The US incarcerates more people than some other nation on the planet. There are at the moment two million folks in prisons and jails on this nation. But mass incarceration, for all of the lives it touches, doesn’t have an effect on all lives equally. Black males are six instances likelier than white males to be incarcerated. Latino males are two and a half instances likelier to be incarcerated than white males.
These numbers mirror a system that arguably doesn’t merely punish those that have dedicated crimes in proportion to their offenses. Slightly, it displays a deeply biased system that has created a disaster on this nation. It appears to me that public well being has a accountability to argue in opposition to mass incarceration, in opposition to a carceral state, making the case in a manner that displays the realities of crime but additionally insists on a extra humane manner of addressing the weather of human nature that generate infraction.
Two arguments in opposition to mass incarceration
I might counsel that there are two key arguments in opposition to mass incarceration within the US: the empiric argument and the ethical argument.
First, the empiric argument. This argument rests on the information I’ve already shared concerning the scope of American mass incarceration and its disproportionate toll on communities of colour. It additionally rests on the truth that prisons and jails are typically harmful locations, the place prisoners face many threats to their well being—from the danger of violence, to transmissible illness, to the extreme toll incarceration can tackle psychological well being.
It is usually a proven fact that mass incarceration poses challenges not simply to prisoners themselves, however to their communities. About 2.7 million American children have a father or mother who’s incarcerated. This includes 11.4 p.c of Black kids, 3.5 p.c of Hispanic kids, and 1.8 p.c of white kids. The shortage of a two-parent family can do much to undermine life outcomes. Excessive incarceration charges in a group may also have an effect on communities by undermining psychological well being. A 2015 study discovered populations residing in neighborhoods with excessive charges of incarceration had been likelier to have a serious depressive dysfunction or generalized anxiety dysfunction.
The empiric argument additionally rests on the info of the historic legacy that informs incarceration in America. As Ava DuVernay noticed in her movie thirteenth, the thirteenth modification, which abolished slavery in the US, says nobody within the nation may be held involuntarily “besides as a punishment for crime.” This exception has arguably knowledgeable a established order that, formed by racist attitudes inside legislation enforcement, the prison justice system, and on the coverage degree, has led to the disproportionate burden of incarceration that has fallen on Black communities. This established order is inseparable from the Drug Conflict, which has accomplished a lot to drive up incarceration charges amongst communities of colour.
The second argument in opposition to mass incarceration is the ethical argument. It lies not in statistics however within the human beings whose lives they mirror—in communities disrupted, in well being saved out of attain. And it’s within the injustice we’ve let creep into our justice system.
Definitely, societies have a proper to prosecute crime and to manage punishment, ideally with an eye fixed in direction of rehabilitation. However when this method turns into unduly punitive, as ours has turn into, it’s itself deserving of judgment and correction. It’s a system that not solely incarcerates however disenfranchises many prisoners. It dispenses punishments that don’t all the time match crimes, with cash and privilege shopping for lighter sentencing and poor offenders receiving harsh sentences, usually for nonviolent drug offenses.
It is a system that goes nicely past the remit of a wise, truthful strategy to addressing crime. What’s extra, it actively impedes our capability to develop such approaches by taking us removed from a compassionate, imaginative perspective that might actually help justice.
Capital punishment
In making the case in opposition to an incarceration system that arguably goes past punitive to look, in lots of circumstances, genuinely vengeful, it is very important take a second to handle what is probably the last word expression of a gratuitously punitive strategy: capital punishment. In a system that routinely dehumanizes these it impacts, through which the state wields energy over prisoners’ our bodies, usually with horrible penalties for his or her well being, capital punishment, by destroying these our bodies, displays a violation of well being in probably the most basic manner.
We must be very clear in saying that no state ought to ever take away the lives of its residents. Capital punishment is the state denying the prisoner the possibility to ever be wholesome once more, because it exacts a measure of what it calls justice, however which is in truth an usually sloppily utilized course of through which the harmless are at instances killed together with the responsible.
Along with all it does to undermine well being, capital punishment additionally undermines the healthcare occupation, to the extent that docs and drug corporations have participated in giving the state the means to hold out executions and have used the language of medication to euphemize what occurs when a prisoner is put to dying.
For these causes, our conversations concerning the injustice of mass incarceration should embody the injustice of capital punishment, and our reform efforts should prioritize the tip of this follow.
A daring reimagining of justice
Mass incarceration perpetuates lots of our worst impulses as a society. It’s biased when it must be neutral. It may be vengeful when it ought to advance justice. It makes us sicker when it ought to rehabilitate residents.
Making a more healthy world means partaking with the problem of mass incarceration by means of a daring reimagining of what justice may be. This doesn’t essentially imply removing prisons, however it does imply doing what we are able to to make prisons into locations that really help rehabilitation and well being. It means ending the Drug Conflict, together with the lengthy sentences that hold so many behind bars for nonviolent offenses. It means addressing the racial biases which have formed the carceral system at each flip, with roots within the legacy of slavery. And it might imply an abolitionist strategy, as we work in direction of a world the place prisons are changed by facilities of true rehabilitation.
I understand “abolition” could also be a difficult phrase within the context of this dialog, but it displays the boldness essential for envisioning a greater future, even when this future is extra a product of reform than of radicalism. These steps all have a job to play as we have interaction within the work of making a greater, extra simply established order round this challenge.
