×
"WHY ARE SO MANY AMERICANS IN PRISON?" The controversial Glen C. Loury, one-time Reagan appointee reborn as a self-identified "black progressive," surfaces in the Boston Review advocating reform of our criminal justice system. It's an issue finally picking up steam among progressives; Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame is devoting his next book to it, and word on the street is that left-of-center think tanks will soon be tackling the problem. Loury writes:
Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history. ...The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program.Loury explains the paradox of less crime and more prisoners by diagnosing our society as one that is aggressively "punitive," and he links this to our history of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow. "We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them. Incarceration keeps them away from us."But as I've written, the outrage surrounding Paris Hilton's preferential treatment proves that Americans are punitive not only when it comes to poor, black men, but also when it comes to rich, white women. We see prison as an effective and fair response to substance abuse, for example, even though we know mental health counseling and rehabilitation work much better. Or maybe the rabid Paris-hating was, on some subconcious level, a way of assuaging our guilt about the massive number of poor people of color we've incarcerated?--Dana Goldstein
