New Yorker Article: "The Caging of America"

Thank you Sean, Dr. Drucker, and others for bringing this Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker article, "The Caging of America" to my attention this morning.

The piece is informative and captures some of the primary issues and injustices permeating the criminal justice system. It is plainly no leap to assert that each one is relevant to public health and in need of our profession.

• Racial and social disparities-- mass incarceration has had the most impact on black men. The sad fact is minorities are incarcerated at a As he points out, more African American men are under the eye of the criminal justice system than were in slavery during the 1850s. Poverty and lack of education are also forces fueling this disparity. For compelling sociological analysis on this issue, see the work of Bruce Western, such as this one and this one.
• Growth of the system: in 1980, the rate of incarceration was 220 per 100,000. In the speck of a few decades that rate exploded to 731 per 100,000. Unprecedented...an anomaly... and odd in the "land of the free" .
• Solitary confinement-- To capture the magnitue, Gopnik points out that enough people to fill Yankee stadium spend their days in dark, banal, and inhumane solitude deprived of socialization, human contact, and the basic stimulation that defines what it means to be a person. This is purely a violation of human rights.
• 70, 000 prisoners are raped annually, which has become normalized to the point of becoming common "fodder for comedy"

• Drug war: The failed war on drugs...without question is one of primary engines of injustice, ineffectiveness, and fuel to the conflagration that is mass incarceration.
• Private prisons. Perhaps the most compelling example of a context where "for-profit" incentives fail to deliver public good. An informative, yet disturbing compilation on the shocking ways the private prison industry colludes with governments, exploits rural communities, provides substandard rehabilitative services, and lobbies for laws that keep institutions full, can be found here.

Gopnik then talks about a theorist, s Harvard's erudite professor of law, William Stuntz who controversially asserted that American commitment and obsession with procedure over principles of justice in constitutional law is what creates a troubling dissonance in cognizance of the system's impact on real human lives. What I like about Stuntz's point is that criminal law does too often shelf human psychology and reliance on common sense and humanity in favor of abstract fixation on process. What does that look like? Read anything about the Prison Litigation Reform Act, like this Human Rights Watch report, for a prime example of how cumbersome procedure subverts exercise of reason and inflame injustice. Stunz's "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" jumped a couple spots on my reading list.

He ends with an analogy ringing with public health undertones: "Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands..." He then goes on to say that rather than some silver bullet, "chipping away" at the prison industrial complex is perhaps the better approach--which means "ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense...many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime"

This post is already too long....Goodnight.

DHC