Awakening to the Prison Crisis

Tom Lowe

May 1, 2000

I was pleasantly surprised to see two articles on the prison explosion recently in the Clarion-Ledger, both of them on the front of the "Perspective" section, the newspaper's weekly stab at going beyond the usual superficiality of the daily press. The articles, one by Mark Weisbrot of the Preamble Center and the other by Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute, were in rare concurrence on the subject of incarceration: we have far too many people behind bars, mostly because of the drug war.

The statistics are alarming. Weisbrot points out that the number of prisoners has multiplied sixfold over the past 27 years, and that we will shortly, if not already, have two million persons behind bars. The only country in the world with a higher incarceration rate is Russia. Our crime rate, on the other hand, is unremarkable when compared with the crime rates of other countries, with the exception of homicide, which can be explained by the proliferation and easy availability of guns.

This is not something of which citizens of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" can be proud.

In addition to the human suffering created by imprisonment per se, decisions to get tough on crime by making the punishment harsher has other nasty side-effects. As Ron Welch, well-known Jackson prisoners' rights attorney, once said "Prisons fill up." It doesn't make any difference how many prison beds you create. The criminal justice system is biased towards keeping them filled. And it's easy to do so: Mississippi's "truth-in-sentencing" law, which took away the discretion of the parole board, has already tripled the state prison budget, from $88 million in 1995 to $270 million today. Those are dollars that could have been used to raise teacher's pay or to adequately fund the universities, instead of forcing them to raise tuition.

Several factors have caused us to put so many people behind bars. Modest changes in the sentences have the most significant effects. Judges, wary of public criticism for "being soft" on criminals, can impose longer sentences. The legislature can create new crimes to punish behavior of which it disapproves.

These things and more have happened. In California, the prison worker's union has become a powerful political force, creating pressure on the legislature and the governor to build more prisons and fill them. Californians recently approved a constitutional amendment which would have the effect of forcing far more juveniles to be tried as adults and taking away a judge's discretion in referring a juvenile to youth courts.

Both Weisbrot and Lynch point out that the incarceration craze has had little effect on crime. Over half the prison population is in for crimes involving drugs, but yet the availability and purity of the drugs on the street have increased while the price has actually declined.

This is failure, pure and simple. In the world of business, failure on this scale would lead, if not to bankruptcy, at least to a radical reassessment of one's way of doing business. Not in the case of prisons. In spite of a veritable mountain of research findings that severe punishments reduce crime very little, if at all, the thrust is still getting tough on crime. No politician, national or local, will speak the truth and tell us that we need to change our policies.

Insanity?

Insanity has been defined as steadfastly adhering to the same behavior, even after the behavior fails over and over to achieve its objective. Sounds like the drug war, doesn't it?

I don't think this is insanity. There are too many intelligent persons supporting the drug war for it to be merely an exercise in collective insanity. What may be ineffective and even harmful to most of us might be quite profitable to some persons or corporations. As an exercise, let's examine who wins and who loses from the drug war:

It is obvious that the drug war pits a few large and powerful entities who have much to gain, against the rest of us, who have far more to lose than we realize. As often occurs, the benefits to the winners are concentrated and specific, whereas the costs are far more diffused and fall upon groups less politically powerful, such as youth and minorities. In such cases, the parties with the concentrated and specific benefits usually prevail, especially when they have political power, which is the case here.

The Psychological Explanation

There are other, more subtle, explanations for this apparent insanity, as well.

A veritable war, waged with a ferocity far out of proportion to the evil of the enemy or the results that might be possibly obtained, is evidence of a particularly pathological form of societal repression and projection. Psychologists have been studying repression and projection for over a century. Storytellers have been creating metaphors for them since the beginning of consciousness. The basic idea of repression is simple: we deny parts of ourselves that we dislike. The denial is so thorough and so powerful, that we actually ban the thing denied from our consciousness, so that it survives only in what Jung called the shadow, a part of the subconscious mind. These thoughts do not disappear; in fact, they don't even lie down and play dead. Instead, they remain active in the subconscious, and if they are particularly painful or urgent, they continually threaten to break out into the conscious. Further, that which is repressed often becomes more barbaric, less civilized, even vicious.

Our mind's solution to that threat is to project the denied elements onto something or someone else. The unacceptable part of ourselves becomes loathed in someone else. For instance, the sexual cravings we deny in ourselves often become the unrestrained sexuality of people different from us: the dark-skinned minorities. Most importantly for our subject, the Dionysiac impulses that drive every one of us towards ecstasy, warmth, oneness, love and pleasure, as well as the towards violence, sexual perversions and chemical euphoria, all of which are more or less repressed and denied in this tough, scientific, unsympathetic and Apollonian world of buying and selling, must be projected upon someone else, lest we accidentally look behind our mask, our "persona," and glimpse the psychic reality of which we have taken great pains to be unaware. This act of self-deception often manifests itself in our fascination and attraction towards persons whose most attractive characteristics, transposed to different and less favored persons, are the occasion for dislike and repulsion.

We project most easily on persons about whom we know very little. The more we know about a person, the more difficult it is to imagine that he or she is subhuman or vicious. The Serbs, for instance, were a particularly useful target for projection because the average American knows virtually nothing about Serbia, its people or its history. For that reason, our leaders justified the cowardly and illegal war against the Serbian People by portraying them as a particularly evil and genocidal nation, for which no punishment was too great.

Likewise, our penal system is a case study in societal repression and projection. In many ways, as this publication continually points out, our civilization is approaching a critical period in its history. In fact, what we choose to do as a society in the next few years will determine if humankind will survive. The signs of breakdown are all around us: pollution, depletion of natural resources, extinction of species, global warming, ozone depletion, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and increasing inequality between the rich and poor nations as well as the rich and poor within nations. Our reaction as a society has been, for the most part, to refuse to think about them or even to acknowledge that they exist. When we are forced to acknowledge them, we invariably rationalize our present behavior as the only possible course of action. Consequently, our answer to crime is to lock people away and forget about them. Our answer to global warming is to purchase energy-wasting and heavily-polluting sports utility vehicles. Our answer to ozone depletion is sunblock.

This is indeed a social pathology; but it is not a mystery. The causes are visible for anyone willing to see. Dealing intelligently with these dangers requires us to change some of our most deeply cherished beliefs about the way our society and our world should work. Those beliefs have deep, unexamined roots in our subconscious minds that cannot be easily changed unless they are brought into consciousness. Most of us would rather die than descend into the cellar of the mind, fearing that we would descend into something like Dante's Inferno. If, however, we refuse to perform that duty, and it is indeed the duty of every human and every society to make that descent, we can reasonably expect a real inferno to erupt in our world.

Copyright 2000 by Tom Lowe. Noncommercial reproduction is hereby authorized provided credit is given and the Jackson Progressive URL is included.