The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The March 13 edition of USA Today had an editorial by Khaliah Ali, Muhammad Ali’s daughter, and Jason Flom. Mr. Flom is the founding board member of the Innocence Project and serves on the boards of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Legal Action Center, and the Drug Policy Alliance. From this introduction, you may correctly deduce that neither of these individuals is a “get-tough-on-criminals” activist.
Nonetheless, I am sure the statistics they cite are accurate, because I have read many similar statistics through the years. Their first numbers are the most damning regarding the American criminal justice system. In 1967, when Muhammad Ali was incarcerated for resisting the Viet Nam draft, there were 200,000 people in American prisons. Now there are over two million. One half of 1% of Americans are in the hoosegow.
I suspect the crime rate in the USA is not much higher than in other developed states, except for crimes involving the use of guns. We have an ungodly glut of gats, and they are used far too often in crimes of various sorts. In any case, we have far more people in prison because of crimes than any other democracy. We have 4% of the world’s population, but we have 20% of the world’s prison population.
Furthermore, Black people are five times more likely to end up behind bars than white people. According to the Aspen Institute, we have a larger percentage of Blacks in prison than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Ms. Ali and Mr. Flom say that women are now the fastest-growing percentage of imprisoned people.
The “war on drugs” explains why such a high percentage of Americans are in prison. Milton Friedman, whom no one would accuse of being a flaming liberal, wrote, “If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view” (which is how Prof. Friedman looked at almost everything), “the role of the government is to protect the rug cartel.” Truer words were never spoken, but that thought requires some thinking to sort out, although I am not going to take time to explain it in this short essay. I just ask you to think about it. The FBI reports that almost 90% of drug arrests are for possession only, and not for distribution.
People also are incarcerated for insignificant crimes. To quote the two editorialists: “Willie Simmons has spent the past four decades in an Alabama prison for stealing $9. Curtis Wilkerson was sentenced to life in prison for stealing a pair of white tube socks. Sharnalle Mitchell was handcuffed in front of her 1- and 4-year-old children and sentenced to two months in jail. Her crime? Unpaid parking tickets.”
If you have a clump of skeptical brain cells located somewhere in your upper head, as I do, you might conclude these three individuals had more alleged or convicted crimes than are suggested by these jaw-dropping vignettes. No doubt there is much more to their stories than was reported. But the point is this: In America frequent petty criminals can end up for many years behind bars because no one tried to take the time to convince them that crime doesn’t pay, and that if they didn’t get their act together, what might happen to them is what did happen to them.
In addition, the editorial reminds us that it costs a great deal on a per capita basis to put people in prison, far more than it would cost to send them tuition-free to state or county colleges. At the infamous Rikers Island in NYC, it costs $556,539 per prisoner per year to keep someone in Rikers. That is roughly $1500 per day. There is also more to that half-million figure than meets the reading eye, but if it is even remotely true, it would be cheaper to book many non-violent criminals onto cruise ships for whatever is the length of their sentence than to lock them up in prison where a small percentage of the inmates are truly violently incorrigible misfits, while the rest are people who ought to know better haven’t been taught why they ought to know better.
The US has long maintained a “tough on crime” policy. The size of our prison population indicates we are successful at incarcerating people but are failures at giving them encouragement to lead satisfying lives. It is far better to use government funds to teach young people ways to become productive citizens than to make them unproductive prisoners. – March 16, 2023
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.