The Left's Prison Complex: The case against the case against jail

National Review, Oct 9, 2000 by Eli Lehrer

The Left knows a growth industry when it sees one. Ever since prominent left-wing journalist Mike Davis popularized the term "prison industrial complex" in a 1995 Nation article, self-styled progressives have relentlessly derided America's burgeoning prison system as a racist, profit-driven monster that enriches corporations and wastes tax dollars while doing little to reduce crime.

The Left's attack on the prison system is wrong in every major respect. America's prison system doesn't discriminate against blacks, is not growing because of a search for profits, and has made America much safer than other countries. For the Left, attacking the prison system is little more than an excuse to recycle tired anticapitalist canards.

Little evidence exists that black criminals face discrimination in the criminal-justice system. Black "overrepresentation" in that system is in the number of criminals arrested. Racist cops aren't responsible for this disparity: Blacks get arrested at the same high rates in cities like Atlanta and Washington where the political establishment is almost entirely African-American and the police forces reflect the population's ethnic makeup. In a study on sentencing disparity commissioned by the Center for Equal Opportunity, former University of Maryland professor Robert Lerner finds that arrested blacks get sent to prison at a lower rate than arrested whites in just about every category that the government measures. Lerner found that blacks were twice as likely to get off on rape charges, around 50 percent more likely to escape punishment when charged with simple assault, and a third more likely to beat the rap on drug dealing. The difference in favor of black offenders existed in 12 out of 14 categories of crime. (The exceptions were traffic felonies and a small category of miscellaneous offenses.)

Black murderers face shorter sentences than their white counterparts and (contrary to leftist dogma) make fewer trips to death row. Even when it comes to the federal law punishing crack possession much more harshly than powder-cocaine possession-a favorite topic of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton-racism doesn't enter the picture. In his 1997 book Race, Crime and the Law, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy shows that the law passed with the enthusiastic support of black congressmen who saw crack becoming the drug of choice in their districts. The use of methamphetamine and heroin-predominantly by whites-has soared in the 1990s, while the penalties for this use have remained stable. Would black Americans be better off if the situation were reversed, and crack dealing went on uninterrupted in American inner cities while police cracked down on rural whites using methamphetamine? If this happened, civil-rights leaders would organize protest marches in favor of stronger drug-enforcement efforts in inner cities-and would be right to do so.

The contention that the quest for profits has driven America's fourfold increase in prison capacity since 1980 is equally specious. Private-prison operators, a chief bugbear of the Left, incarcerate a measly 5 percent of America's convicts. Prisons contract out more services than they did 15 years ago, but so do nearly all other government agencies. The overwhelming majority of prison services remain in the hands of money-losing government bureaucracies. Unlike their military-industrial counterparts, which produce some of America's leading exports and sell civilian goods ranging from jetliners to computer hardware, major prison-related producers sell little outside of America's borders and almost nothing to private citizens. While a few states, California and Tennessee most prominently, do count corrections-industry groups among their most powerful lobbies, they remain exceptions. No sizeable cities have prison-reliant economies, and few people outside of declining farm towns actually want to live near prisons. Indeed, the presence of a large jail proved a major stumbling block in the effort to revitalize Chicago's South Loop.

It's not profits, but well-founded public outrage over criminals being set loose too soon that has driven America's gradual increase in length of prison sentences. In the early 1970s, as crime increased and prison sentences decreased, annual Gallup polls showed huge increases in Americans' fear of crime. The number of Americans telling pollsters that crime was a major political issue likewise increased sharply, as did public support for stiffer sentences.

Public sentiment was right. British researcher Donald E. Lewis's comprehensive examination of studies on the correlation between sentence length and crime rates (published in the British Journal of Criminology) concludes that doubling the length of the sentence for a crime will cut the likelihood that that crime will be committed by a little less than half. In a 1994 report on national sentencing policies published by the National Institute of Justice, Michael K. Block-a former member of the federal sentencing commission-found that violent criminals, on average, spent a little over three months in prison per reported crime, and even murderers were turned loose after serving an average of about five years. Sentences have increased a bit since 1994, but remain shockingly low. "There are too many criminals committing too many crimes," wrote Block. "We find ourselves [building more prisons] because for most of the last half of the 20th century, sentencing practices have not been harsh enough."