| Criminologist Stephen
Richards says, “A successful corrections system
doesn’t grow. If they were correcting anybody,
they’d shrink.”
By Richards’ standards, the US penal system
is a massive failure. Our prisons hold a record 2.1
million men and women. That’s twice as many
inmates as the prison population of the entire continent
of Africa, which is three times the size of the US
— and a five-fold increase from the number of
inmates in US prisons 30 years ago. The US incarceration
rate of 724 per 100,000 is 25% higher than that of
any other nation. And the total number of people incarcerated
grew 1.9% last year, bringing to 2.4 million the number
of children who now have a mother or father behind
bars.
The surge in the US prison population has nothing
to do with an increase in violent crime: homicide,
rape, robbery, and assault have all declined
steadily since 1993. Its source is the so-called
“war on drugs,” which cost taxpayers a
cool 12
billion in 2004 alone, and has done nothing to
reduce illegal drug use or availability.
Its most destructive legacy has been the mandatory
minimum sentencing laws that were created a few decades
ago, mostly by lawmakers eager to appear tough on
crime in the run up to elections at the height of
the Reaganalia (“Just Say No”), and in
the midst of public hysteria over the emergence of
a potent new drug called crack cocaine. Mandatory
minimum sentencing laws dictate fixed sentences for
individuals convicted of a crime regardless of culpability
or other mitigating factors.
These laws have swelled the number of non-violent,
first-time offenders behind bars, and driven the number
of drug offenders in prisons and jails overall from
40,000 in 1980 to more than 450,000 today. By 2003,
those sentenced for drug offenses made up 55% of all
federal inmates. In 2004, law officers made more arrests
for drug violations than for any other offense —
about 1.7 million arrests, or 12.5%
of all arrests.
The only way to reduce one’s sentence under
mandatory minimum sentencing laws is to provide
information to the prosecution that will lead
to the conviction of another offender. This has meant
that the kingpins the laws were allegedly intended
for usually walk free while their low level workers,
such as the women who serve as their “drug mules,”
routinely serve long sentences. That’s why the
number of women incarcerated in state facilities for
drug-related offenses rose by 888% between 1986 and
1999, far outpacing the number of men imprisoned for
similar crimes.
Journalist Nell Bernstein’s excellent new book,
All
Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated,
documents the endless — and fruitless —
cycle of crime and punishment that the mandatory drug
sentencing laws of the past three decades have set
into motion, and their devastating effect on the very
children, families, and communities that they were
allegedly created to protect.
All Alone in the World reads as a compelling
mixture of damage assessment and blueprint for the
future. Using first-hand stories derived from dozens
of interviews with children of incarcerated parents,
Bernstein critiques policies around arrest, sentencing,
visiting, foster care, reentry, and legacy.
The oftentimes harrowing accounts of her interview
subjects not only foreground the trauma children are
exposed to through the current system, but offer glimpses
of where it has gone wrong — and could go right.
The police who came for nine-year-old Ricky’s
mom were in such a hurry that they left him alone
in the apartment with his infant brother. For two
weeks, Ricky cooked for himself and his brother, and
changed his diapers, until neighbors noticed and called
Child Protective Services. Antonia was five when she
saw her mother arrested on the street for prostitution
— handcuffed and put into the back of a police
car. At home, she and her ten-year-old brother were
on their own for a week until their mother returned.
Witnessing a parent being seized and handcuffed at
gunpoint and then being left alone in the house to
fend for oneself — and this routinely happens
to children during an arrest — isn’t just
a bad situation for the child, or one that could easily
be redressed by something as simple as an officer
taking the child into the next room and asking the
parent if there’s someone who can take care
of him. It also creates early, deep mistrust towards
the law and its enforcers — and, as one officer
reminds Bernstein, encouraging children to see police
as the enemy does not enhance public or police safety.
Through careful documentation and statistical evidence
illustrated by first-hand accounts, Bernstein argues
that the well-being of both prisoners and their children
is better insured through drug treatment, regular
family visits, and parenting classes than it is through
simply locking prisoners up, forcing them to communicate
with their children by phone or through glass, or
farming a child out to a foster home “for their
own good” — i.e., to remove them from
the “criminal element” in their lives.
The latter may satisfy the current American bloodlust
for retribution, but the policies that Bernstein recommends
produce far lower rates of recidivism among inmates
and decrease the chance that their children will later
wind up in trouble with the law themselves.
There are those who will howl that convicted felons
don’t deserve any “privileges” upon
release — that they should “pay”
for their crime forever. But shutting down every means
by which a parent can hope to go straight is a recipe
for recidivism that punishes both parents and their
kids. “Children,” Bernstein writes, celebrate
their parent’s release “with cyclical
regularity, then lose hope in increments as she fights
a losing battle against joblessness, untreated addiction,
and the intractable stigma of a criminal record.”
When a parent can’t get a job or food stamps,
or live in public housing or get into a decent drug
treatment program because of her past conviction,
the resulting strain undermines the parent-child relationship,
humiliates and enrages everyone involved, and increases
the chances of the parent turning to crime again and
the child following her example.
Because this is a book of problems and solutions,
Bernstein offers examples from working model programs
at every point in her critique. Take New York, where
repeat offenders usually face long prison sentences
under the notoriously harsh Rockefeller mandatory
sentencing laws. The Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison
(DTAP) program specifically targets hard cases and
offers participants a deferred sentence if they agree
to spend fifteen to twenty-four months in a residential
treatment program instead. Columbia University’s
five-year evaluation of the program showed that participants
were 87% less likely to return to prison than those
who simply served their sentence without treatment.
And the cost savings of DTAP over the standard charges
associated with imprisonment and recidivism have added
up to a savings of 26 million dollars since the program
began in 1990.
In Oregon, the Department of Corrections is collaborating
with other state and non-profit agencies on a Children
of Incarcerated Parents project. The initiative fosters
family bonds as a means of improving the long-term
prospects of the children and their parents alike
for working together as a family and avoiding further
encounters with the criminal justice system.
In California, a small, select group of women who
have been convicted of nonviolent and nonserious offenses
(shoplifting, for example) are offered the opportunity
to serve one-year sentences together with up to two
children — a situation that allows the women
to care for their children rather than sending them
into the foster system.
All of these innovative programs cost less money
than incarcerating thousands of people each year.
All of them are more effective at preventing recidivism.
And all of them are still — well, model programs
in a country that gives a lot of lip service to “family
values,” but appears to derive much more satisfaction
from locking up its citizens than it does from creating
a genuinely rehabilitative justice and penal system.
Innovative approaches like these could have spared
Dorothy Gaines
and her family quite a bit of trauma. Dorothy is the
middle-aged widow and mother of three I wrote about
this past spring who wound up doing hard time for
conspiracy to deliver crack cocaine, even though police
never
found any evidence of drugs in her home.
Dorothy was “turned in” by shady friends
of her boyfriend who were looking for a way to reduce
their mandatory minimum sentences. They told the federal
prosecutor that she had been a drug mule, and
it worked. The men who actually ran the drug ring
reduced their time to five years while Dorothy was
convicted of a conspiracy charge and sentenced to
nearly 20. She served six before President Clinton
commuted her sentence in 2000.
Before her arrest, Dorothy had been a nurse’s
technician with a good salary who regularly took her
children to the zoo, bought them treats, and worked
in her garden. That was before police surrounded her
car when she stopped at a light on her way back from
a family reunion with her three kids. Before they
pulled their guns out in front of her eight-year-old
son, Phillip, and her daughters, ten-year-old Chara
and eighteen-year-old Natasha, or took them back to
Dorothy’s apartment to rip out her floorboards.
Before they hustled her off to jail, where an incompetent,
court-appointed attorney bungled her case.
Now Dorothy is out and trying to piece her life together
again. But her drug conviction has closed off virtually
every avenue to becoming economically self-sufficient
and taking her place at the head of her family once
more.
Dorothy sounded frustrated when I spoke with her
today on the phone. “When you come out, where
are you supposed to go?” she steamed. “There’s
nothing for a person when they come out of the system:
no housing, no jobs. You go to fill out a job application
and the first thing on it says ‘Are you a convicted
felon?’ They don’t want to hire you. If
you lie and they find out about it, it’s not
just that you’re not hired: under your parole,
those are grounds for terminating your probation and
sending you back to prison.”
Dorothy was looking forward to December 22nd, when
she would be finished serving her five years of probation
and could apply for a pardon. Maybe then she would
be allowed to work as a nurse’s technician once
more. “If I could have a real home by Christmas,”
she sighed, “That would be the best present
in the world.”
All Alone in the World appears at a crucial
point in the public conversation about crime, punishment,
and privilege. While white-collar criminals whine
about the criminalization of politics, the criminalization
of families by a supposedly family-friendly government
is a far more real and common thing — as innocent
children are forced to share in the punishment of
parents who never stop paying their dues.
Nancy Goldstein’s next column will appear
on Thursday, November 24th. She can be reached at
goldstein.nancy@gmail.com.
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