The roots of brutality

December 18th, 2006

We torture. We do. And if you actually ponder the issue … sadly, and with a bit of historical understanding … you might come to the conclusion that it’s the acceptance of that notion that is the shock, not the particulars. There is no question that much of what we do now, covertly and/or blatently as time goes on, has been learned through decades of experience in American prison systems. Our penal system is a national shame and an international sign of America’s brutal and unexamined immaturity.

When I read about Padilla [a US citizen who is now so vacant as to be referred to as "furniture"] and others who have been wrongfully used, I can’t help but think about an early Quaker experiment in prison reform. In the 1820’s, the Friends, who were more interested in rehabilitation than punishment, came up with a radical idea … “cellular isolation,” based on their practice of going within the “silence” to access one’s own conscience. They built a state-of-the-art prison in Eastern Pennsylvania to try out their scheme … a “penitentiary” — a place for penance. A cut above punishment … but woefully flawed by the misunderstanding of the psychology of those they housed.

Prisoners’ cells were aligned along the spokes of the radii, but arranged to prevent any contact between them, and each was fitted out with a small outdoor exercise yard that was equally isolated. Forced to wear a concealing black hood over their heads, prisoners spent their time confined in near-total sensory deprivation, allowed neither to speak, communicate, nor see other prisoners, and permitted out for only one hour a day to exercise alone in confinement. During the early years, the silence of the cellblocks was broken only by the exhortations of a minister brought in to provide religious instruction.

Supporters of the influential “Auburn plan” of incarceration (named after the penitentiary at Auburn, N.Y.) argued that silent labor was more conducive to moral reform. Other advocates, such as Charles Dickens, who paid a special visit to the prison during his tour of America in 1842, denounced the “Pennsylvania plan” as inherently cruel, “immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” Still others argued that the penal system was simply ineffective in meeting its goal of reforming prisoners’ behavior. [ article here.]

and

… Eastern State was criticized relentlessly for the use total solitary confinement. The London Times claimed that it was “maniac-making.”

Charles Dickens visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842 and later wrote about it. “The System is rigid, strict and hopeless … and I believe it to be cruel and wrong…. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

There are no figures on how many people went insane at Eastern State. Prison officials persistently claimed that solitary confinement had no ill effects on the inmates. Cases of mental illness were frequently attributed to “excessive masturbation.” One inmate lost his mind and died within a few months of incarceration. The prison physician concluded that the inmate “though apparently well on admission, was strongly predisposed to mania.” [article here]

The Pennsylvania experiment was brought to a halt in later years, but various of the reforms [the elimination of housing in communal dungeons, isolation as punishment and limits in social interactions] stuck, though still representing a vast improvement on what had gone before and creating new versions of penal discipline. It appears that our notions about warehousing prisoners is a long string of trial and error … and when there are errors, often egregious, we only hear of them when headlines declare a prison riot. We are, nationally, unsympathetic. The harshness of our penal system has developed into a bona fide science of terrorism in the last years — and nothing productive leading to “rehabilitation” has surfaced in decades.

So it would appear that, historically, Jose Padilla is nothing new — we just think he is. We’ve just believed better about ourselves, ignored our dark side even as it expands its multi-billion dollar industry day by day. I’ve read figures that every one in 11 [some say 13] Americans are in the pokey — think of that — and with prisons so overcrowded, many who should not be let out, are … to make room for more. No attempts at educating this population have gained acceptance — except a government-approved attempt at converting them to Evangelicism.

Charles Graner, Jr [the man who set Lyndee England's lower angels free] had worked as a prison guard in Pennsylvania and had exactly the right “mind set” to gleefully follow the orders of his superiors. He’s serving ten years for his actions in Iraq … seeing the system from the inside, now. But we should be mindful that WE created Graner … he is our native son, schooled in our common “values,” and symptomatic of US.

A judges recent decision declaring lethal injection unconstitutional, and a botched execution in Florida, has brought up the topic of the death penalty again. Whenever that comes up, the whole penal system gets a look-over — but a brief one; like the “war on drugs,” our treatment of a [burgeoning] prison population is one of those “invisible” issues nobody will touch. Until it actually gets a good, hard look — until we stop murdering murderers, trying children as adults, ignoring racial bias and imposing harsh drug sentencing — we will hang poised between enlightenment and brutality … and will have rightfully earned the title “torturers.”

This is a failure of our justice system — but it is so VERY American as to be breathtaking, and potently connected to our current issues with Fundamentalism. Like the Old Testament God we favor, we punish rather than educate, facilitate or rehabilitate — and like the Empiricism that drives our darker side, we crush and disenfranchise those that do not go along quietly.

We’re torturers — it ain’t pretty, but it’s true. And … as usual … solutions can only be found in a psycho/spiritual reassessment and continued activism to awaken a nation.

Jude

Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul
George Monbiot, The Guardian
December 18, 2006

You might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators have found a new way of destroying a human being.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant,” released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk — taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture.” The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.” Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.

He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another “enemy combatant,” Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA’s foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions,” and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles.”

Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.” The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position — maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla’s treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation — a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22-and-a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation.” The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there’s a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.” People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far — in Texas and Washington state — both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds — physical or mental — produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilized nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment
MICHAEL MOSS, NYT
December 18, 2006

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

“Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.”

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.

“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been “treated fair and humanely,” and that there was no record of either man complaining about their treatment.

Held as ‘a Threat’

She said officials did not reach Mr. Vance’s contact at the F.B.I. until he had been in custody for three weeks. Even so, she said, officials determined that he “posed a threat” and decided to continue holding him. He was released two months later, Lieutenant Fracasso said, based on a “subsequent re-examination of his case,” and his stated plans to leave Iraq.

Mr. Ertel, 30, a contract manager who knew Mr. Vance from an earlier job in Iraq, was released more quickly.

Mr. Vance went to Iraq in 2004, first to work for a Washington-based company. He later joined a small Baghdad-based security company where, he said, “things started looking weird to me.” He said that the company, which was protecting American reconstruction organizations, had hired guards from a sheik in Basra and that many of them turned out to be members of militias whom the clients did not want around.

Mr. Vance said the company had a growing cache of weapons it was selling to suspicious customers, including a steady flow of officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The ministry had ties to violent militias and death squads. He said he had also witnessed another employee giving American soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs.

On a visit to Chicago in October 2005, Mr. Vance met twice with an F.B.I. agent who set up a reporting system. Weekly, Mr. Vance phoned the agent from Iraq and sent him e-mail messages. “It was like, ‘Hey, I heard this and I saw this.’ I wanted to help,” Mr. Vance said. A government official familiar with the arrangement confirmed Mr. Vance’s account.

In April, Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance said, they felt increasingly uncomfortable at the company. Mr. Ertel resigned and company officials seized the identification cards that both men needed to move around Iraq or leave the country.

On April 15, feeling threatened, Mr. Vance phoned the United States Embassy in Baghdad. A military rescue team rushed to the security company. Again, Mr. Vance described its operations, according to military records.

“Internee Vance indicated a large weapons cache was in the compound in the house next door,” Capt. Plymouth D. Nelson, a military detention official, wrote in a memorandum dated April 22, after the men were detained. “A search of the house and grounds revealed two large weapons caches.”

On the evening of April 15, they met with American officials at the embassy and stayed overnight. But just before dawn, they were awakened, handcuffed with zip ties and made to wear goggles with lenses covered by duct tape. Put into a Humvee, Mr. Vance said he asked for a vest and helmet, and was refused.

They were driven through dangerous Baghdad roads and eventually to Camp Cropper. They were placed in cells at Compound 5, the high-security unit where Saddam Hussein has been held.

Only days later did they receive an explanation: They had become suspects for having associated with the people Mr. Vance tried to expose.

“You have been detained for the following reasons: You work for a business entity that possessed one or more large weapons caches on its premises and may be involved in the possible distribution of these weapons to insurgent/terrorist groups,” Mr. Ertel’s detention notice said.

Mr. Vance said he began seeking help even before his cell door closed for the first time. “They took off my blindfold and earmuffs and told me to stand in a corner, where they cut off the zip ties, and told me to continue looking straight forward and as I’m doing this, I’m asking for an attorney,” he said. ” ‘I want an attorney now,’ I said, and they said, ‘Someone will be here to see you.’ ”

Instead, they were given six-digit ID numbers. The guards shortened Mr. Vance’s into something of a nickname: “343.” And the routine began.

Bread and powdered drink for breakfast and sometimes a piece of fruit. Rice and chicken for lunch and dinner. Their cells had no sinks. The showers were irregular. They got 60 minutes in the recreation yard at night, without other detainees.

Five times in the first week, guards shackled the prisoners’ hands and feet, covered their eyes, placed towels over their heads and put them in wheelchairs to be pushed to a room with a carpeted ceiling and walls. There they were questioned by an array of officials who, they said they were told, represented the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“It’s like boom, boom, boom,” Mr. Ertel said. “They are drilling you. ‘We know you did this, you are part of this gun smuggling thing.’ And I’m saying you have it absolutely way off.”

The two men slept in their 9-by-9-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in the 50s, Mr. Vance said, “I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn’t anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops.”

Asked about the lights, the detainee operations spokeswoman said that the camp’s policy was to turn off cell lights at night “to allow detainees to sleep.”

A Psychological Game

One day, Mr. Vance met with a camp psychologist. “He realized I was having difficulties,” Mr. Vance said. “He said to turn it into a game. He said: ‘I want you to pretend you are a soldier who has been kidnapped, and that you still have a duty to do. Memorize everything you can about everything that happens to you. Make it like you are a spy on the inside.’ I think he called it rational emotive behavioral therapy, and I started doing that.”

Camp Rule 31 barred detainees from writing on the white cell walls, which were bare except for a black crescent moon painted on one wall to indicate the direction of Mecca for prayers. But Mr. Vance began keeping track of the days by making hash marks on the wall, and he also began writing brief notes that he hid in the Bible given to him by guards.

“Turned in request for dentist phone embassy letter request for clothes,” he wrote one day.

“Boards,” he wrote April 24, the day he and Mr. Ertel went before Camp Cropper’s Detainee Status Board.

Their legal rights, laid out in a letter from Lt. Col. Bradley J. Huestis of the Army, the president of the status board, allowed them to attend the hearing and testify. However, under Rule 3, the letter said, “You do not have the right to legal counsel, but you may have a personal representative assist you at the hearing if the personal representative is reasonably available.”

Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they were Americans, Lieutenant Fracasso said. The cases of all other detainees are reviewed without the detainees present, she said. In both types of cases, defense lawyers are not allowed to attend because the hearings are not criminal proceedings, she said.

Lieutenant Fracasso said that currently there were three Americans in military custody in Iraq. The military does not identify detainees.

Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel had separate hearings. They said their requests to be each other’s personal representative had been denied.

At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was evidence only the board could see.

The men pleaded with the board. “I’m telling them there has been a major mix-up,” Mr. Ertel said. “Please, I’m out of my mind. I haven’t slept. I’m not eating. I’m terrified.”

Mr. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and cellphone for his communications with the F.B.I. agent in Chicago.

Each of the hearings lasted about two hours, and the men said they never saw the board again.

“At the end, my first question was, ‘Does my family know I’m alive?’ and the lead man said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Mr. Vance recounted. “And then I asked when will we have an answer, and they said on average it takes three to four weeks.”

Help From the Outside

About a week later, two weeks into his detention, Mr. Vance was allowed to make his first call, to Chicago. He called his fiancée, Diane Schwarz, who told him she had thought he might have died.

“It was very overwhelming,” Ms. Schwarz recalls of the 12-minute conversation. “He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, and was kind of turning to me for answers and I was turning to him for the same.”

She had already been calling members of Congress, alarmed by his disappearance. So was Mr. Ertel’s mother, and some officials began pressing for answers. “I would appreciate your looking into this matter,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois wrote to a State Department official in early May.

On May 7, the Camp Cropper detention board met again, without either man present, and determined that Mr. Ertel was “an innocent civilian,” according to the spokeswoman for detention operations. It took authorities 18 more days to release him.

Mr. Vance’s situation was more complicated. On June 17, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American military’s detention unit, Task Force 134, wrote to tell Ms. Schwarz that Mr. Vance was still being held. “The detainee board reviewed his case and recommended he remain interned,” he wrote. “Multi-National Force-Iraq approved the board’s recommendation to continue internment. Therefore, Mr. Vance continues to be a security detainee. We are not processing him for release. His case remains under investigation and there is no set timetable for completion.” Over the following weeks, Mr. Vance said he made numerous written requests — for a lawyer, for blankets, for paper to write letters home.

Mr. Vance said that he wrote 10 letters to Ms. Schwarz, but that only one made it to Chicago.

Dated July 17, it was delivered late last month by the Red Cross.

“Diana, start talking, sending e-mail and letters and faxes to the alderman, mayor, governor, congressman, senators, Red Cross, Amnesty International, A.C.L.U., Vatican, and other Christian-based organizations. Everyone!” he wrote. “I am missing you so much, and am so depressed it’s a daily struggle here. My life is in your hands. Please don’t get discouraged. Don’t take ‘No’ for answers. Keep working. I have to tell myself these things every day, but I can’t do anything from a cell.”

The military has never explained why it continued to consider Mr. Vance a security threat, except to say that officials decided to release him after further review of his case.

“Treating an American citizen in this fashion would have been unimaginable before 9/11,” said Mike Kanovitz, a Chicago lawyer representing Mr. Vance.

On July 20, Mr. Vance wrote in his notes: “Told ‘Leaving Today.’ Took shower and shaved, saw doctor, got civ clothes back and passport.”

On his way out, Mr. Vance said: “They asked me if I was intending to write a book, would I talk to the press, would I be thinking of getting an attorney. I took it as, ‘Shut up, don’t talk about this place,’ and I kept saying, ‘No sir, I want to go home.’ ”

Mr. Ertel has returned to Baghdad, again working as a contracts manager. Mr. Vance is back in Chicago, still feeling the effects of having been a prisoner of the war in Iraq.

“It’s really hard,” he says. “I don’t really talk about this stuff with my family. I feel ashamed, depressed, still have nightmares, and I’d even say I suffer from some paranoia.”

Incarceration Nation
Marc Mauer, TomPaine
December 11, 2006

Two remarkable developments in Washington in the past week highlight the extent to which the United States has become the land of mass incarceration.

First, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Weldon Angelos for a first-time drug offense. Angelos was a 24-year-old Utah music producer with no prior convictions when he was convicted of three sales of marijuana in 2004. During these sales he possessed a gun, though there were no allegations that he ever used or threatened to use it. Under federal mandatory sentencing laws, the judge was required to sentence Angelos to five years on the first offense and 25 years each for the two subsequent offenses, for a total of 55 years in prison. In imposing sentence, Judge Paul Cassell, a leading conservative jurist, decried the sentencing policy as “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”

The Angelos decision came on the heels of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report finding that there are now a record 2.2 million Americans incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails. These figures represent the continuation of a “race to incarcerate” that has been raging since 1972. With a 500 percent increase in the number of people in prison since then, the United States has now become the world leader in its rate of incarceration, locking up its citizens at 5-8 times the rate of other industrialized nations. The strict punishment meted out in the Angelos case and thousands of others explain much of the rapid increase in the prison population.

The composition of the prison population reflects the socioeconomic inequalities in society. Sixty percent of the prison population is African American and Latino, and if current trends continue, one of every three black males and one of every six Latino males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in his lifetime. The overall rates for women are lower, but the racial and ethnic disparities are similar and the growth rate of women’s incarceration is nearly double that of men over the past two decades.

While the United States has a higher rate of violent crime than comparable nations, the substantial prison buildup since 1980 has resulted from changes in policy, not changes in crime.

The “get tough” movement, which embraced initiatives designed to send more people to prison and to keep them for longer periods of time, contributed to massive prison construction and a corrections budget now totaling $60 billion annually. These policy changes included mandatory sentences that restrict judicial discretion while imposing “one size fits all” penalties, “three strikes and you’re out” laws that allow life terms upon a third felony conviction, and the “war on drugs.”

Drug policies have been responsible for a disproportionate share of the rise in the inmate population, with the 40,000 drug offenders in prison or jail in 1980 increasing to a half million today. A substantial body of research has documented that these laws have had virtually no effect on the drug trade, as measured by price or availability of drugs. Most of the drug offenders in prison are not the “kingpins” of the drug trade. Indeed, the low-level sellers who are incarcerated are rapidly replaced on the streets by others seeking economic gain.

While crime rates have been declining nationally for a decade, research to date demonstrates that expanded incarceration has, at best, been responsible for only a quarter of this decline. Other factors that played a key role include a strong economy in the 1990s that provided employment opportunities for low-skill workers, a marked decline in crack cocaine use and its associated violence by the early 1990s, and strategic community policing. New York City, which experienced a two-thirds reduction in homicides from 1990 to 2002, did so despite a one-third decline in its jail population during that period. And conversely, while Idaho led the nation with an astonishing 174 percent rise in its prison population, it nevertheless experienced a 14 percent rise in crime.

With a new Democratic Congress in place, there is hope that long-festering criminal justice policy inequities can finally be addressed. Long-time reform champions Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Bobby Scott, D-Va., are poised to take over the chairmanships of the House Judiciary Committee and its Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security subcommittee, respectively. But we should be cautious in our expectations given the Democratic Party’s record of complicity in endorsing “get tough” measures. Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, for example, was loaded with harsh sentencing provisions and $8 billion in new prison construction. Progressives would be wise to continue to build bipartisan support for criminal justice reform measures. In recent years this has led to alliances with conservative Senators Sam Brownback and Jeff Sessions who sponsored bills for prisoner reentry and crack cocaine sentencing reform respectively.

As we look to the new Congress, high on any reform agenda should be the following:

• Crack cocaine sentencing reform—During the last 20 years, the federal sentencing laws for crack cocaine offenses have subjected thousands of low-level defendants to mandatory five- and 10-year prison terms, while exacerbating the racial dynamics of incarceration. More than 80 percent of the persons charged with these offenses are African Americans, who receive much stiffer terms than those meted out to powder cocaine defendants.

• Mandatory sentencing reform—Congressional mandates to impose harsh sentences with no judicial input have created unfair and overly harsh penalties, and have been decried by the American Bar Association and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, among many others.

• Racial impact statements—Just as fiscal impact statements aid lawmakers in assessing the financial implications of sentencing policies, the preparation of racial impact assessments could provide similar benefits to policymakers. Had such assessments existed in 1986, we could have had a debate on the racial dynamics of the crack cocaine laws prior to their enactment, not 20 years later.

• Felon disenfranchisement reform—Five million Americans could not participate in the November election due to a current or previous felony conviction. Laws that govern these practices are enacted by the states, but Congress has the authority to require uniform voting rules in federal elections. Legislation proposed by John Conyers in the House would require states to permit voting by any non-incarcerated person in federal elections, even if barred from participating in state elections.

Three decades of prison expansion have led to rates of imprisonment that are shameful for a democratic nation. Both public safety and community health would be better served through investments in policies that promote job creation, high school graduation and substance abuse treatment. It’s time to reverse the race to incarcerate.

Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project and the author of Race to Incarcerate and co-editor of Invisible Punishment (both from The New Press).

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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