Building a New Kind of Gated Community

[michaelr]

By Dennis Behreandt Published: 2007-08-06 15:17

ARTICLE SYNOPSIS:

The American prison system employs more people than Wal-Mart. In the land of the free, that's a problem.

Follow this link to the original source: "Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?"

COMMENTARY:

Glenn C. Loury is a professor of economics at Brown University. In a recent column for the Boston Review, he makes the following statements:

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world's population—houses 25 percent of the world's inmates.

Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia).

We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

The United States, famously, is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet, says Loury, "never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens."
If the U.S. is to remain the land of the free, then the problem of America's growing prison population must be dealt with, and soon. That can only occur when the root cause of the problem is identified. For Loury there are several factors at play, but most prominent among them is racism.

On the face of it, it looks like Loury is right: "On average, state inmates ... are also vastly disproportionately black and brown." Race, he conludes, "helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy...."

It is altogether too easy, however, to blame the trend on racism. It is more likely that another "ism" is the causal factor: statism.

The telling factor may be the number of people employed by the prison system. If Loury is right that the corrections system employs more people than GM, Ford, and Wal-Mart combined, then it is obvious that we have in existence a gargantuan governmental bureaucracy. All of the people involved in such a bureaucracy have a vested interest in its perpetuation and growth. Moreover, the prison system is a government monopoly. It does not function in the market and is not subject to competition. It does not have to run lean in order to turn a profit.
The only imperative for a bureaucrat in such a bureaucracy is job security and that requires continued growth of the bureaucracy itself. Where the prison system is concerned, that means more inmates.



It just so happens that the easiest place to get these inmates is in low income urban neighborhoods that themselves have been created by the welfare state. Criminologists Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West and Jan Holland, who have studied New York City, describe the process:

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family's ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

For now, the victims of this system are the minorities who live in these urban areas. But we have to take race out of the equation. Big government is a failure that represents a threat to all Americans regardless of race. Unless fidelity to the principles of Constitutional government is restored, in the future all Americans may find themselves increasingly at risk of living in a new kind of gated community.

Dennis Behreandt

Dennis is Web Editor for the John Birch Society, and a regular contributor to The New American magazine.