In the belly of the beast

By KATHARINE WHITTEMORE
| Globe Correspondent

November 13, 2011

In case you didn’t know, we are living in a crazy, surprising Nixon-in-China moment in the history of prison reform. Law-and-order conservatives like Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Rick Perry are now bent on showing nonviolent prisoners, to quote Gingrich, “encouragement and love.’’ They’re pushing for sentence reductions instead of lengthy incarceration, plus souped-up parole, rehabilitation, and drug-treatment programs. This, from the political party resolved never to be soft on crime. As Ronald Reagan once said, “The liberal approach of coddling criminals didn’t work and never will.’’ But today’s conservative approach? It looks flat-out liberal.

What’s going on here?

One word: money. In a time of great economic pain, it seems that piles of cash can be nicked from our bloated prison infrastructure. Corrections spending is now the second fastest-growing area of state budgets, trailing only Medicaid. In 2010, we spent $68 billion on corrections. That’s 300 percent more than 25 years ago. The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Consider Indiana’s gotcha math: Governor Mitch Daniels, another Republican for reform, says a prisoner kept in a state facility costs $55 a day, but treating one outside costs $10 to $30.

One of the must-reads for reformers is “Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons’’ (FT, 2004) by former Reuters national correspondent Alan Elsner. It was shortlisted for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and lionized by both Pat Nolan, a conservative activist who is Gingrich’s, um, partner in crime on prison issues (see their website, http://www.rightoncrime.com), and the late Ted Kennedy, who said Elsner “makes an overwhelming case for reform.’’

Overwhelming, to be sure. But even so “Gates of Injustice’’ reads less like a polemic and more like, in Elsner’s words, “a travel book’’ to a place most of us will never visit. We learn, for instance, that more, by far, of America’s mentally ill citizens are in prisons than in mental institutions. And that we’re also stuck with the legacy of draconian sentencing laws and guidelines in the 1990s - take Leandro Andrade, who got 50 years for stealing nine children’s videos from a California Kmart.

Then there’s the so-called prison-industrial complex. Again, with the money. Elsner sharply shows, for instance, how one rural area (Fremont County, Colo.) lashes its economy to the corrections system. Prisons provide jobs and a tax base, that’s obvious. Less so is how they can trigger increases in federal aid to a community. That’s because the census counts inmates where they serve time, which boosts an area’s population and thus its share of any federal funds tied to size. And since inmates have little income, this lowers a county’s average salary rates, which can further bump up federal largesse. Who doesn’t want prison reform? Much of rural America, that’s who.

Angela Y. Davis, the antiprison activist and cause célèbre of the early 1970s, all but fracks the inequities of the system. Her “Are Prisons Obsolete?’’ (Seven Stories, 2003) scorns the idea of reform in favor of outright abolition. Abolition is purposely a loaded word; with great cogent passion, she traces how prison is the newest incarnation of slavery (one in 11 African-Americans are in jail, versus one in 45 whites). It’s an extreme stance (where, exactly, would the murderers and rapists go?). But she insists that a system of reparations for crimes committed, and a multifront approach to fixing busted schools and neighborhoods, could put an end to an institution once thought vital - just as we halted the “necessary evil’’ of slavery.

For more, Link: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2011/11/13/belly-beast/b30o5yczcFGt50YvEcHPwM/story.html