America loves prisons. Not just in the sense of just thinking they’re a good idea, or that we need to build more of them. No, prisons appear to American voters much the way strippers appear to drunk businessmen at 12:07 a.m.; irresistible, shiny, and worth throwing money at.
We also treat strippers and prisoners alike as deserving recipients of rape when it happens to them, but perhaps I’m stretching the analogy too far.
Prison reform is not a sexy topic to most people. If you suggest that maybe, just maybe, building more prisons is dealing with the wrong end of the supply/demand problem, it sounds to people as if you just suggested that they should let someone slit their throats and go sell their TV for crack.
If you suggest that maybe we should try to make prisons a less volatile, criminalizing environment, you may as well have personally signed the order for Willie Horton’s furlough. I try to avoid this conversation, because I’ve been treated to one too many Bronson-esque tirades about how “they’re animals and belong in cages,” or “no, if anything, prison is too good for them,” etc. But America can’t afford to continue avoiding this conversation.
It shouldn’t be a hard one to have, after all; how many of us have had a relative or a friend do time, or done it ourselves? Statistics say quite a few of us. From a cold, practical standpoint, how many of us are looking at an ex-con moving into our neighborhood at some point? Statistics say much the same thing. How many of our tax dollars go into building and maintaining more of these things? You probably don’t know an exact figure, but you know it ain’t cheap.
Ignoring the statistics on how many prisoners are inside for non-violent drug offenses, or how many are serving time for a questionable conviction, or even how many are guilty but serving ridiculously long sentences because of bad legal representation or a legal panacea like three strikes laws (all three situations seeming to correlate somewhat with race and class, but I digress), we still need to look at the function of prison in American society: Read More
