The Caging of America

The title of this post was first the title of an article by Adam Gopnik in the January 30th edition of The New Yorker. It is our national disgrace. Or at least one of them; we can't forget the field of Republican presidential candidates.

For anyone inclined to equate the drop in crime over the last twenty years or so with the increased rate of incarceration, Gopnik cites a recent book, The City That Became Safe, by Franklin E. Zimring, a professor and head of the Criminal Justice Research Program at Berkeley Law, that shows otherwise. In the early 1990s crime rates started falling by a factor of about 40% (as much as 80% in NYC), and it was experienced throughout all of the Western World...and for reasons that still seem about as mysterious as blackbirds falling from the sky.

Zimring's book analyses the 80% drop in crime in NYC, and what distinguished it from the 40% drop experienced by the rest of the Western World. It is important to note that, during the same 20-year period in which the incarceration rate has been going up in the country at large, in New York state the rate has been going down. "Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison."

"In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices--a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime in not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not....the logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar's-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn't naturally start in the next office building. White collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity..."

Zimring's analyses of NYC, as channeled through Adam Gopnik, doesn't show any miracle cure. It shows that it was the result of a lot of small changes in police procedures. "Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry." (It's a six-page article; I'm being simplistic in my summary.)

But that discussion about the relationship between prison sentences and crime rates is a sidebar. The article is about the shameful American rate of incarceration.

Here are some facts:

Most American prisoners are serving sentences much longer than those give for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world.

Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teenagers to life imprisonment.

There are more black men in prison, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in the 1850s.

There are more people in U.S. prisons (excuse me, under correctional supervision) than were in Stalin's Gulag at its height.

The imaginary "city" of Lockuptown is the second largest city in the U.S.

The rate on incarceration in the U.S. in increasing:
In 1980
220 prisoners per 100,000 people

In 2010
731 prisoners per 100,000

In the last two decades, state spending on prisons has risen six times faster than the rate of spending on education.

At least 50,000 men are in solitary confinement, many of them in "supermax" prisons. The author suggests locking yourself in the bathroom (no windows) and imagine staying there for 10 years, with one hour per day of solo exercise.

More later.