Lockdown America
"Children I want to warn ya’, ‘cause I’ve been to California" –Bow Wow Wow
"Until the racial bias and class basis of super-incarceration are attacked head-on, California’s prisons will remain graveyards of human rights." – Mike Davis, 2004
In 2004, less than six months before the humiliating defeat of then Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the author Thomas Frank published a popular book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in which he argued that the largely blue collar workers of the state and their families had been manipulated and duped by years of Republican propaganda into believing that the Democrats were their enemies. Although Frank’s book has been widely criticized since (not least by the historian Mike Davis, who showed that the central premise of Frank’s book – that the Democrats were better for labor – was fundamentally flawed) the question the book poses is still relevant. The problem is: Frank was looking at the wrong state. A better example for those of us concerned about the future of America might be: "What’s the matter with California?"
Formerly known for its amusement parks and beaches, its orange groves and pristine deserts, California is becoming increasingly known for its vast and growing prison population. Currently the nation’s largest state prison system, California has roughly 170,000 inmates in its 33 state prisons. That’s nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in the entire University of California system, and almost twice the total prison population of New York State. Despite efforts to reduce that population, more inmates, many of them arrested for parole violations, drug charges, or some combination of the two, keep coming every day. Recent events, including the stabbing of four prison guards and a large brawl at the Chino Correctional Facility for Men, have drawn attention to both the incredible overcrowding and the inhumane treatment of prisoners, even as more and more are crammed into institutions already filled beyond capacity. According to the Associated Press, an investigative committee told Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004 that the entire system could safely hold no more than 135,000 prisoners. Although California’s prison population has recently declined by about 4,000 inmates, this is due in large part to the forced outsourcing of prisoners to other states, a policy that literally makes prisoners and their confinement a commodity to be traded and bartered for.
The problem, of course, is not merely one of overcrowding, and although California has aggressively and single-mindedly pursued a policy of incarceration as a solution to crime, they are not alone in this pursuit. Indeed, what’s the matter with California is indicative of what’s the matter with our entire nation. Although there has been little serious talk of it since its initial publication, February’s report from the Pew Center on the States revealed that the total prison population of the United States has now exceeded 2.3 million prisoners. This is more than any other nation in the world, with China, whose human rights abuses have recently come under fire from western politicians, coming in a distant second at 1.5 million. However, whereas, China has a population of roughly 1.3 billion, the United States has only about 280 million. This means that while China incarcerates only 0.1 percent of its population, the United States incarcerates close to 1 in 99, nearly 10 times as many people per capita. And yet, China is not plagued by waves of crime. So what does this mean? What’s wrong with America? And why have we spent so long doing nothing about it? After all, the Pew Report is really nothing new. The prison population in America, as the report makes clear, has been rising for at least the last 25 years, even as crime has continued, across the board to decrease. As the report sates:
"Prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the nation’s population at large. Instead, more people are behind bars principally because of a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and, through popular "three-strikes" measures and other sentencing laws, imposing longer prison stays on inmates."
These "policy choices," such as California’s draconian "three strikes law" and New York’s equally harsh Rockefeller Drug Laws, are despite their negative consequences, wildly popular among average middle class citizens, who see crime as a constant threat to their sometimes already tenuous hold on life. That these laws almost always disproportionately affect poor white, black, and Latino populations, whose political voice often goes unheard, is no surprise. Like California’s growing fiefdoms of gated communities, surrounded by wrought iron and guarded by armed private security forces, New York City is continuing its own project of economic segregation, slowly pushing out undesirables and threatening poor and ethnic minorities through a combined process of economic black mail and incarceration.
Indeed, the United States prison system has become little more than one of a handful of tools for this increasing project of economic segregation and gentrification of America’s urban centers. Whereas white flight led to the decline of urban centers across the country, the recent repopulation of these cities has resulted in a kind of reverse suburbanization, where the poor are forced to the edges of the city, as wealthy residents drive up real estate costs and quality of life in the center. Those who refuse to leave are branded troublemakers and their lifestyles, often the result of poverty and poor education, are literally criminalized through drug laws and quality of life laws, which seem almost designed to introduce and acclimate these young men to a life of institutionalization. Is it any surprise then that the Pew report also cited the staggering figure that 1 in 9 black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are behind bars at any given time? Imagine if one in every nine Tibetans were imprisoned by China? Would the world respond with greater condemnation of what is and what it already sees as a gross violation of human rights? Perhaps it is time that the world turned a spotlight on the United States.
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