Editorial from The Guide	Editorials Archive

As the millennium turns, the United States has surpassed Russia and now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

One out of every 150 Americans, over 2 million people, are in prison or jail. Over two-thirds of all those entering prison today have been convicted of non-violent offenses, predominantly drug charges. A majority of those imprisoned for drug offenses are serving time for simple possession convictions. And many among the rapidly growing prison population of so-called sex offenders (considered violent criminals) are incarcerated for sex "crimes" that involved no violence or force whatsoever.

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But it is not concern about violence that animates the drive to lock away evermore Americans. Our culture's mania for prisons results from political exploitation of both racism and carefully cultivated sexphobia. Politicians who cannot overtly appeal to white America's latent fear of black Americans can, instead, campaign against "criminals" who, in popular imagination, look like Willie Horton. And as political crusades against "perverts" (i.e., garden variety homosexuals) are falling out of political fashion, new pogroms aimed at so-called pedophiles allow politicians of all orientations to pontificate for decency and to attack the Bill of Rights.

The twin specters of crack-crazed Negroes and predatory sex monsters have been exploited for nefarious political ends that must alarm anyone who values a free society. One in four black American males born today is destined for prison, and one in seven is now currently or permanently barred from voting as a result of a felony conviction. Our culture's obstinate unwillingness to address the realities of adolescent sexuality perverts curiosity and affection into "crimes" deemed so horrific that constitutional protections of due process are gutted. Special gulags are being built to warehouse for life those not convicted of any offense but merely suspected of having a personality "abnormality," a vague Stalinistic standard abhorrent to anyone who values civil liberties.

And as prison designers give up even the pretext of any rehabilitative aim, prisons evermore resemble torture chambers: prisoners are forced to wear remotely activated stunbelts capable of delivering debilitating electrical shocks; new "super max" facilities isolate prisoners 23 hours a day, sometimes in shackles, thereby inducing insanity; and requirements that prisoners pay for their room and board are transforming prisons into slave labor camps and creating financial incentives to keep such institutions fully "staffed."

Let us be clear that our shameful prison policy is not the cause of the recently reduced crime rate. It is a relatively good economy and shifting demographics (wherein the percentage of young males has declined as an overall component of the population) that have seen crime rates drop. Indeed, San Francisco-- which has remarkably reduced the number of its citizens sent to prison-- has seen a greater drop in violent crime than prison-obsessed New York.

The greatest political harm done by our prisonmania is fostering the lie-- fundamental to all oppression-- that there are "good" people who merit freedom and "bad" people who deserve to be treated like scum. We must not be seduced into abandoning recognition of our common humanity, for whatever goodness we have comes from our commitment to everyone's worth and dignity. Let us strive for a society wherein we boast about how few people we lock up and how well we work for their eventual freedom. **