{"id":4617,"date":"2005-07-05T20:24:27","date_gmt":"2005-07-06T00:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4617.html"},"modified":"2005-07-05T20:24:27","modified_gmt":"2005-07-06T00:24:27","slug":"a-reagan-legacy-the-worlds-leading-jailer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-reagan-legacy-the-worlds-leading-jailer\/","title":{"rendered":"A Reagan Legacy – the World’s Leading Jailer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Ed Stephan<\/a><\/p>\n

We seldom notice our own aging. The day-by-day, year-by-year changes are there, but we don’t usually think of them until they become an “event” – though we age continously, we’re suddenly old enough to go to school, drive a car, vote, marry, begin a career, retire. In the abstract, quantitative<\/em> changes lead to qualitative<\/em> changes, sometimes dramatically, like the subterranean pressures which gradually build into a major quake; we seldom notice until it’s happened.<\/p>\n

Personally, I’m interested in qualitative political change (Republicans out, Democrats in). But professionally I tend to look at American history as a result of changes in demographic quantities – gradual expansion and settlement and closure of the frontier (Turner thesis<\/a>), waves of immigration preceding our 1921 and 1924 quota laws and “America-First” xenophobia, changes in the workforce composition marked by the presidencies of TR (rise of skilled labor), FDR (factory workers), Yet-To-Be-Named (rise of technical-managerial class).<\/p>\n

Criminology was never an area of professional interest for me, but here’s one of those quantitative changes which anyone interested in American politics ought to start paying attention to (I made the graph using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s HS-24: Federal and State Prisoners<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"number<\/p>\n

Michael Niman<\/a> refers to our “Prison Industrial Complex”, which he ascribes to Reagan: the “war on drugs” and “three strikes you’re out”.<\/p>\n

When historians look back at the end of the 20th century they’ll write about “the era of incarceration.” Prisons, like consumerism and suburban sprawl, have emerged as defining features of the American cultural landscape. Building and running prisons is one of the fastest growing industries in America, supported by a subservient judiciary eager to keep them filled….<\/p>\n

In 1998 the US surpassed the former Soviet Union and won the crown as the globe’s foremost jailer with an incarceration rate of approximately 690 prisoners per 100,000 citizens [his numbers differ just slightly from the ones I used]. By comparison, that is almost 6 times Canada’s incarceration rate (115), over 12 times Greece’s rate (55), 19 times Japan’s rate (37) and 29 times India’s rate of 24 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Niman points out that all this growth involves enormous cost to the taxpayers. It’s estimated that maintaining a prisoner costs anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 a year. Though it’s hard to see what we get for all that, it’s easy to see that the billions “come at the cost of cuts to education, the arts, parks, environmental programs and social programs”. The prison system is also, notoriously, a “war on African Americans”. After presenting more statistics, Niman concludes: “Put simply, this means that if a white man in Amherst and a Black man in Buffalo both personally consume illicit drugs, the Black man is over 20 times more likley to wind up in jail.” To meet rising prison costs, state and local governments turn increasingly to prison labor which they “lease” to private corporations.<\/p>\n

The prisoners who stuff junk mail into envelopes for the likes of Bank of America, Chevron and Macy’s, take telephone reservations for hotels and airlines such as Eastern, pack golf balls for Spaulding, repair circuit boards supplied to Dell, Texas Instruments and IBM, etc. often earn about $1 an hour. During the 1990s creative managers leased prison labor for a variety of tasks ranging from the nocturnal restocking of shelves at Toys R Us to raising hogs and manufacturing Honda parts and El Salvadoran license plates. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Census Bureau counts prisoners as residents of the place their prison is located. So (non-voting) prisoners inflate the numbers used for apportionment and representation in the places where prisons and their strongly unionized employees are, while their official absence<\/em> from the communites which produced them reduces those communities’ claim on anti-crime and anti-proverty program funds. <\/p>\n

Somebody is going to have to address all these issues. Based on recent history, I don’t think it’ll be the Republicans. Certainly not the Bush family which, aside from being able to claim the nation’s most accomplished executioner<\/a>, has extensive interests in the burgeoning systems of private prison<\/a>s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Ed Stephan We seldom notice our own aging. The day-by-day, year-by-year changes are there, but we don’t usually think of them until they become an “event” – though we age continously, we’re suddenly old enough to go to school, drive a car, vote, marry, begin a career, retire. In the abstract, quantitative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}