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The temptation is to quote it all. This selection gives you an idea. From Adam Gopnik’s stunning New Yorker article on the sowing and reaping of American criminal justice.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state.”
Related articles
- Why does America lock up so many people? (arunwithaview.wordpress.com)
- The Caging of America (3quarksdaily.com)
- Why does the United States lock up so many people? (forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com)
- The poor storm: Ending mass incarceration in America (blogs.berkeley.edu)
- Navy Is Smaller; Prisons Are Bigger (patospapa.wordpress.com)
- “The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?” (sentencing.typepad.com)
- The Caging of America (eaudenil.wordpress.com)
- “Fight Or Fuck” (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
- The Enlightenment Roots of American Mass Incarceration (andrewhammel.typepad.com)
