers were also concerned with victims'
rights.

But "extending a hand to victims was seen from the start as primarily
an extension of the welfare state," Gottschalk observes, whereas in
America, where welfare is a dirty word, it was seen as a way of
steering criminal justice in a more punitive direction.

Gottschalk's assault on '70s feminism is sure to raise the most
eyebrows. She argues that the women's movement helped facilitate the
carceral state by promoting a punitive approach to sexual violence
that was unmitigated by any larger political considerations. This
single-minded focus led to what The Prison and the Gallows describes
as unsavory coalitions with tough-on-crime types.

In the State of Washington, women's groups successfully marketed rape
reform as a law-and-order issue so that, when the measure finally
passed in 1975, it was "in part by riding on the coattails of a new
death penalty statute."

In California a new rape shield became known as the Robbins Rape
Evidence Law, in honor of one of its legislative sponsors, a
conservative Republican named Alan Robbins. In pressing for limits on
the cross-examination of alleged rape victims, feminists "generally
did not consider what effect such measures would have on a defendant's
right to due process," Gottschalk adds, even though due process at the
time was under assault from a growing war on crime.

More radical elements, meanwhile, strayed into outright vigilantism.
In Berkeley, antirape activists picketed an accused rapist's home. In
East Lansing in 1973, they "reportedly scrawled Rapist on a suspect's
car, spray-painted the word across a front porch and made warning
telephone calls late at night." In Los Angeles, a self-styled
"antirape squad" vowed to shave rapists' heads, cover them with dye
and then photograph them for posters reading, This Man Rapes Women. A
feminist publication called Aegis ran a notorious cover showing a gun
with the warning, "You can't rape a .38; we will defend ourselves."

The National Rifle Association was no doubt delighted.

Gottschalk contends that such activists wound up "profoundly
co-opted," since "by framing the rape issue around 'horror stories,'
they fed into the victims' movement's compelling image of a society
held hostage to a growing number of depraved, marauding criminals."
She notes that feminists threw themselves into the battle for the
Violence Against Women Act, which passed in 1994 as part of an omnibus
anticrime bill that "allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison
construction, expanded the death penalty to cover more than fifty
federal crimes, and added a 'three strikes and you're out' provision
mandating life imprisonment for federal offenders convicted of three
violent offenses." Yet feminists' involvement was relatively modest
two years later when a few liberals tried to rally opposition to
Clinton's plan to abolish Aid to Families With Dependent Children,
which heavily benefited poor women.

Like their nineteenth-century forebears, who advocated bringing back
the whipping post to deal with wife beaters, late-twentieth-century
feminists got more excited about punishment than defending the welfare
state.

Gottschalk is more than a bit brave in pointing this out. Still, her
choice of historical examples to explain the growth of an increasingly
vindictive national mood seems incomplete. As much damage as radical
feminists may have done in undermining due process, they seem less
important than certain antidrug activists--in particular, certain
black Democratic antidrug activists--whose efforts ran on parallel
tracks. This means not just Jesse Jackson, who backed vigilante-style
antidrug patrols by the Nation of Islam ("As long as this type of
solution is within the law, it should be encouraged") but also
Congressman Charles Rangel, the Manhattan Democrat who, as head of the
House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, spent much of the '80s
baiting Reagan for being soft on drugs. "I haven't seen a national
drug policy since Nixon was in office," Rangel lamented at one point.
"So far, the Administration hasn't given it any priority." This is as
clear a case of an ostensible liberal cheering on the forces of
right-wing reaction as one could hope to find. US prisons are not
bulging with rapists and wife beaters, but they are filled with drug
offenders, some 458,000 as of 2000, which makes the brief space that
Gottschalk allots to the drug war somewhat hard to fathom.

It's like discussing Al Capone without mentioning Prohibition.

Sasha Abramsky is less interested in the ideological currents that
helped pave the way for mass incarceration, although in American
Furies he does spotlight the fascinating role played by a
Berkeley-educated sociologist named Robert Martinson, who, after
several years investigating the cornucopia of rehabilitation programs
offered at the time by the New York State prison system, summed up his
findings in a sensational 1974 article titled "What Works?" His
answer: nothing. Martinson's frustration is understandable to anyone
who has ever suffered through an encounter group.

Yet his conclusions, published in the neoconservative journal Public
Interest, were grossly one-sided: While many programs do not work,
some clearly have a positive effect.

In short order, Martinson's article became the bible of the
vengeance-and-punishment set, which seized on it as proof that
rehabilitation was a lost cause and that the only purpose of prison
was to penalize wrongdoers. Once this ideological impediment was
removed, the criminal-justice system slid downhill with remarkable
speed.

If punishment was good, then more punishment was better.

In short order, Massachusetts Governor William Weld was declaring that
life in prison should be "akin to a walk through hell," while
right-wing Senator Phil Gramm was promising "to string barbed wire on
every military base in America" to contain all the criminals he wanted
to round up. In Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, a
colorful local character named Joe Arpaio got himself re-elected
sheriff time and again by parading his inmates about on chain gangs,
dressing the men among them in fluorescent pink underwear and serving
prisoners food that, as he cheerfully admits, costs less than what he
gives to his cats and dogs. "Voters like it everywhere," Abramsky
quotes Arpaio as saying of such policies. "I'm on thousands of talk
shows.

I never get a negative.

I get letters from all over the world--and I answer every one. They
say, 'Come up here and be our sheriff.'" What makes this all the more
repellent is that the people subjected to such humiliation and abuse
are rarely killers or rapists but alcoholics, vagrants and other small
fry doing time for such misdemeanors as possession and
shoplifting.

Amazing how much damage a single article can do, eh? Yet when a
conscience-stricken Martinson published a mea culpa in the Hofstra Law
Review five years later ("contrary to my previous position, some
treatment programs do have an appreciable effect on recidivism"), the
media yawned.

No big shots interviewed him on TV, and no politicians called to
solicit his views.

No one wanted to hear that rehabilitation programs work, only that
they don't. Beset by personal troubles, professional setbacks and
perhaps the realization of how grievously he had allowed himself to be
misused, Martinson committed suicide by throwing himself out of a
ninth-floor Manhattan apartment in 1980. American Furies provides us
with a vivid account of the horrors that have followed--the low-level
pot dealers and shoplifters sentenced to life in prison in California,
Oklahoma, Alabama and other states where various "three strikes" or
other habitual-offender laws pertain; the supermax prisoners condemned
to spend twenty-three hours a day in barren concrete cells the size of
walk-in closets; the epidemics of suicide and self-mutilation; and the
stubbornly high levels of violence between and among prisoners and
guards--which law-and-order advocates seize upon as reason to build
yet more supermax facilities. US prison policy is like a computer
program that is designed to spit out the same answers no matter what
data are fed into it: Arrest more people, put more of them in prison,
build more cells to accommodate them.

Where will it end? As Martinson's story shows, American mass
incarceration is not what social scientists call "evidence based." It
is not a policy designed to achieve certain practical, utilitarian
ends that can then be weighed and evaluated from time to time to
determine if it is performing as intended.

Rather, it is a moral policy whose purpose is to satisfy certain
passions that have grown more and more brutal over the years.

The important thing about moralism of this sort is that it is its own
justification. For true believers, it is something that everyone
should endorse regardless of the consequences. As right-wing political
scientist James Q. Wilson once remarked, "Drug use is wrong because it
is immoral," a comment that not only sums up the tautological nature
of US drug policies but also shows how they are structured to render
irrelevant questions about wasted dollars and blighted lives.

Moralism of this sort is neither rational nor democratic, and the fact
that it has triumphed so completely is an indication of how deeply the
United States has sunk into authoritarianism since the 1980s. With the
prison population continuing to rise at a 2.7 percent annual clip,
there is no reason to think there will be a turnaround soon. Indeed,
Gottschalk writes that mass incarceration is so taken for granted
nowadays that "it seems almost unimaginable that the country will veer
off in a new direction and begin to empty and board up its prisons."
Still, she ends on a quasi-optimistic note by quoting Norwegian
sociologist Thomas Mathiesen to the effect that "major repressive
systems have succeeded in looking extremely stable almost until the
day they have collapsed." Indeed, repression is itself often a sign of
instability bubbling up from below.

This is not much to pin one's hopes on, but it will have to do.