Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America's Penal System

Preface

Preface This book was written in response to troubling trends in American society . Since 9/11,America has been edging closer and closer to a limited democracy that accepts the curtailment of freedom and the enhancement of governmental power and control as the price for safety. This movement, however, has been underway for decades in the way America responds to crime, especially street crimes, or those offenses most likely to be engaged in by the lower classes and Americans of color. It is no accident that these crimes, more so than the more harmful behaviors of corporate and government officials, are the prime subject of crime control , and that the prime suspects are those unlike “us”—they represent economic decay and difference. It is also no accident that America’s use of imprisonment has grown so dramatically in recent decades, and that the prison targets the poor and minorities. This is true despite the fact that they also do not represent the greatest threat to our health and well-being. Rather, it is the corporate criminal who pollutes the environment, uses his economic and political power to alter the course of American politics and law, who poses the greatest threat to the average American. But this book is not about them; it is about the runaway train that has become America’s penal system. Today the average citizen regards the prison as an appropriate response to crime; and so too do America’s politicians.As a result, the rate of imprisonment in the United States has expanded exponentially since 1973. Since then, the number of inmates imprisoned in the United States has grown each and every year. More than thirty years later, our prison system is the biggest in the world, in terms of both raw numbers and rates.And, contrary to popular opinion, the United States has the longest average prison sentences of any nation in the world.And still, we have a substantial level of crime. ix These few facts, which are examined in detail in the pages that follow, make it clear that the U.S. penal system is the harshest in the world. Add to these facts the observation that the United States, unlike any other Western democracy, also employs the death penalty for criminals, and the picture of an extensively repressive penal system is nearly complete.These drastic measures, however, have not lowered our rate of crime. To round out this picture, we must add that the people subject to this form of repressive control are the poor and the minorities in our nation, the least well-off, those who have the fewest quality choices to make during their life courses. In contrast, the well-off get away with their crimes, or, if punished, are treated rather kindly in comparison. Not only is this system of punishment repressive,but it fails at its mission of reducing crime.The balance of evidence—and we should make it clear here that we mean the balance of scientific evidence produced by independent social scientists who are not supported by grants, stipends, or salaries from conservative think tanks, and who have not produced pro-prison research as part of their governmental duties—illustrates that prisons are not an effective crime control response. Much of this book is dedicated to demonstrating this point. At this stage in history, it is also time to recognize that there looms on the horizon important environmental and energy problems that must be addressed now, which also have important implications for the future of imprisonment in America. In contrast to the position taken by the Bush White House, scientists around the world and leaders of the majority of other nations have come to recognize that the most important issues facing the world today with respect to long-term survival are global warming and the end of oil. How will America’s big prison system fare in, or respond to, a world where oil is becoming more and more scarce, and where burning oil produces global warming? When will U.S. criminal justice policy experts recognize the end of oil and global warming as significant issues that should affect criminal justice policy? When will these issues become so important that they will alter the practice of imprisonment in America? These issues are examined in this book.To my knowledge, outside of the few mentions I have made of these themes elsewhere, this is the first book on criminal justice issues and policy to...