Let’s correct a misnomer — a misconception, a euphemism. Life imprisonment does not just mean life in prison. A riveting talk by one of the world’s leading human rights attorneys at a recent ACLU event in Boston has caused me to reflect on how a life-in-prison sentence actually means something different. It means death in prison.
Of course many inmates without life sentences also die in prison — from suicide, homicide, beatings, rape, AIDS and gross medical indifference. Living through a 20- or 30-year sentence requires survival skills most of us could not imagine, much less attain.
And over the past four decades, judges have been dispensing years in prison as if they were handing out parking tickets. Fifteen-, 20- and 30-year sentences have become a norm. The number of people incarcerated in America has exploded from 300,000 in 1972 to 2.3 million today. The United States locks up a larger percentage of its people than any other country on earth — by a lot. And another 6 million are subject to the control of the penal system — on probation, parole or supervised release. Mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines, and political expediency bear much of the blame.
Let’s not forget that racism constitutes a central pillar of our carceral system. No surprise there — it was designed that way as part of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy: make white people fear people of color, create and exploit a racist myth of super predators, promise to purge them from white lives and neighborhoods by throwing blacks behind bars by the hundreds of thousands or millions and many white votes will follow.
Those venal political manipulators predicted correctly. Their electoral strategy worked. Today, an African-American male child born in the United States has a one-in-three chance of spending time behind bars during his lifetime. For a Latino, the odds are one in six.
Let’s consider cocaine offenses. Crack and powder coke are equally dangerous and addictive. Crack cocaine generally is used in black inner-city neighborhoods while powder has been the cocaine of choice in white suburbs. In 1986, Congress passed a law that created a sentencing disparity between crack and powder of 100:1. A 2010 law reduced the difference, in the name of reform and fairness, to 18:1. That law also eliminated the five-year federal mandatory minimum for simple possession of crack, a penalty never imposed for powder.
We have seen some other fledgling steps toward criminal justice reform. In many jurisdictions, a policy of treating opioid dependency not as an excuse for incarceration but rather as a public health crisis is taking root.
The political motivations for this change are complex. Some are fiscal. It costs almost as much to keep a person locked up for a year as it does to attend Harvard.
Some considerations are practical. Mass incarceration, America’s four decades-long experiment on human beings, has done nothing to promote public safety but it has destroyed the lives of the individuals convicted and wreaked havoc with their families and communities. We have been guaranteeing that kids will grow up in poverty and without parents.
As for motivations behind the policy pivot on opioids, we should not discount the changed demographics. Once again, race matters. Now that white people, adults and kids have fallen victim to this scourge, more money, resources, legislative common sense and judicial understanding — and sometimes even compassion — have begun to follow.
Five percent of prisoners in America will never again experience life beyond the razor wire, but 95 percent of people in prison sooner or later will be released – 600,000 this year. And that number should – it must – increase. After all, many prisoners were captured and held while America waged its wars on crime and drugs. It’s time, past time, to free the prisoners of those misguided, expensive and failed wars.
But what happens then?
Some of those released, against the odds, exhibit remarkable resilience. They, of course, can never regain the lost and wasted years of unnecessary incarceration, but they nonetheless succeed outside the razor wire — not because of their experience inside, but despite it.
For many years I have believed that we must, as Joan Baez sings, “raze the prisons to the ground.” I have, for an equally long period, despaired that we ever will.
But on May 31, with friends and colleagues, I attended the annual ACLU of Massachusetts dinner in Boston where the keynote speaker was Bryan Stevenson, the brilliant human rights lawyer, best-selling author of “Just Mercy,” and also probably the most extraordinarily thoughtful, insightful, warm and caring person I have ever met.
In his talk, Stevenson said something I will not soon forget — that the opposite of poverty is not riches; the opposite of poverty is justice. Bryan concluded by admonishing and imploring us to keep our “eyes on the prize, hold on.”
Attorney Bill Newman is director of the western Massachusetts Office of the ACLU, host of a WHMP weekday program and author of “When the War Came Home.”