Archive for the ‘US prisons’ Category
super-punishment in the usa, and other dismal stuff
ok this graph is from just over a decade ago, but things haven’t changed much
I’ve written, I think, that I’ve decided to give the USA a rest, after the latest federal election there, for the sake of my sanity if nothing else. And I have to say I feel better for having made that decision. I live far from that country after all, and nothing much that happens there is going to affect me directly. But one of the books I’m currently reading, Humankind: a hopeful history, by Rutger Bregman, a ridiculously young Dutch author (writing as a quintessentially ageless old man) and, I would say, sociologist, has prompted me to reflect on the issue of crime and punishment, not just from a US perspective, but from the starting point of the ‘broken windows’ thesis that originated in that broken country.
Put most simply, the broken windows concept suggests that if you don’t do something about a broken window in a building, pretty soon you’ll get more of them until the building’s a right mess. That’s to say, you need to bring the original breaker to justice, even if it was accidental. And here’s the Wikipedia definition:
In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, antisocial behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes, such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking and fare evasion, help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
The first thing to note about this ‘theory’ is that it would obviously appeal to micro-managing types and blame merchants everywhere. It would encourage the police to harass loiterers and ‘suspicious-looking characters’ wherever they find them, and has even created a system where the police are given brownie points for numbers of arrests. And surprise, surprise, the theory was developed in the US, with its private prisons, high incarceration rates, death penalties and super-long prison sentences – and Bregman effectively counters the crime policies based on this theory with the approach in Scandinavian and other European countries, with their much lower crime and incarceration rates.
One obvious point to be made is that a broken window isn’t a crime, ipso facto, and it could have any one of a multiplicity of causes, as could a crime. So to look at these matters from a punitive perspective, right off the bat, might just be counter-productive. I won’t go into the ‘no free will’ argument again here, but to look at people’s circumstances from a more humane perspective would be of assistance, to put it mildly. When you come across a rabid, vicious dog who seems prevented from tearing your throat out only by a strong mesh fence, it seems reasonable to assume that she wasn’t brought up in a happy, playful, loving environment among other pets and humans. And you wouldn’t expect that dog’s behaviour to be improved by spending the rest of her days in solitary confinement in a black hole.
But of course the broken windows approach isn’t about improving that dog’s behaviour, or that of a ‘criminal’. It’s about improving the environment by removing these nasties from it. And the more ‘improved’ you want your environment to be, the more rules you will need to create, the more violations you will have to find, to make it so. That might just require more trained and toughened people to enforce the rules. A police state, no less.
Okay, so the USA is a diverse country and it would be unwise to generalise. Nevertheless, let me make some general points. The USA has the lowest minimum wage of any developed country, while Australia, where I live, has one of the highest (it’s true that individual US states can offer higher wages, but many of them don’t). It also has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democratic nation, by a long way. Could these two factoids be connected?
There are also other negative indices. The USA has, by far, the highest wealth inequality of any OECD country. It has the highest rate of executions of any democracy. It is also the only country in the OECD that doesn’t have universal healthcare, though its average expenditure on healthcare is higher that that of other OECD countries – with poorer outcomes. That’s according to The Commonwealth Fund, which, in its 2023 analysis, referenced below, made these points:
- The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.
- The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average.
- Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population.
Much of this has to do, I suspect, with the USA’s championing of ‘the individual’. Spin-offs of that ideology include extreme selfishness, which helps explain the rich-poor divide, an ‘I can do whatever I want’ mentality, which helps explain obesity, and ‘I alone can fix it’ thinking, which results in not seeking medical help, with lack of demand leading to lack of supply.
And it seems to me that most United Staters don’t recognise these problems, I think largely due to insularity and jingoism. To give a personal anecdote about the jingoism, I used to leave comments on some US political videos, and I had a a thought of referring to the people of the US as ‘United Staters’, because it occurred to me, reasonably enough, that ‘America’ referred to a double continent and surrounding islands, with a population of over a billion. It was Wikipedia, in fact, that suggested United Staters as a perhaps more accurate term of reference. But on my first (and, I think only) comment using the term, I was hit by a response so abusive that it was very soon wiped, presumably by site monitors. Other times, in commenting on some scientific issue, I would receive a response laden with US jingoism, which had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Surely nobody of any other nationality does this! It’s quite creepy.
Anyway, returning to the USA’s adoption of the ‘broken windows’ paradigm, there has been blow-back, and some states are recognising the effectiveness of very different approaches, particularly in Europe. In Humankind, a revelatory work about the power of positive community, Bregman describes a couple of prisons in Norway, maximum-security Halden, and Bastoy, an island-based facility, and it’s worth quoting:
The inmates of Halden prison each have a room of their own. With underfloor heating. A flatscreen TV. A private bathroom. There are kitchens where the inmates can cook, with porcelain plates and stainless steel knives. Halden also has a library, a climbing wall and a fully equipped music studio, where the inmates can record their own records. Albums are issued under their own label, called – no joke – Criminal Records. To date, three of the inmates have been contestants on Norwegian Idol, and the first musical is in the works.
On the island [of Bastoy, a ‘softer prison’], there’s all kinds of things to do. There’s a cinema, a tanning bed, and two ski slopes. Several of the inmates got together and formed a group called the Bastoy Blues Band, which actually scored a spot opening for legendary Texas rockers ZZ Top. The island also has a church, a grocery store and a library.
Rutger Bregman, Human kind, pp 328-9
The island prisoners do engage in community work, ploughing and planting, chopping wood and making furniture, using such lethal tools as chainsaws. The prison guards, a high proportion of whom are women, are trained in ‘dynamic security’, designed to prepare inmates for a return to the ‘normal life’ that the prison itself seeks to emulate. The effectiveness of such a system is proven by Norway’s recidivism rate, the lowest in the world. ‘In the US, 60% of inmates are back in the slammer after two years, compared to 20% in Norway [and 16% in Bastoy]’, writes Bregman.
Wikipedia cites the World Prison Brief’s incarceration data, which tells us that the USA’s per capita incarceration rate is ten times that of Norway – and three times that of Australia (where the incarceration rate has long been a matter of concern).
So why does the USA, which so indefatigably touts itself as the world’s greatest democracy, and then some, have such a shocking record in this field? It seems to be connected to its obsession with individualism, and associated praise and blame. ‘Self-made’ individuals are idolised, while the ‘left behind’ are blamed for their plight. No doubt that’s overly simplistic, but it contains more than a grain of truth, methinks. Thankfully there are smart United Staters, such as Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, who have exposed the mythology of free will for what it is, for those willing to listen.
So let me end this post on a slightly more upbeat note. Bregman, always looking for silver linings, describes the impact of a visit to those Norwegian prisons by North Dakota’s top prison officials in 2015. North Dakota is a conservative, sparsely populated state with an incarceration rate many times greater than that of Norway. The state’s head of the Department of Corrections was brought to tears by the experience, and came to the stark realisation that the broken windows strategy was fatally flawed, and that ‘the implementation of humanity’ was key. Since then, prison officials from six other US states have visited Norway – and things are beginning to change (that’s as of 2020, when Bregman’s book was published). It’s a small beginning, but figures on incarceration rates, dating to as recently as 2024, make it clear that implementing humanity within the USA’s legal and correctional system has a long way to go.
References
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: a hopeful history, 2020
Global Inequality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
On the strange world of US politics, jingoism, superheroes and the rise of social media
the mind’s new minefield
The main problem with the US Federal political system, it seems to me, is that far too many United Staters, including the nation’s political pundits, think there’s nothing much wrong with their political system. Jingoism doesn’t tend to foster a reformist agenda.
Here’s a simple example. On MSNBC, during a discussion of the two failed impeachment proceedings against then President Trump, Chuck Rosenberg, a lawyer and NBC pundit, referred to the resignation of Britain’s former PM Boris Johnson. ‘Removing a President should be hard’, he said with much gravitas, ‘we certainly don’t want to be able to dump our political leaders the way they do in Britain’. I felt a very strong urge to scream at the screen “YES YOU DO!” It should be policies and effective governance that counts, not pumped-up individuals.
It has since become clear that even a clear-cut federal election loss isn’t enough to convince some that their time of leadership has come to an end. This isn’t particularly surprising in the case of Trump, who ‘always wins’ in spite of losing the 2016 election to Hilary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. But of course he ‘won’ that year by virtue of a bizarre system known as the Electoral College. In fact he was the fifth candidate in US history to win only by virtue of this system after losing the popular vote. Even so, we have to ask how such a profoundly ignorant, lazy, corrupt, habitually duplicitous buffoon could have managed to score anything like enough votes to take over the running of the wealthiest, most heavily armed and internationally dominant country on the planet.
Well, needless to say, the problem lies with the USA’s socio-political system, not with Trump, who likely hasn’t added a single neuron to his pre-frontal cortex since the age of seven.
Firstly, that impeachment issue, and the concept of Presidential immunity. Impeachment, which either doesn’t exist or is never used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK or Ireland (and I think that’s all of the other majority-English speaking democracies), is an overly politicised weapon, best abandoned. If a President has broken a law – and he (it’s aways been a he) or she should be subject to all the laws that other citizens are subject to – then they should be tried by the courts, not by any political body. And it goes without saying that court justices and magistrates should not be appointed by political bodies but by independent authorities, insofar as this is possible.
Secondly, on immunity. The British monarch is immune from prosecution, a hangover from the days of Divine Rights. Fortunately, these monarchs today have no political power, and I’m not opposed to vestigial monarchies, such as exist in Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, as a link to the past, an anchoring national symbol and a tourist drawcard, though I do think they should all be as subject to the nation’s laws as all other citizens. US Presidential immunity, however, is far more disturbing, as Trump’s attempts to utilise it reveals. So, in some respects, Trump is an asset, in that he’s exposed the gaping holes in the US Presidential system. Will United Staters unite to fix their system? I very much doubt it. Recall that their nation’s Attorney-General, or chief law enforcement officer, is chosen by the President himself, and recall that William Barr, realising full well that Trump was looking for a potential A-G that would protect him from the consequences of his own crimes, wrote an ‘unsolicited memo’, which some lawyers (non-Republicans of course), criticised for
its sweeping views of the president’s constitutional role and prerogatives, including the notion that the president has “absolute” and “all-encompassing” constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress, including decisions about criminal investigation and prosecution.
and so forth (this from the ACLU) . Barr went on to become Attorney-General and to suppress any action based on the Mueller report’s damning findings. Since then, Presidential immunity has been argued with immense tediousness by people who should know better. Of course there should be no immunity for politicians of any kind. Their actions can have huge effects, so it stands to reason that a whole suite of laws should regulate their behaviour, above and beyond the behaviour of others. And the greater the politician’s power, the more it should be constrained by law. But of course, much better not to give your political leader so much power in the first place. These people are public servants after all.
This brings me to the USA’s attitude to their Presidents, which strikes me as quasi-religious. They even, rather bizarrely, remember them by number.
Here’s a bit of my view on this. The USA is the land of the super-hero. Make no mistake, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonderwoman, The Justice League of America, all these I alone can fix it guys are US-born aliens. And not only do they defeat all the bad guys, they clean up or go over the heads of all the corrupt or incompetent local officials. It’s a childish fantasy but it seems the USA’s great unwashed are full of these childish fantasists
In the USA, the President gets to choose many powerful figures apart from the A-G and the Vice President, who have never been elected by the people. Unlike in the Westminster system, none of these powerful figures have to show up in Parliament/Congress, to face opposition or questioning of their actions. They seem more like Presidential courtiers than government ministers. Here’s a quote from the White House website:
The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices.
Of course, in Australia and other Westminster-based nations, the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) gets to select and reshuffle her cabinet, but all are elected officials who must work within the parliament and within spitting distance of the opposition. I’ve written elsewhere about my – discomfort, shall we say – with adversarial systems, and I would like to see more of a multi-party system in all of the countries of the WEIRD world. The USA has become more of an Us v Them system than most, to its detriment, I think. After all, governments usually ‘get in’ by relatively slender margins and will be ousted by slender margins in their turn, and yet we constantly see the incoming government overturning the best work of the previous government, and then having their changes overturned in their turn. Surely we can do better than this.
Under Trump, of course, the partisanship has become more extreme, and the Republican Party itself has become bewitched, bothered and bewildered by their nation’s laziest and most corrupt and deceitful leader. And surely, to understand this you have to understand his appeal, for the non-cognoscenti in particular.
Voting isn’t compulsory in the Land of Freedom, so it’s not surprising that millions don’t give a damn about their government, but many of those people must be feeling the squeeze. The USA has the largest per capita imprisonment rate in the WEIRD world (3.5 times higher than here in Australia), as well as the death penalty in many states (Australia abandoned the death penalty nationwide nearly 60 years ago). It has the lowest federal minimum wage, and a rich-poor divide much larger than ours (Australia has the highest minimum wage, federally, outside of Luxembourg). It also fares poorly in terms of basic healthcare and education, and its high levels of Christian religiosity – only about 5% of United Staters identify themselves as atheists – helps explain the current disastrous situation regarding women’s control of their bodies. And with the USA’s more or less never-ending ‘war on drugs’, the country’s poor would be ill-advised to find relief in that area.
And yet. Even with all these problems and disaffections, I find it hard to credit the public gullibility vis-a-vis Trump. Reading history helps, sort of. Hitler had millions of admirers, both inside and outside of Germany, before his downfall, and the same could be said for countless dictators of nations large and small – they’re not called populist leaders for nothing. How do we explain this? – by looking at the situation, and most notably the economic situation, of the dictator’s followers, learning about their grievances, their fears, their group dynamics, sharpened nowadays by social media….
Here’s another anecdote. A few years ago, shortly after the 2020 Presidential election, in an attempt to get out of the house and meet real people I decided to go to a meet-up (here in South Australia) with the impressive name ‘Deep Thinkers’, with decidedly mixed results. After a couple of pleasant chats I moved on to buttonhole a bloke sitting at the bar. As he looked Middle-Eastern, I asked him where he was from (I didn’t say he looked Middle-Eastern). ‘Port Pirie’, he said, naming a small industrial town about 250 kilometres north of Adelaide. I felt as if I’d made a blunder, but we went on to talk about infotech, his field of work, and computer literacy. Then, during a lull, apropos of nothing, he said, ‘I think Trump is one of the greatest Presidents the USA has ever had’. Well, needless to say, things went downhill fast after that (though on the whole, relations remained amicable), but on later reflection, I felt the effects of trepverter, a Yiddish word, supposedly meaning ‘a witty comeback you think of too late’, but which I think of more broadly, as a response I only come up with when I’m alone and my head is clear (I seem to live most of my life in this broadly defined trepverter world). So instead of rabbiting on about Trump’s ignorance and incompetence, I’d have done better to inquire how my interlocutor had arrived at this conclusion. Was he perchance a historian of the US Presidency? Would he be able to name any of the other great US Presidents? Provide me with a top ten, along with a bottom ten? The point being that it was obvious that he was not an authority on US politics, which was confirmed by other remarks he subsequently made, that he was a ‘conservative Christian’, and that he ‘never listens to the mainstream’ (a particularly telling remark). His ‘opinion’ of Trump was purely a parroting of a social media meme, and I rests my case.
This social media phenomenon is quite powerful, and it’s relatively new, and certainly has disturbing elements. To be explored in future posts.
19: the USA – an anti-bonobo state?
Of course it would be ridiculous to compare the complex, diverse collection of human apes – some 330 million of them – who call the USA home, to the few thousand bonobos who make their home in the forests of the Congo. So call me ridiculous.
Bonobos appear to be an egalitarian lot. They have fun together, sexually and otherwise, they share responsibilities, they look after each other’s kids, and they generally nip disagreements, which do occur, in the bud, either with sexual healing or with female group force. Unfortunately they don’t read, write or do much in the way of science, but you can’t have everything.
They don’t kill each other, which their close rellies the chimps occasionally do. And it’s the male chimps who tend to do this, just like male human apes.
Now, Americans. They like to think they’re exceptional, many of them, but to an outsider like me they seem exceptional in only two respects – their religiosity and their jingoism, neither of which I have much time for. The nation’s foundational religiosity has been well dealt with by Sam Harris and many others, and the backlash to their writings, as well the more recent kowtowing by so-called evangelical Christians to the mendacious messianic misanthrope whose presidency has effectively destroyed the nation’s reputation for the foreseeable, indicates that they still have a lot of growing up to do. Their jingoism seems another form of infantilism, and I suspect they get it drummed into them from kindergarten on up. That’s why even their best cable news pundits and politicians carried on a ‘how has the mighty fallen’ narrative over the four years of the misanthrope’s reign, without seeming to realise that the problem wasn’t Trump but their massively flawed federal political (and legal) system. It’s also why they’ll never engage in the root and branch reform of that system, the failings of which Trump has done them the great favour of exposing.
However, in comparing Americans unfavourably to bonobos, it’s not their lack of modesty and self-awareness that I want to focus on, but their violence. The violence of the state, and states, towards individuals, the violence, or violent feelings, of individuals towards the state, the violence of partisanship, and ordinary violence between individuals. And of course the gun culture.
Incarceration is a form of violence, let’s be blunt. The USA, with less than 5% of the world’s population, has some 22% of the world’s prisoners, making the nation’s incarceration rate the highest in the world. It was up at nearly 25% twelve years ago, and declined slightly during the Obama administration, but no doubt has been rising again under Trump. State authorities have also played a role in rising or declining rates of course.
The nation tries to delude itself by calling their prisons correctional institutions, but very little in the way of formal correction is attempted. The tragedy is exacerbated by prison privatisation, which first occurred under Reagan in the eighties. A for-profit prison system, fairly obviously, benefits from a high prison population, and from skimping on counselling, training, facilities, and even basic needs, covering all of Maslow’s hierarchy.
As is well known, US prisons are top-heavy with those people designated as black (I’ve always been uncomfortable with black-white terminology). So much so that a 2004 study reported that ‘almost one-third of black men in their twenties are either on parole, on probation, or in prison’. So it would surely be correct to say that every person ‘of colour’ is touched by the prison system, either personally or via friends and family. I won’t go into the reasons why here, except to mention the obvious issues of poverty, disadvantage and endemic despair, exacerbated by the imbecilic war on drugs, but clearly imprisonment is itself violently punitive and rarely leads to human betterment. It appears to be a ‘sweeping under the carpet’ response to all these issues. People are free to do whatever they like, but if they make a nuisance of themselves in the street, and make the place look bad, best to put them out of the way for a while, until such time as they clean themselves up. But the sad fact is that very few if any of those incarcerated blacks have done anywhere near as much damage to the nation as has their outgoing President.
As to a sense of violence towards the state, this is evidenced by paramilitary anti-government groups and the strange sense amongst a huge swathe of the population that if governments try to do anything interventional or ameliorative that in any way affects their lives they’re engaging in socialism, thus leaving the path open for white-collar crime (especially the gleefully celebrated crime of tax evasion), bank banditry and the like, and for real minimum wages to fall well below those of comparable countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Japan etc. And so, while their fellow-citizens are struggling in poorly paid jobs with inadequate conditions, people placard the streets screaming about their constitutional right to be protected from their Great Enemy, government in all its despicable forms. Ronald Reagan, who seems to have become a doyen of the moderate right, is now celebrated for saying that government is the problem, not the solution, surely one of the most imbecilic utterances of the pre-Trump era.
So with this eschewing of government oversight and guidance, the USA has devolved into a war of all against all, with rights eclipsing responsibilities, and with parts of the country resembling the worst of so-called third world countries in terms of entrapment, suffering and despair. But of course it’s different for the rich, who protect their own.
Finally I want to explore another form of violence, which relates to the US military. It’s amusing to note that there are arguments raging online about whether or not the US military is a socialist organisation, since it’s run and massively funded by by the federal government, with congress never delaying and rarely debating such unaudited funding. This is all fun to read since so many Americans become apoplectic when the word socialism comes up, but the fact remains that the Pentagon is, to most outsiders, something like a supermassive black hole sucking in funds that are never to be seen again.
US military spending is estimated to be close to one trillion dollars over the 2020-21 year, with something like 85% described as discretionary spending, which means essentially that they can spend it any way they choose. Three attempts have been made in the past three years to audit the Pentagon, and they have all ended in failure, but it’s unclear whether the auditor or the Pentagon is the responsible party. Needless, to say, conducting such as audit would be a largely thankless task. Of course defenders of all this expenditure claim that vast sums of money are required to keep safe this exceptional beacon of liberty to the world. Yet much of US military personnel and materiel are deployed outside of the country, and the USA has never been under serious attack from any other nation since its foundation. The fact is that the US uses its military as has every other powerful military state in history, dating back to the Egyptians and before, and including the Romans, the Brits, the Germans and the Japanese, that’s to say, to enhance its power and influence in the world. And the US certainly is exceptional in its military. Its defence budget is ‘more….than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined’.
Every powerful nation in history has fallen for the same fallacy, that their economic and military superiority somehow infers moral superiority. Might is right, essentially, and this translates to non-human ape societies too, as they all have their power hierarchies. Bonobos, however, less so than any of the others. In bonobo society, it seems, group power is used to stifle individual power-mongering, so that the group can get back as quickly as it can to the main purpose of their lives, surviving and thriving, exploring and foraging, looking out for each other and having fun. If we could have all this, in our more mind-expanded, scientific, with-knowledge-comes-responsibility sort of way, what a wonderful world this would be.
References
https://bonobohumanity.blog/category/identity-politics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States