“Slow-Motion Violence”
What is it about the “the slow-motion violence of mass incarceration that enables it to elude our moral immune system”? Adam Gopnik reflects on his recent piece on the moral failure of America’s prison system for the New Yorker, which has drawn both praise and criticism. His closing words widen the scope:
The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be slow-motion sins. We don’t stone the adulterer or hang the sodomite or massacre the restive inner-city residents. We allow the atmosphere to be filled with greenhouse gases; we allow the hypertrophic growth of inequality; we let the prison population grow to the size of a megalopolis. And the key is that there’s no particular moment when they happened, no single event to expose and decry.
Read Notes on “The Caging of America” here. Original article here.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)
Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
Graph of the Day: Is Big City Crime Moving to the Suburbs?
By Benjamin Landy (Via Blog of the Century)
“For two decades, American inner-city crime has been dropping,” writes Century Foundation Fellow Patrick Radden Keefe in next week’s New York Magazine. “But if our major metropolises are so safe today, how do we account for the fact that Newburgh, whose residents could comfortably transplant into any small pocket of Manhattan […] is struggling to cope with a deadly gang war, open-air drug markets, and citizens who are justifiably afraid to walk the streets—the very ‘big city’ problems, in other words, that our actual big cities appear to have licked?”
It’s a question for which sociologists have no easy answer. Across the country, violent crime has fallen to its lowest levels in 31 years, “upending”—as Keefe points out, “the bedrock sociological correlation between tough times and higher crime.” Yet crime rates have not fallen nearly as fast in most of America’s suburbs, leading some to wonder whether once dangerous places like New York City have become safer simply by exporting gang violence into outlying suburbs and small cities like Newburgh and Poughkeepsie.
A recent report by the Brookings Institution offers some clues. Researchers Elizabeth Kneebone and Steven Raphael looked at FBI and U.S. Census Bureau data for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2008, and found that while violent crime fell substantially—21 percent on average—there was significant variation between cities and suburbs. Surprisingly, crime rates dropped by nearly a third in cities, but only 7 percent in suburban areas. While city crime rates remain higher than in the suburbs, the gap narrowed dramatically between 1990 and 2008, with urban crime falling from 2.8 to just twice the rate in the suburbs.
Over the eighteen years that were studied, urban populations continued to become decentralized, with key demographic groups moving to mature and high-density suburbs. For instance, while nearly two thirds of African Americans lived in primary cities in 1990, by 2005-2009 only half remained. The poor and Hispanic populations also crossed a significant threshold during that period, with the majority shifting from urban to suburban centers.
However, the Brookings study found no correlation between the demographic migration of minorities and the change in crime rates. In fact, the association between crime and the proportion of the population that is black, Hispanic, poor, or foreign born actually decreased substantially. From 1990 to 2008, the strength of the relationship between the share of black residents and property crime decreased by half, and that between Hispanic residents and violent crime nearly disappeared.
How then to explain the exceptional violence of small cities and suburbs like Newburgh? With little evidence to suggest that the decentralization of poor and minority populations is contributing to higher crime in traditionally safe exurban locations, sociologists and criminologists are, for the moment, left scratching their heads.
To learn more, check out TCF Fellow Patrick Keefe’s article in the upcoming issue of New York, which looks more closely at the struggle to combat crime in Newburgh, New York—and asks whether incarceration itself may actually be accelerating crime in this small city.
America’s Prison Problem, Ctd.
By Benjamin Landy
Following Tuesday’s post on America’s disturbing incarceration rate – the highest in the world by a wide margin – it is worth taking a closer look at the true economic cost of keeping one out of every 48 working-age men in prison or jail.
According to a 2010 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), federal, state, and local governments spent about $75 billion on corrections in 2008, most of which paid the high cost of keeping inmates incarcerated. CEPR estimates show that reducing the number of non-violent offenders in prisons and jails would lower this cost by almost $17 billion per year, with most of the savings going towards the most financially strapped states and local governments. And, according to the report, “every indication is that these savings could be achieved without any appreciable deterioration in public safety.” This is because, as the below graph demonstrates, while incarceration rates have remained unacceptably high, the violent crime rate has been dropping since 1992.
The gap between the number of people in U.S. prisons and the violent crime rate has been diverging significantly since violent crime peaked in 1992. While the incidence of violent crime has been decreasing for almost two decades, incarceration rates have continued to rise, reaching nearly 600% of their 1975 levels in 2008. Currently, non-violent offenders make up over 60 percent of the prison and jail population, with drug offenders accounting for about a quarter. That is a staggering 250% increase since 1980, when less than 10 percent of the prison population were non-violent drug offenders.
The cost of housing each individual inmate, according to the Center for Effective Public Policy, is approximately $35,000 a year. With the recession taking a particularly harsh toll on local governments, many states have been forced to reconsider the policies that lead them to imprison so many people. Appearing “tough on crime,” usually an uncomplicated position for politicians during election years, has begun to look increasingly unsustainable.
However, the problem of America’s overcrowded prisons represents not only a fiscal crisis, but also a humanitarian one. On May 23rd, the Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 decision the ruling of a lower court that ordered California’s prisons to reduce their number of inmates by 30,000, citing the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The lower court had written that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
A gym used as a dormitory in an overcrowded prison in Chino, California, in 2007. Source: NYT.
Reposted from my Graph of the Day Series at Taking Note.
America’s Prison Problem
By Benjamin Landy
According to the New York Times, the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
The reasons for this incredible discrepancy are myriad, complex, and fiercely debated. However, we do know that prison sentences tend to be far longer in the United States than in most other countries, and that Americans are habitually locked up for petty crimes (like abusing drugs or writing bad checks) that would rarely result in time behind bars elsewhere.
Looked at as a graph, the numbers are shocking. Only Russia and Rwanda come close to the incarceration rate of the United States, which is easily the highest in the world. Amazingly, there are nearly eight times as many prisoners per capita in America than in Europe.
Adam Liptak considers some of the numerous explanations:
“Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges – many of whom are elected, another American anomaly – yield to populist demands for tough justice.”
Many experts further attribute America’s extreme incarceration rate to the easy availability of guns, which contributes to a murder rate four times that of Western Europe, and the DEA’s efforts to combat drugs. While the American incarceration rate held relatively stable from 1925 until 1975, at around 110 prisoners per 100,000 people, that ratio began to increase rapidly in the late 1970s, as politicians competed to appear “tough on crime.”
In 1980, before the so-called “War on Drugs” shifted into high gear, there were only about 40,000 people serving time for non-violent, drug-related crimes in the United States. Today, that number is close to half a million, and still climbing.
Reposted from my Graph of the Day Series at Taking Note.
