Addict Nation (24 page)

Americans have lost perspective on punishment. We’ve become drunk on a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” cocktail, fixated on the satisfaction we feel when we hear a “tough sentence.” Sadly, poor minorities are drowning in the wreckage of our addiction.

For years, when I was a reporter on the syndicated TV show
Celebrity Justice,
I would go to the Los Angeles criminal courthouse for a celebrity case and find myself sitting through a few non-celebrity cases as I waited for the star defendant to arrive. The difference between how the rich and the poor were treated in the very same courtroom was simply breathtaking.

For the poverty-stricken defendants, who are represented by public defenders, it seemed like the whole system was on speed. The prosecutor, the judge, and the public defender would banter—often cheerfully—using legalistic, acronym-filled language, without any real acknowledgment that a human being was sitting there with his life in the balance. I could hardly keep up. At the end of a flurry of chatter, the public defender would mumble a recommendation to the person on trial. The defendants often seemed confused. Their English was sometimes poor. The offer was usually some kind of plea deal, and the clueless defendant invariably agreed. Within seconds, he would be carted off to prison to be replaced by another poor, minority defendant. As one former prosecutor confided in me, “When I looked out at the cases on the docket, all I could see was a sea of black and brown faces.” A poor person trapped in the criminal justice system is just a number, a commodity to be sorted and stocked.

By contrast, I noticed with dismay, when the rich and famous defendant arrived, often with a team of high-powered attorneys, the judicial process would begin to move in slow motion. The judge, prosecutor, and the defendant’s dream team of attorneys would interminably dissect every last nuance of every legal maneuver. There were frequent huddles at the judge’s bench, out of earshot of the journalists on hand. Often, the entire proceeding would end up being postponed due to some well-presented excuse and we, reporters, were left to come back another day. No, justice isn’t blind. In fact, Lady Justice seems to have undergone LASIK surgery. Now, she’s just terribly short-sighted.

Most imprisoned Americans are poor, male, and members of a minority group. Roughly two-thirds of the United States population is white. But white males comprised only about one-third of the inmate population in 2007. Hispanics, who can be of any race, are about 15 percent of the American population, but Hispanic males accounted for about 18 percent of all inmates. African-Americans comprise only about 13 percent of the population. But black males represented the largest percentage—35 percent—of all inmates held in custody in 2007.
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In other words, more than half of all inmates are minority, way above their percentage in the general population. The question is “Why?”

Is there something wrong with minorities? How ridiculous. That would be a highly racist concept. And you certainly wouldn’t hear that from me, since I am a woman of color, being Puerto Rican on my mother’s side. Do I need to remind anyone that we have an African-American president? Even those who might disagree with some of his policies would never mistake him for a dummy! Ditto for Puerto Rican Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor! Nevertheless, if you toured the nation’s prisons and looked at the racial makeup, you might wonder . . . why are so many people of color locked up? America’s prison system today is a case study in institutionalized racism. And it’s hurting all of us . . . black, brown, and white. We’re relying almost entirely on one solution— incarceration—to deal with myriad complex social problems. It’s simplistic, and it’s morally wrong. But we’re culturally hooked on doing it this way.

“We have an addiction to a false sense of justice. Punishment is the mentality rather than rehabilitation.”

—Matthew Albracht, managing director of the Peace Alliance

More Than 2 Million Americans Warehoused

Right now, as you read this, more than 2 million human beings are living in cages in America. That’s about the same as the entire population of Slovenia . . . or Macedonia . . . or any number of countries.
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In fact, America has more human beings locked up in prisons than any other country in the world. Here’s another way to look at it: about one out of every 100 adults in the United States is in prison!
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More than 7 million Americans are either behind bars, on probation, or on parole.
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We have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Any which way you slice it . . . it’s shocking! As a country, we are on a punishment binge, and when you consider that most addictive behavior is progressive, this trend is almost guaranteed to grow. So, it’s high time we ponder the question: Why are we, as Americans, so obsessed with putting people behind bars?

Helter Skelter

The roots of America’s fanatical need to incarcerate began back in the late sixties and seventies when our nation’s crime problem seemed to be spinning out of control. August 9, 1969, is a date that will live in infamy throughout the hills of Southern California and the world. It was the night the Manson clan committed its savage massacre of Sharon Tate, the very pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, and four other people, including an heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune. Before leaving, the “family” scrawled the word “pig” in blood on the front door. In another viciously sadistic Manson clan slaying, the very next night the Beatles-inspired phrase “Healter-Skelter” was written and, yes, misspelled, in blood at that crime scene. The late author and social observer Dominick Dunne wrote, “The shock waves that went through the town were beyond anything I had ever seen before. People were convinced that the rich and famous of the community were in peril. Children were sent out of town. Guards were hired.”
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The killings also dealt an ultimately fatal injury to America’s counterculture movement. Even though their philosophy was based on racism and violence, the Manson family looked like flower children. That was enough.

Average Americans, already feeling destabilized and threatened by the long-haired hippies who seemed to be everywhere, declared war on the peaceniks and their favorite pastimes, free love and mind-altering drugs. The author Joan Didion wrote, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
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And from the ashes of those horrific killings would rise an anti-crime crusade that would ultimately end up imprisoning hundreds of thousands of young men who weren’t even alive when Charlie Manson ordered his followers to murder.

Over the next few decades, the anticrime movement would create its own set of problems, taking down millions of uneducated young men and women, from the underclass, who were not violent but had broken the law. The consequences to families and communities have rippled across generations.

“Moms actually give birth in jail now, and the kids grow up visiting their mom in prison. You’re seeing people who are going through their childhood with an incarcerated parent. There are these big, giant institutions that you are fighting to keep out of, but it kind of has this tractor beam attached. We heard the same story over, and over, and over, and over.”

—Simeon Soffer, director of prison documentary film
Fight to the Max

In the eye-opening book
Addicted to Incarceration
, author Travis Pratt writes, “One out of every three African-American men in the United States population between the ages of 20 and 29 is under some form of correctional supervision (prison, jail, probation, or parole); when limited to urban areas, that figure approaches 1 in 2 . . . a high rate of incarceration may indirectly increase crime rates through its effect on both family disruption and the potential economic deprivation brought on by the loss of an additional (or perhaps the only) income.”
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In the vicious cycle of our “lock ’em up” addiction, we destroy families by imprisoning parents and then watch the unsupervised, undisciplined children grow up to become criminals themselves. Our incarceration of minorities is a self-perpetuating, destructive process. And we justify it all with the word . . .
justice.

Charlie Manson had hoped to provoke a war against blacks, which he called Helter Skelter. In a sick irony, he may have instigated just that.

Here Is the Backstory on
Our Addiction to Imprisonment

As the sixties gave way to the seventies and the eighties, a relentless crime wave swept across the nation. The violence seemed to rob Americans of a fundamental sense of security. A lot of the crime was random and horrific. Son of Sam came to epitomize the era. This mystery serial killer singlehandedly terrorized New York City from July 1976 until his arrest in August 1977. The phantom, who would turn out to be nerdy David Berkowitz, seemed to come out of nowhere and gun down strangers at random, particularly women with long, dark hair and couples parked in cars.
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I was a college student living in New York City at the time and, as a young woman with long, dark hair, I was terrified, biting my lip anxiously as I walked around town, always looking over my shoulder for anybody who looked “strange.”

The “establishment” became increasingly convinced that a hard line was called for. The pendulum started to swing from permissiveness to punishment. The notion spread that America was coddling criminals and needed to get tough. Politicians realized that campaigning for “law and order” increased their chances of getting elected. “Law and order” translated into tougher sentences. Conservatives chanted the mantra that rehabilitation is a joke. Victims of violent crime wanted vengeance, and who could blame them? It was said that a conservative is a liberal whose been mugged!

“The era of accelerated incarceration and punishment—being the primary purpose over deterrence and rehabilitation—began in the ’70s when the law-and-order politicians and law-and-order candidates began to use the sensationalism of crime to scare voters into selecting them. If you ran for any office, for the most part, a principal part of your platform beginning in the ’70s had to be ‘I will be tough on crime’ not that ‘I will reduce crime by changing lives and getting to the root causes.’”

—Judge Mathis, syndicated television show judge

Much of the violence was fueled by the burgeoning illegal drug trade. The middle class and the rich were creating a lot of the demand, doing drugs like crazy. But they could afford to snort a few paychecks up their noses. Low-income addicts often needed to rob—and sometimes kill—to pay for a habit that can get very pricey. The middle class and rich indulged in their “cool” habit behind gated walls and in penthouse apartments. The poor dealt and used their drugs right on the street. Coke was neatly laid out on a mirror, while crack vials littered the gutters. For these reasons, poor addicts and dealers were getting arrested in droves while middle- and upper-middle-class drug users—and their upscale drug suppliers— were not. I saw this myself as a young journalist in the 1980s. Looking back, I can say that it’s a bizarre blessing that, as an alcoholic, my drug of choice was booze. I dabbled in drugs on a few occasions, but I consider myself lucky to have avoided picking up the habit I saw all around me. So many middle-class professionals were doing coke regularly that it was certainly not shocking to walk into a party full of yuppies and encounter a group in a corner, or in a quiet bedroom, doing lines. None of those people ever thought twice about being arrested because it so rarely happened to a hip, young, urban professional, no matter how strung out they got.

The fear of crime ultimately morphed into the so-called War on Drugs. This accelerated the disproportionate imprisonment of African-Americans, even though most drug users are white. While the tougher laws may have been designed—admirably—to cut down on violent crime, it became apparent that it was much easier to catch somebody with a stash of drugs than solve a complex murder case, a messy rape, or neighborhood robbery where everyone scatters. For example, nationally—in 2008—less than a third of all robberies were “solved” with an arrest. Less than half of all rapes were cleared with the capture of a suspect. But drug cases are often easy to prosecute. No DNA testing or complex forensics is required. No he said/she said to deal with. Just a hand on a stash and, for good measure, some cash!

In the 1980s, as First Lady Nancy Reagan urged Americans to “just say no,” President Reagan ramped up the War on Drugs. The crime/drug nexus was fixed in the public’s mind.

As we entered the 1990s, three-strikes laws began popping up in states across the nation, mandating long prison sentences for those convicted of a third felony. About two dozen states enacted three-strikes laws. All of this caused incarceration rates to explode. And who was taking the biggest hit? African-American males.

We, the Taxpayers, Are Paying for
the Incarceration of So Many

Overcriminalization
is a term now being used by both liberals, concerned about the exploitation of prisoners, and conservatives worried about big government. Liberals see the inequities in the arrest, conviction, and sentencing rates. Conservatives, whose entire philosophy is based on limiting the government’s control over the lives of American citizens, are now looking with alarm at the escalating number of prisons and prisoners. The American Civil Liberties Union sums it up this way: “Between 1970 and 2005, the number of men, women, and children locked up in this country has grown by an historically unprecedented 700%.”
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