Hello all,
Dr. Drucker asked me to post a letter he wrote in response to Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America" in the New Yorker.
Here is Dr. Drucker's letter:
To The New Yorker
LTE Jan 26 2012
"Adam Gopnik gets imprisonment. Besides his eloquent condemnation of the corrosive experience of imprisonment for individuals, he understands the epidemic qualities of mass incarceration in America – over 14 million arrested each year , over 2 million behind bars, and another 4- 5 million closely monitored on probation or parole. Once “infected” in this epidemic, prisoners are most likely to re-enter prison again and again within a few years – mostly for violations of the terms of their release. And the system never forgets - we now have 65 million individuals with computerized criminal records ( with fingerprints) for 37 % of all American adults – probably double that rate for black men.
Regardless of any historic differences in Northern and Southern notions about crime and punitiveness, it is the size of the prison population ( mass incarceration) that makes all the damages imprisonment does to individuals ( upending their own and their families lives, often for the most trivial offense) into a full bore public health disaster . And, because it is self imposed ( expressing the punitive will of the American people ) mass incarceration has become one of the most shameful and self destructive episodes in our nations history – on a par with our age of slavery ."
Ernest Drucker
Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University ;
Scholar in Residence and Senior Research Associate
John Jay College of Criminal Justice , City University of New York
Author of A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. The New Press, 2011
The Gopnik article was excellent. But what do folks think about the section on "small acts of social engineering" like hot-spot policing and stop and frisk. What does effectiveness even mean if "chipping away at the problem around the edges" can be "effective," if you also agree that these are systems of social and racial control? Can the ugly side of stop and frisk really be alleviated?
ReplyDeleteI've seen the recent effects of the increase in marijuana arrests in my neighborhood over the past two years. It appears to me that the result has largely been a shift in the site of drug activity away from storefronts and busy streets and back into parks and quieter residential areas. This is only observational, but I doubt that this can result in increased overall safety for the community.
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