`You were in prison …'

Christian Century, Sept 26, 2001 by William C. Placher

ONE CAN READ a good many books about the moral and political implications of Christian faith without finding much discussion of prisons. Even when Americans worry (as we should) about capital punishment, those worries rarely spread to concern about the penal system in general.

Jails and prisons are an ever more important topic in American society; we live in a country gone mad on sending people to prison. Consider some statistics. From the early 20th century until the mid-1970s, the United States imprisoned about 110 people for every 100,000 of the population. The figure doubled in the late 1970s and '80s and doubled again in the '90s, so that today 445 out of every 100,000 Americans are in prison.

According to Eric Schlosser ("The Prison Industrial Complex," Atlantic Monthly, December 1998), other countries come nowhere close to such figures: compared to that 445 are 36 per 100,000 in Japan, from 50 to 120 in the countries of Western Europe, 229 in the famous "police state" of Singapore, and 368 in South Africa before the change to majority rule.

California alone, reports Schlosser, has "more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined." The Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps, with their political prisoners or whole races imprisoned, incarcerated larger percentages of their total populations, but, counting only criminals in the usual sense of the word, the United States has a larger portion of its population in prison or jarl now than any society in history.

Consideration of most social issues in the U.S., if we are honest, leads us sooner rather than later to the prisons. Take race, for example: one in every three young African-American men in the U.S. is either in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or under pretrial release; in many cities the figure is more than half. Nationwide, more black men are in jail or prison than in college--in California, four times as many. Black males in the U.S. are incarcerated at four times the rate of black males in South Africa.

Prison conditions are often dreadful. In my own state of Indiana, young men under 21--some guilty of violent crimes, some not--can be assigned to a facility where most of them sleep in large dormitories which are essentially unpatrolled at night. Some inmates, unable to defend themselves against sexual predators, quickly become flamboyantly effeminate, concluding that having forced sex is better than being beaten. The administrators of the facility can hardly claim to be unaware of what is happening. Indeed, the threat of rape has unofficially become part of the deterrent policy of American prisons. In a widely publicized program called "Scared Straight," teenage boys identified as potential troublemakers are taken to prisons where inmates harangue them about how eagerly they will welcome such good-looking boys as sexual victims.

Some states have reinstituted chain gangs. New laws keep lowering the age at which capital punishment is permitted. Yet conservative American rhetoric continually talks about how "soft" we are on our prisoners and denounces the supposed "luxury" of the prison system. Running for president in 1996, Bob Dole kept calling the American criminal justice system a "liberal-leaning laboratory of leniency."

When groups concerned about criminal justice have carefully investigated some of the cases of prisoners on Illinois' death row, over half of those reviewed have been proven innocent of the crimes of which they have been convicted. Even a cynic might expect that death-penalty cases would have been reviewed in the first place more carefully than those that merely involved prison sentences, so one suspects that many prisoners not on death row are innocent too.

Social programs to keep young people out of trouble, even if they have only mixed success, come far cheaper than paying for the prisons, but prisons are far more politically popular. Opening high school gyms for "midnight basketball," for instance, demonstrably lowers crime in the surrounding neighborhoods, but has often been dismissed with ridicule in political debates, even as we keep building more prisons.

Even the American political left has been scared off the prison issue. Appearing to be "soft on crime" seems such a horrible risk that no one wants to chance it. Candidates remember the fate of Michael Dukakis, who, running for president, faced ads about Willie Horton, an African-American who had committed a murder while in a Massachusetts furlough program when Dukakis was governor. No other politician wants to be identified as on the side of the criminals--perhaps, if truth were told, least of all on the side of African-American criminals. So Bill Clinton paused in his first presidential campaign to approve the execution of a man so severely retarded that he did not understand that he was going to die (he asked that the pie from his last meal be saved so he could eat it later). And the number of people whose killing he had approved sometimes seemed George W. Bush's principal qualification for high office.