Michael Albert
About
25 years ago I was at a dinner party with a bunch of leftist economics faculty
and grad students, and I posed a hypothetical question to engender some dinner
debate. If you had only two choices, I asked, would you open all prison doors
and let everyone out, or would you keep everyone right where they are?
To
my surprise there wasn’t any debate. Only I was willing to entertain what
everyone else saw as the utterly insane, ultra-leftist notion that opening the
doors might be better than keeping everyone incarcerated with no changes. I then
added the option of giving everyone let out a job and ample training, but still
there were no takers.
Years
later, would the result of such a query to leftists be the same? As context, our
little experiment might best be undertaken in light of the oft-quoted notion
that it is better to let ten criminals go free than to jail one innocent person.
Of course that may be just a rhetorical put-on for gullible law students, but it
is supposed to communicate that there is something utterly unthinkable about
innocent folks festering in prison. Okay, this implies some calculations. For
example, what is innocence and what is guilt, and how about letting one innocent
person fester in order to jail twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand
malevolent psychopaths who would otherwise run amuck hurting and even killing
way more innocent folks? On the other hand, what if the calculus is the
opposite? What if the real question is should we keep one criminal in jail along
with five or ten innocent folks, or let them all go free?
The
crime rate in the U.S. is approximately the same as in comparably industrialized
and citified Western Europe. The number of inmates per hundred thousand citizens
in the U.S., however, is as much as fifteen times greater than in Europe, again
depending on which country we choose for our comparison. Stereotypes aside, the
rate of incarceration in Spain is a bit more than England is a bit more than
France is a bit more than Germany is a bit more than Turkey…and Norway and
Iceland are relatively crime free by comparison. The U.S. rate of incarceration
is about fifteen times Iceland’s, twelve times Norway’s, a bit over eight times
the Turkish rate, and a little over six times Spain’s.
The
high U.S. rates began spiraling dramatically upward about
thirty years ago in tune with politician and media exploitation of a largely
manufactured public fear of crime. Political candidates–Reagan being the game’s
most effective but far from its sole star–would drum up fear and then meet it
with programs for warring on drugs, expanding the number of prisons, extending
minimum mandatory sentencing, and imposing three strikes you’re out innovations.
When everyone from the cop on the beat, to the police chief, to the crime beat
reporter, to the DA, to the judge hears nothing but an endless litany of lock ’em
up and let ’em rot rhetoric, they all become predictably aggressive. Thus,
between 1972 and 1998 the number of folks in prison rose by over five times to
1.8 million.
Most
of the increase, unsurprisingly, has been due to jailing folks for nonviolent
crimes such as possessing drugs, whereas in Europe such "crimes"
rarely lead to prison. So in the U.S. we jail five, six, seven, or even eleven
or fourteen folks who would be seen as innocent enough to stay out in society in
Europe, for every one person we jail who the Europeans would also incarcerate.
In other words, if we opened the doors right now, a horrendous proposal in most
people’s eyes, for every person the Europeans would have us jail, five to ten
who they would deem innocent would be set free. This is rather sobering. If we
would rhetorically let out ten guilty inmates to free one innocent one, surely
we ought to happily let out one guilty inmate to free five to ten innocent
ones–no? And then we ought to refigure our approach to laws, trials, and
especially punishment and rehabilitation as well–no?
The
data and most of the ideas above, by the way, did not come to me by way of a
dinner party with radical leftists. Instead, I borrowed this material from an
article in Scientific American, August 1999. The author, Roger Doyle, was
examining some facts to see their numeric implications. Being honest of course
means looking at facts and reporting them truthfully. Being left means looking a
little deeper to find institutional causes, and then extrapolating from the
conditions and causes one finds to proposals that further egalitarian and
humanist values one holds dear. Doyle went on in his Scientific American
essay to point out that (a) a key difference between young whites and
(disproportionately jailed) young blacks was that the whites are more likely in
our current economy to get jobs enabling them to avoid the need to steal or
deal, (b) income differentials are vastly greater in the U.S. than in Europe
and, (c) reading only a little into his words, that incarceration may be seen as
a tool of control against the poor so that "high U.S. incarceration rates
are unlikely to decline until there is greater equality of income."
Kudos
for Scientific American’s honesty and even radicalism, but what about our
hypothetical leftist dinner party? If the difference between the U.S. and Europe
isn’t that Americans have more genes causing them to be anti-social but, rather,
that Americans and particularly black Americans are put into circumstances by
our economy which virtually require them to seek means of sustenance outside the
law, and if, to be very conservative, half the inmates in the U.S. are arrested
for victimless "crime" that would not even be prosecuted in Europe,
doesn’t it make sense to ask whether this entire U.S. prosecutorial and punitive
legal apparatus is, in fact, utterly counter productive in its current
construction?
Finally,
this doesn’t even broach another radical question. Why are some leftists sitting
around a table, whether twenty five years ago or today, or why is anyone at all,
anytime, for that matter, more worried about the occasional fearsome anti-social
or even pathological thug/rapist/murderer who is caught and incarcerated going
free, than they are by (1) the violent and willful incarceration of so many
innocent souls who have worthy and humane lives to live if only enabled to do
so; or (2) the gray flannel businessmen walking freely up and down Wall Street
who preside over the misery of so many for their own private gain, each
businessman a perfect biological incarnation of willful, self-delusional, and
largely incorrigible anti-social behavior that operates at a scale of violence
which the worst incarcerated thugs can never dream to approach, or (3) the
government, which, on behalf of those gray flannel businessmen wrecks massive
mutilation and devastation on whole countries, then calling it humanitarian
intervention so that they can avoid the fatal injection death penalty our
society prescribes for murder, much less for murder most massive such as they
commit?
Our
jails are ten to fifty times more crowded than the number of people a humane
legal system would have to incarcerate and/or rehabilitate because ways to
diminish that gap would entail reducing income differentials and improving the
lot of society’s worst off. Businessmen won’t tolerate that, not without a
fight, anyway.