Okay, given that we understand that neither Ted Bundy nor Bernie Madoff, or for that matter John Gotti, are representative of people who are charged with crimes, let's see what is true about the population of people who are incarcerated. We don't have good nationwide data but here's a recent cross section of the New York City jail population.
As you can see, most have limited education, and were unemployed. Many have been homeless, and they have high rates of emotional disorders and Emergency Room use. So why did we start to incarcerate so many people in the 1980s?
The first reason is that prisons replaced mental hospitals.
Beginning in the ’70s, courts ruled that mental health patients should be moved from hospitals to community based services. States saved money by closing mental hospitals, but people were released without adequate care, housing, or social support. The idea was supposed to be that the states would replace institutional settings with community based supports, group homes, and outpatient mental health clinics. But for the most part, they never did that second part. Many people who were formerly institutionalized became homeless, and were arrested for substance abuse, petty theft, and disruptive behavior.A 2009 study found that 14.5% of men and 31% of women in jail suffered from serious mental illness. Available services preferentially benefit people with private insurance and less severe illness. Many providers, including state hospitals, will not accept Medicaid.
So here's what happened. These two curves are nearly mirror images.
The second reason is the war on some people who use some drugs. Of course these populations overlap to a large extent, as you can see.
Historically, white and Black people have used illicit drugs at very similar rates, but Black people far more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses. This is due to disproportionate police attention to minority communities, disproportionate arrest, disproportionate charging, and disproportionate sentencing.
These disparities begin with juvenile justice. In the affluent white suburban town where I grew up, if the cops busted kids partying they'd confiscate the pot and beer and tell them to get lost. (Then they'd smoke the pot and drink the beer themselves.) You know what happened to Black kids in the city. I did a study funded by the Office of Justice Programs in a couple of New Hampshire cities a while back, and basically, 100% of the white kids who were arrested were diverted to community service or counseling, and 100% of the Black and Hispanic kids were prosecuted. This is entirely at the discretion of the police, just to be clear. And being sentenced to a juvenile correctional institution is a straight path to adult prison.
Next we'll talk about the consequences of criminal conviction.
5 comments:
As I have asserted previously, the foundations of this country's problems come down to racism: the belief that there are different "races" of humans, and the brown ones are inferior. This is what allows people who watch Fox to swallow the bullshit they're fed. That's what allows them to vote for a miserable, pathologically narcissistic motherfucker who wants everyone else to be miserable, who wants revenge. Because people who support a complete con man also want revenge. They don't give a shit about truth; they're just angry, and want revenge. They believe their problems are because there are brown people, or immigrants, or women who should not be receiving the same benefits they do. So better for the whole house to burn down.
As Thom Hartman says, this is all part of America's never-ending Civil War.
Don - When I think about this issue my thinking jumps to our distant ancestors learning to develop loyalty to groups bigger than family groups. How do you attach to some people not related to you but not others? An easy way is to convince ourselves that OUR group is special. WE are superior to those other groups because... . People born with a propensity to think that way would make for a much more cohesive tribe. "Descent with variation." Since we're probably descended from the more successful large groups, most of us are likely born with a propensity to think like this. But managing to successfully create the next generation takes way more than this one trait, so we're born with a lot different built-in tendencies. Some more adaptable to today, and some less.
The problem is with the people who aim to manipulate us through this trait. Some are more susceptible than others. I don't know why, but the rage feedback could easily make it addictive. Beyond that most of them are very good people; the kind who'd help you out if you had car trouble on a busy street at night. Rather than seeing them a morally bad or mentally deficient, it might be better to see them as having a delusion, or an illness, that needs to be cured. I'm hoping that the evil that this current administration is creating will eventually rise to a level that will shock them back to their senses. We, sadly, will have to experience that pain along with them.
Chucky —
Reading your analysis, I'm reminded that we (modern-day westerners) seem to be "living on remote" instead of experiencing the world directly, which renders us susceptible to artificial experiences and beliefs:
1) Lack of interaction of the type you've described above: Yes, people would help others "in a pinch" ... but folks are rarely exposed to others except in urban areas, which doesn't include suburbs, exurbs and farms. So people outside of our own little homes, cubbies and other workplaces aren't "real," they're just something we hear about (if at all) on the teevee.
2) Cars, not horses (we look through the windshield as through a TV — the world "passes us by" and we're not a part of it, we're just in our little bubble passing through inconsequential space).
3) Cell phones: We're caught in a digital interface, instead of seeing what's directly in front of our faces, and seeing and hearing what's really going on.
4) Television: Americans in particular seem to believe TV is more real than reality itself; they draw no distinctions between characters on SNL (or Fox) and people in their actual lives. People know infinitely more about figures (real or unreal or, in some cases, both) on the teevee than they do about their neighbors, and that's how most people seem to like it.
5) Computers and video games: How many 20-somethings have spent more time this way than in reality? And are allowed to buy absent parents?
6) Constant visual and auditory stimuli: Turn off a TV in a doctor's office or hotel lobby and see what happens! It won't be off for long.
7) Need for constant stimulus: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
8) Constant noise and light pollution: Are there really stars in a velvety sky? Who gives a shit about Niagara Falls or Mount Fuji? Isn't the latest fashion or computer game a hell of a lot more exciting?
I could go on ... but I believe our failure to see that humans directly experience reality is alienating us from ourselves, the world and each other. This leaves us prey to the most outrageous bullshit that's piped in to our brains on digital media.
Oh: And I haven't even listed anything related to the corrosive concepts of "capitalism" and "success" ... which seem to occupy much of modern America's thoughts, instead of matters of actual meaning and consequence!
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