The Prison Industrial Complex Hurts The Economy
Lately, some surprising folks have been talking about what needs to change in the criminal justice system. There have been repeated calls for a national conversation. But at the moment, people are understandably preoccupied with the worst economic crisis since the Depression.
But criminal justice is not unrelated to the economy. Our nation’s prison industrial complex contributes in large and small ways to our overall economic decline. We pay a cost through incarcerating large numbers of men and growing numbers of women who could be a productive part of the economy, and making them basically unfit for anything other than prison or continued criminal pursuits. We pay for the toll their absence plays on families in poor communities and communities of color. And all of us suffer from the warped economic priorities that push states to direct more and of their scare resources to maintaining prisons, while starving education, human services, arts and infrastructure.
As people organize to speak truth to power whether on Wall Street or at the nation’s capital, real criminal justice reform needs to be on the agenda.
A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics featured on the Sentencing Project’s weekly electronic newsletter proves that when it comes to traffic stops, we’re not post-racial. Read more from the Sentencing Project, here.
Blacks Three Times as Likely as Whites to be Searched in Traffic Stops
The survey showed that African Americans were slightly more likely to face multiple contacts with police officers, but that blacks were about as likely to be pulled over in traffic stop as whites and Hispanics. However, when pulled over blacks were more likely than whites and Hispanics to be arrested, while both blacks and Hispanics were more likely to receive tickets than whites. Blacks were also more likely to have force used or threatened against them by police officers.”
“A special report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that black drivers in 2008 were three times as likely to have their cars searched during traffic stops as whites. The study, which looked at contact between citizens and law enforcement, also found that traffic stops involving blacks were roughly twice as likely to result in a search as those involving Hispanics.
Former Harvard law professor William J. Stuntz says the American justice system is unraveling.
Justice System Unraveling
Still more so the African American portion of that prison population: for black males, a term in the nearest penitentiary has become an ordinary life experience, a horrifying truth that wasn’t true a mere generation ago. Ordinary life experiences are poor deterrents, one reason why massive levels of criminal punishment coexist with historically high levels of urban violence.
“Among the great untold stories of our time is this one: the last half of the twentieth century saw America’s criminal justice system unravel. Signs of the unraveling are everywhere. The nation’s record- shattering prison population has grown out of control.
Outside the South, most cities’ murder rates are a multiple of the rates in those same cities sixty years ago — notwithstanding a large drop in violent crime in the 1990s. Within cities, crime is low in safe neighborhoods but remains a huge problem in dangerous ones, and those dangerous neighborhoods are disproportionately poor and black. Last but not least, we have built a justice system that strikes many of its targets as wildly unjust. The feeling has some evidentiary support: criminal litigation regularly makes awful mistakes, as the frequent DNA-based exonerations of convicted defendants illustrate. Evidently, the criminal justice system is doing none of its jobs well: producing justice, avoiding discrimination, protecting those who most need the law’s protection, keeping crime in check while maintaining reasonable limits on criminal punishment.”
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