Jim Webb’s Attack on the American Gulag
On June 11, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia introduced his bill to set up a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission. "We find ourselves as a nation," Webb declared, "in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis," vis., "the national disgrace of our present criminal justice system" and "the disintegration of this system, day by day and year by year." This "is dramatically affecting millions of lives, draining billions of dollars from our economy, destroying notions of neighborhood and family in hundreds of communities across the country, and—most importantly—it is not making our country a safer or a fairer place."
True words.
The goal of Webb's legislation? To establish a national commission to examine and reshape America's entire criminal justice system, the first such effort in more than 40 years. Its aims as outlined by Webb are to refocus incarceration policies on criminal activities that threaten public safety; to lower the incarceration rate; to decrease prison violence; to improve prison administration; to establish meaningful re-entry programs for former offenders; to reform drug laws; to improve treatment of the mentally ill; and to improve responses to international and domestic criminal activity by gangs and cartels.
Webb compared the implications of his bleak data to the financial meltdown that has already eaten a trillion dollars of public funds and the "War on Terror" that has eaten another trillion, plus tens of thousands of lives.
America has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's known prison population; 7.3 million incarcerated, on probation or on parole; 2.38 million are in prison—five times the world's average rate. Imprisoned drug offenders are up from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 by 2008, a significant percentage of them with no history of violence or high-level drug activity. There is extreme disproportion in the drug sentencing—blacks have roughly the same drug-use rate as whites but are seven times more likely to go to prison where there's hopeless overcrowding with all hope abandoned and extremely high recidivism rates. Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals, roughly 350,000 compared to 80,000.
One very important omission from Webb's profile of crisis was the crisis in prison medical (non)care, now so dreadful in California as to be taken out of California hands and managed by a court-appointed federal judge. This is clearly a contentious issue since Jerry Brown plans to run for governor on a platform that denounces medical care for prisoners as a frivolous expense. Gov. "Moonbeam" Brown has learned his lesson and become No-Nonsense Jerry, who rejects prison medicine as "holistic" silliness. Considering the ever-growing number of three-strike lifers vegetating in their own organic manure who have Alzheimer's and can't remember their names let alone their crimes, the cynicism of Jerry Brown—whose family has lived off the people in every possible "job" they could "run" for (after) for over 50 years—is unfathomable.
What hope of reform? For 30 years, the political economy of the American gulag has had irresistible allurements: the "tough on crime" Seal of Approval for political candidates from police chiefs, prison guard unions and the victims' lobby. What governor, given the fate of Dukakis of Massachusetts or Ryan of Illinois, dares to pardon or even parole? In my recollection, only Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas, released substantial numbers from prison.
"Reform of the justice system" is now on lips that would otherwise disdain those words because of economic crisis, which has enabled reform of New York's terrible Rockefeller drug laws: The prisons housing the swelling flood of convicts become the darling of upstate New York. What legislator would vote to kill all those rural jobs, however counterproductive? Before the fiscal meltdown, hardly any; since the fiscal meltdown, a solid majority. New York State cannot now afford the huge workfare program that developed in the upstate counties around Rockefeller's prison-packing program. The money just isn't there. So, soon thousands of those convicts who shouldn't have been there in the first place won't be there either.
Aside from the spur of fiscal crisis in every state, the only apparent opening political wedge discernible in Webb's opening statement is the issue of organized Mexican gangs that supposedly exist in "hundreds" of American cities. "There are an estimated 1 million gang members in the United States, many of them foreign-based," Webb declared. "Every American neighborhood is vulnerable. Gangs commit 80 percent of the crime in some locations. Mexican cartels, which are military-capable, have operations in 230-plus U.S. cities. U.S. gangs are involved in cross-border criminal activity, working in partnership with these cartels."
Yet the organized gangs of prison guards and cement contractors who control all the state legislatures are far more powerful.
Webb's stark recitation of the grim facts was all the more dramatic since it was devoid of editorial comment. It reminds one of Machiavelli's little theorem: the more difficult the diagnosis, the easier the cure; the easier the diagnosis, the harder the cure. When it is obvious to all, there is no cure.
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This is a very important article and it is the subject which used to attract a lot of attention from PCR. Unfortunately, Dr. Roberts seems to have gone off on an Iran tangent recently. I'm glad that Mr. Cockburn has made this post on a matter of far greater importance to Americans than Iranian politics and Senator Webb is to be commended for sticking his neck out on this.
Kirt, the problem is that Iran will be a matter of grave importance to us if the belligerence first neocons have their way.
Dr. Roberts wrote recently (and explicitly) of the climate of fear in this country. This is what connects the prison problem and its related woes, for instance the militarization (and unconscionable rudeness) of American police departments (or, militaristically, "forces"), and the (again, in Roberts' words) demonization of Iran. We have a military to police abroad and police to be an occupying army at home. The two sides of the Imperial coin, as it were.
"America has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s known prison population; 7.3 million incarcerated, on probation or on parole; 2.38 million are in prison—five times the world’s average rate."
Posting in a thread to a PCR essay, I made the point--anent the preceding data--that one could argue that some entire countries, e.g. the PRC, are huge, minimum-security prisons to their entire populations. In light of the present Cockburn essay, one could further argue that entire US towns and neighborhoods that are all-but-officially run by gangs have become mini-prisons to their non-gang populations.
Neither of my observations is intended to whitewash the appalling US rate of "official" imprisonment, nor the almost-totally corrupted justice (sic) "system" behind the statistics. I merely point out--in so many words--that mere walls do not a prison make. Nor are they even necessary.
One parting thought: Every time I prepare to board a commercial airliner, I wonder if my planned "escape" to wherever will be thwarted. Our own post-9/11/01 nationwide lockup has bragging rights to rival China's.
There is a profound sense of disillusionment, hopelessness, and utter depravity amongst vast portions of youth in this nation. If the rates of gang participation continue to climb and we do nothing to secure our borders, we are looking a truly frightening scenario further down the road in this country.
I would also like to concur with Mr. Cockburn that it is profoundly immoral and profligate to imprison drug addicts. However, I would question how many of these people where involved in committing other criminal acts at the same time.
Cockburn didn't touch on the main problem, but perhaps Webb will: the centralization of police powers in D.C. This was done to fight not only large gangs, but to end such local abuses as lynchings in the South and corruption in the big cities of the North. For example, Al Capone was imprisoned not on bootlegging charges, but income tax evasion.
But the problem with centralization is that, eventually, the center becomes completely corrupt, which is what we have now. There no longer are private lynchings in America, but the federal government itself conducts the lynchings, as at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Chicago is as corrupt as ever, and its political machine just produced our young president.
An organized crime mob once could bribe only the officials in one or two cities, more than that being too expensive; other cities were left to their own local mobs . Now, the mobs bribe the officials in one or two federal agencies and have the run of the whole country.
Federal laws and courts curbed Third Degree interrogations by local cops. But now federalized local police -- many employing former military who tortured in Iraq and at Guantanamo -- torment local citizens with impunity using Tasers and other brutalites, as detailed at William Norman Grigg's Web site.
Police and prison guards' unions also have been federalized, giving them power to legislate immunity for officer misconduct. In California, the records of police misconduct inquiries are kept secret under a bill passed by the liberal Democratic state Legislature and signed into law by liberal Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
It used to be that Republicans were for "law enforcement" and Democrats were for "civil rights," giving a kind of balance to the system. But in the early 1990s, Democrats -- led by Davis, then the chairman of the Democratic Party of California -- figured out that if they stopped worrying about civil rights, the cop and prison guards unions would become their natural allies, as the teachers and other government shirkers' unions already were. That happened.
Cops and prison guards' unions now routinely back Democratic candidates, giving the latter cover on "law and order" issues. In return, Democratic office holders goose police and guards' salaries, pensions, perks, and pleasures.
Then there are the vast armies of federal police who act with the impunity of the old KGB: FBI, Treasury, Secret Service, DHS, FDA, EPA, CIA, forest rangers, etc....but enough.
Anyone interested in how the criminal justice system operates should read "The Criminal Justice Club," by former prosecutor Walt Lewis, who spent over 30 years as a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney. The book is available at Amazon. Mr. Lewis details the false depictions of criminal justice in the media and elsewhere.
This issue is important and all too often neglected.
We give far too much power to prosecutors and police agencies. It's partly because the non-penal restraints on behavior--disapproval of the community, relgiious affiliation, ordinary notions of civility, have been so eroded, tha so some, all that is left is the "thin blue line." Not so thin, these days.
Steve Sailer noted a while back that the push to incarcerate was a product of the crime surge of the 1960s and in fact cut into that surge substantially (at the cost of quadrupling the incarceration rate). Mr. Higdon points out correctly that many societies are, in effect, minimum security prisons (and not just the obvious tyrannies - the police in Japan or Germany are much more intrusive than their American counterparts). Americans would be loathe to accept that sort of police power and we are not going to reverse the social degeneration that produced that crime wave anytime soon (if ever!). What's left is the hoosegow. James Burnham (In "Suicide of the West") quoted Vilfredo Pareto to the effect that he didn't care what a man's legal philosophy was as long as he was willing to ensure that murderers, thugs and rapists were kept off the streets. Amen to that.
Although I agree with your post, Mr. Van Oosbree, I find it troubling but true that "we are not going to reverse the social degeneration that produced the crime wave anytime soon (if ever!)". It appears persons in the social pathology classes of America are increasing. And that means that there will be more potential clients to add to the American prison system in the future even if drug laws are reformed to exclude non-violent persons from the "Gulag".
@ Theodore Van Oosbree
I think that the puppet governments imposed on Germany and Japan are the political wet-dreams of Roosevelt himself.
If we break from them, I pray that they do the same.