The US national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” proclaims that the stars and stripes wave over the ‘land of the free.’ Nope. Not even close.
The United States has never really been the land of the free given the significant number of people held in slavery, which, you know, is kind of the opposite of freedom.
It’s not the land of free now, either. Because the US has a lot of people in prison. And you know, prison is like, kind the opposite of freedom.
Let a statistics website paint of picture of the US state of not-even-close-to-the-land-of-the-free-ness:
The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide (per data released in October 2021 by World Prison Brief). This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world’s total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000—the highest rate in the world. The prison populations in each U.S. state vary from one to the next, with the highest rates in Louisiana and Oklahoma. Overall, the incarceration rate in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past decade—the prison population was a mere 200,000 in 1972, less than a tenth of today’s total.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country
So here’s the thing: what is the point of making yourself one of the least free nations on the entire planet? What is the US thinking when it puts so many people in prison? Let’s run down a few plausible ideas behind this massive deprivation of liberty.
1. Deterrence. Could the idea of deterrence be behind the US putting so many people in prison?
It could. But it isn’t really. Because putting 2 million people in prison doesn’t really deter anyone or anything at this point.
It’s not that no one is deterred from doing something by the thought of giving up their freedom. Some people are.
The kind of people who are deterred by the thought of prison are, perhaps sadly, also the people who are deterred by ‘keep off the grass’ signs. It doesn’t take much to deter people who are liable to be swayed by deterrence. In many countries, people are deterred from crime by the thought of being embarrassed. People hate embarrassment. People may hate embarrassment more than they hate the idea of prison. Even in the US people hate embarrassment. But they’re not particularly embarrassed by the thought of prison since, hello, so many people are there. You lose of a lot of deterrence when you overuse a supposedly deterrent mechanism.
If your elementary school teacher threatens to send people to the vice principal for doing something wrong, then kids may be deterred. Until the teacher sends virtually everyone to the vice principal for virtually everything from standing sideways to chewing gum to breathing loudly to laughing to you name it.
At that point, the kids in the class begin to understand the assignment – which has become to get revenge on the overly punitive teacher by doing anything and everything possible to get to the vice principal’s office, where you can meet your friends, hang out, and plot new crimes.
You can get a lot of deterrence from a rarely used deterrence mechanism. You get virtually none from the hog-wild mania for prison that the US indulges.
In fact, at this point, all your really sophisticated criminals run their criminal enterprises from prison, where they can meet their fellow gang members, hang out, and plot new crimes.
And for a fair number of people, being in prison isn’t all that worse than being poor in America. This is not because prison is a comfortable like an airport VIP lounge. No, prison is even less comfortable than an airport lounge. It’s because being poor in the US is so hideously bad that you might as well commit some crimes, get your free meals and shelter, meet some new gang member friends, hang out, and plot new crimes.
That said, it’s not that there’s no deterrence whatsoever from putting people in prison. In fact, if you put the relatively small percentage of people who commit the most crimes in prison, you’ll get a substantial drop in crime, particularly if we’re talking about crimes that require being out of prison in order to commit them. Car theft for example. It’s hard to steal a car while you’re in prison because there aren’t that many cars parked at prison. Lots more cars outside of prison.
The problem there of course is that if there is an auto theft ring that turns a hefty profit and employs a lot of car thieves, then they’ll replace employees that land in prison with employees that are not in prison yet. If the pay is good enough, the auto theft ring will be able to hire.
Any good freedom-loving capitalist ought to be able to figure that out. A rational economic analysis will convince at least some good freedom-loving capitalists to invest in a lucrative crime as long as the numbers pencil out.
And they do pencil out in a fair number of cases. This is a bigger problem than a high incarceration rate can solve.
Okay, so if deterrence is a legitimate concern but the current prison population of the United States isn’t indicative of a true concern with deterrence, then what other explanation could there be?
How about –
2. Rehabilitation?
Ha ha ha ha just kidding. LMFAO. Oh god no. No, no, no, no, no. The United States hasn’t believed in rehabilitation in a long time. Maybe it never did. It used to believe in something else it called ‘paying your debt to society.’ It doesn’t believe in that anymore either.
The idea behind rehabilitation and paying your debt to society are that people who are convicted of crimes are just people. They can choose to commit crimes or they can choose to not commit crimes. The goal of rehabilitation is to teach them to not commit crimes. The goal of ‘paying your debt to society’ is to start people who committed crimes off with a clean slate wherein they can choose to commit crimes or choose to not commit crimes. In these old-fashioned conceptions, crimes are events.
The new-fangled, more modern conception is that people who commit crimes are not people at all but something else entirely – criminals. And since they’re not people, they can’t be rehabilitated and it doesn’t matter how many of them are in prison. They don’t count – because they are criminals. In this conception, a crime is not an event – it’s an identity.
You might wonder – well how can the United States produce so many criminals compared to other countries? How does a nation produce so many not-people within in its borders?
Ah borders. Well that’s part of the answer isn’t it. The other answer has to do with that nasty phenomenon in US history known as the civil rights movement.
By the 1980s, a certain segment of the population was anxious to roll back any progress made in securing, you know, the freedoms that come with civil rights for all. And one way to do that is to literally undo the freedoms of civil rights by labeling people criminals. People who take drugs are not drug users, for example, they are criminals.
People who cross the border into the United States are likewise not people exactly, they are aliens. If they cross the border without prior permission, they are illegal aliens. Aliens are obviously not people. And if they are illegal aliens, well then they must be criminals. The word illegal is right there in the name! They must be criminals.
So by the mid-80s, thanks partly to a ‘war on drugs,’ it was pretty easy in the US to ditch the idea that people who committed crimes could pay their debt to society. Aliens aren’t part of society and if people who just won civil rights are allowed to pay their debt to society they might start exercising civil rights! Yikes!
Only about a third of the people in US prisons are white, while the percentage of the US population that’s white (non-Hispanic) is about 57.8%.
This leads a lot of white people to think they’re getting a good deal from prisons. They’re not. For a variety of reasons. But one reason is that there are hundreds of thousands of white people in US prisons. Not getting screwed as badly as Black Americans does not equate to White Americans getting a good deal.
Believing that not getting screwed by the police and the justice system as badly as Black Americans is the same as not getting screwed at all is a persistent cover story in the current US narrative about white people.
Both political parties use it, either explicitly or implicitly. A close examination of reality, however, would indicate that not getting screwed at all is considerably different from getting screwed less badly than someone else. Just an FYI there for ya.
At any rate, some of the hundreds of thousands of white people and the hundreds of thousands of black people in US prisons do sometimes accidentally get rehabilitative type services. And some of the those who get things like jobs training, or education, or the chance to get off drugs make use of those opportunities and do their utmost to cease having the identity ‘criminal‘.
That goes against the whole idea of assigning the criminal identity to folks in prison though, so once people get out an entire US system conspires to make these folks criminal again by making it incredibly difficult for them to get jobs or otherwise ‘go straight’. Occasionally there are cracks in the system designed to make people criminals for life and someone slips through and gets a second chance as though they had in fact ‘paid their debt to society.’ Annoying as that is, apparently America hasn’t yet been able to completely stop some folks from giving others a second chance.
But those blips of rehabilitation are but drops in the mighty raging torrent of American imprisonment. So rehabilitation is definitely not the reason America is so enthusiastic about imprisoning people.
3. Okay, so not deterrence and rehabilitation but at least the mighty US prison-industrial complex does reduce the crime rate, right?
It kind of does. Sort of. Not exactly. See part of the problem has to do with what’s a crime. If you make letting your dog pee on the sidewalk the kind of crime that people can and do go to jail for, you’re gonna have a hard time reducing the crime rate. If you put jaywalkers and people who spit on the sidewalk in jail, you’re gonna have a hard time keeping the jails from being overcrowded.
In other words – if you make every goddamn thing in the world an imprisonable crime, you’re gonna have a lot of goddamn crime.
This might seem like common sense or a logical conclusion to draw but it does not seem to have dented the US enthusiasm for deciding that the most ridiculous things are worthy of jail time. Such as not watering your lawn, flirting, littering, swearing, farting, and loitering.
That said, a certain reasonable number of people in prison for actual crimes like rape and murder does reduce the crime rate to a certain degree.
The problem is that US prisons serve more or less like getting an advanced degree in crime and since the US thinks you’re a criminal once you’ve been in prison at all, what you end up getting from the US prison system is highly trained criminals who, you know, actually increase the crime rate.
So at this point, the US isn’t getting any marginal benefit from imprisoning all the people it does. It does incur marginal costs though. Which brings us to the next potentially plausible reason for putting so many people in prison.
4. Is it cost-effective to put so many people in prison?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Of course not.
Let’s think this through for a bit. When you put a person in prison, you pay their living expenses for the entire time they’re in prison. You’re supporting them. You’re putting them through crime school. It’s probably better than having them sleep on your sofa, but you’re still paying their bills.
The more people you put in prison, the more people you are supporting and the more people who are not supporting you. Who’s the you in these sentences? Why the American taxpayer of course.
Who are the American taxpayers? Well, not the big corporations. But those white folks that think they’ve been getting a goooood deal from the American prison system, a lot of those folks are taxpayers. There are actually private prisons run for profit (what hellish dytopia is that? It’s the American hellish dystopia!) so they’re making some money. But ordinary taxpayers aren’t.
They’re not only paying for black and brown folks to go to advanced crime school so that they can get a lucrative crime job upon graduation but they’re also losing the benefit of all those tax dollars those folks in prison could be generating if they hadn’t become criminals for life.
Now of course these white folks don’t want to pay the taxes they’re paying; they are perpetually complaining that they’re paying too much. But they are voting for the people who increase the budgets of the police forces that can arrest more people to put more people in prison so that the taxes they don’t want to pay can subsidize the room, board, and advanced crime school educations of the criminals.
Americans ain’t getting the dollar value from their prisons that a reasonable dollar-loving person would want to get. Even the Koch brothers realized ‘hey wait a minute, this costs too much money and is not very libertarian. Why are all these people in prison at my expense?’
So let’s answer the question as to why all these people are in prison at your expense. And everyone’s else expense. Why are we collectively apparently willing to spend so much cold hard cash on something that isn’t returning any dividends?
5. Love of punishment?
Ding, ding, ding! Bingo! We have a winner!
There are various purposes that punishment can serve, but a few are long-time human favorites among people who are fans of punishment. One is that punishment can serve as a form of vengeance. Vengeance is very attractive concept to a human being one who wants it because it holds out the tantalizing promise that the pain and sense of betrayal that the vengeance seeker is experiencing can be magically transferred (via delicious revenge) to the person on whom vengeance is wrought, so that the vengeance seeker doesn’t feel it anymore.
Vengeance doesn’t actually work, but it seems like it’s going to and that’s what draws us toward it. Vengeance isn’t vengeance of course if you don’t harm the person you believe harmed you.
So prison, in that sense, is a harm factory, dishing out harm on the premise that the people inside it have caused harm and therefore retaliation is a just punishment.
The idea of punishment also involves causing not just harm but pain. The pain, theoretically is justified by the offense committed by the person undergoing the pain. What this works out to is that prisons are supposed to be physically uncomfortable places to be, so as to serve as punishment, a notion that some prisons take to a ridiculous degree.
So we have a factory system of harm and pain that produces, as such things tend to do, more harm and pain down the road. It’s what some would call a downward spiral. The harm and pain of the downward spiral are outweighed, in the minds of prison enthusiasts and throw-the-book-at-them armchair crime psychologists, by the pleasure of inflicting harm and pain on someone else (or at the pleasure of the idea of inflicting pain and harm on someone else).
But I’m gonna propose another reason for the desire for punishment and prisons that Americans feel.
They’re not getting the rewards they thought the good old USA promised them.
After World War II, the US was riding high, economically and in some other ways as well. Good-paying factory jobs, the GI bill, a growing middle class, strong unions, little economic competition from other nations, the grass was greener on the American side of the fence.
By the 1980s, though, inflation was rampant and things seemed to spiraling out of control. Reagan took office and undertook a campaign (with Paul Volcker) to break inflation, unions, the middle class, those factory jobs, and all the rest of it. It worked. All those things went away or have eroded slowly into puny shadows of existence.
And what that meant was that lots and lots of white Americans were left with an impression that was most certainly not correct. They were left with the impression that Reagan, and the Republicans, and the Star-Spangled Banner, and patriotism, and traditional values promised that they would get their fair share of rewards from the new shape of the American economy.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh no, sweetie, if you thought that, you were woefully misled. That’s not what they had in mind at all. They had in mind that you would get a ‘trickle’ of your fair share. That’s what they had in mind.
They had in mind to reach their hands into your pockets take everything out of them and scream “Welfare queens” while they were doing it.
They had in mind to convince you that black and brown people were taking your fair share so that you’d keep looking at a mirage while they robbed you blind. Metaphorically blind, although I’m sure some of those white folks promised a shining city on the hill during the Reagan era have gone literally blind by now. But mostly metaphorically blind, the kind of blind where you cannot see the robber in your house tossing your future out the window even when it’s wearing a shirt that proclaims in large letters ‘I’M A ROBBER! A ROBBER, YOU MORON, A ROBBER!’
Even when those white folks that got hoodwinked (well not just white folks, let’s be fair here) find out that their heroes call them morons and get indicted for robbing them, they have still been robbed so blind that they seemingly can’t tell that they’ve been robbed.
Which leads us, I suppose, to the conclusion that the reason so many people in the ‘land of the free’ are in prison is because there are an awful lot of Americans who do not mind being robbed blind.
Kind of ironic, but irony and the universe are BFFs, so what did you expect?
Maybe it’s time to get pretty fed up.
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From someone who is already pretty fed up:
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