Bill Clinton memorably entered the White House eight
years ago over the body of poor, lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, whose execution
he had hurried back to Arkansas to attend. As he departs, the American prison
population stands at two million, an all-time high, up from 1,429,000 in 1992,
with a disproportionately soaring rate of incarceration among young black men.
His administration saw the introduction at Federal level of the ‘three
strikes and you’re out’ sentencing policy (imposing life
prison-terms, without parole, on a third conviction) and increased penalties
for drug-related crimes in the Sentencing Commission’s mandatory guidelines.
It actively promoted ‘truth-in-sentencing’ provisions (prisoners forced to
serve at least 85 per cent of their sentences before parole), pumping Federal
funds into prison-building projects in states where such practices
prevailed. Small wonder that Gore and Clinton failed to protest at the
700,000 or so (predominantly black) Florida voters disenfranchised as a result
of previous felony convictions; these were policies they had been conniving at
for the past eight years.
American
incarceration rates are now
proportionately six times higher than those of Britain, Canada or France. In
addition to this, a further 3.2 million Americans are on probation,
and 685,000 on parole. This huge increase in the prison population has
been heavily racialized: between 1984 and 1997, the proportion of adult white
men in prison rose from 0.5 per cent to 0.9 per cent, whereas the percentage of
incarcerated adult black men rose from 3.3 per cent to 7.2 per cent. By the end
of this period there were 758,000 black men in prison, along with 274,000 on
parole and a further 902,000 on probation. Altogether, more than 18 per cent of
all adult black men were under some form of correctional supervision in
1997.footnote1 Almost a
third (32 per cent) of black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are currently
‘under some type of correctional control’—incarceration, probation or
parole—compared to 1 in 15 whites, or 1 in 8 latinos.
This surge in prison numbers has not been the result of a sudden
crime boom but of deliberate changes in US criminal
justice
and sentencing practice.footnote2 The introduction, across
state after state, of ‘three strikes’,
‘truth-in-sentencing’ and ‘zero tolerance’ (suspects
arrested and charged for the most minor offences) has hugely increased the
number of arrests and prison sentences, and the length of time served. The
number of prisoners doing time for relatively minor, non-violent offences has
also soared: these accounted for 70 per cent of all new committals to US state
prisons in 1996—over 400,000 inmates are held for drug offences
alone.footnote3 While the ‘three strikes’ policies are usually
assumed to refer to convictions for violent felony, in some states, including
California, only the first two offences need come from a specifically
enumerated list of ‘serious’ crimes—a list which, astonishingly, includes
burglary, although burglaries by definition involve no victim contact, and the
amount stolen is usually worth less than $500. The third ‘strike’ can be
any felony, no matter how trivial, committed at any subsequent time. Juveniles
have no right to trial by jury, yet their offences can also be counted as
‘strikes’. A sixteen-year-old who steals from two neighbours’ garages in
the same afternoon can get two ‘strikes’ with one guilty plea.
The only justification for these brutalizing sentencing
policies, as propounded by Clinton, Bush and Gore—and parroted on
the other side of the Atlantic by Jack Straw and Ann Widdecombe—is that
‘prison works’: that high levels of imprisonment will reduce crime rates
and deter serious drug abuse. But do America’s harsh new incarceration
practices actually achieve this? The most reliable source of inter-country
difference in crime rates, the International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS)
fails to confirm the relationship between high levels of imprisonment and low
crime rates (see Table 1).footnote4 The latest survey shows
that America’s overall victimization figures remain around average for the
sample shown: despite the swollen size of the US prison population, American
citizens are just as likely to be victimized as the inhabitants of other
countries with far fewer prison inmates and actually run a greater risk of
homicide and ‘aggressive contact crime’ (robbery, sexual assault
and other violent attacks).
A closer examination of US Justice Department
statistics reveals, in fact, an extraordinary absence of correlation between
prison population and crime rates.Between 1977 and 1996, there were
two spells (1980–84 and 1991–96) when the rise in incarceration rates did
coincide with a fall in crime rates; but there were also periods (1977–80 and
1984–91) when the crime rate rose, despite the growth in the prison
population (see Figure 1).
Another illustration of the overall failure of America’s
prison policy to reduce crime can be found by looking at inter-state variations
in the relationship between crime and incarceration rates. Here, one might
expect states with the steepest increases in imprisonment to have the slowest
growth in crime. Instead, as Franklin Zimring has shown, incarceration rates
were poor predictors of change in crime rates during the 1980s.footnote5
Applying Zimring’s technique to the available state-level data for 1990–96
shows that, if anything, the correlation was even weaker. The correlation
coefficient between the percentage changes in crime and incarceration rates
actually fell, from 0.32 during the period 1980–90, to 0.15 for
1990–96.footnote6 Thus, inter-state variations in prison expansion explain less than 3
per cent of the variation in inter-state crime rates—confounding any attempt
to establish a straightline relationship between the two. Of the wide range of
social and economic forces that may affect the crime rate, the
deterrent effect of tough sentencing policies clearly plays, at best,
a limited role.
If prison growth has had little effect in reducing ‘victim’
crimes, it has made even less of an impact on the rate of serious drug-use. The
number of prisoners incarcerated annually for drug offences rose more than
twelvefold between 1979 and 1997—from 18,000 to 227,000—without any
demonstrable effect on the availability of illicit narcotics or the
prevalence of ‘hard-core’ use.footnote7 The percentage of high-school seniors who thought it
‘fairly easy’ (88 per cent) or ‘very easy’ (89 per cent) to get hold of
marijuana remained unchanged between 1975 and 1995, while the number who
thought it easy to get hold of ‘hard’ drugs actually increased.footnote8 The rising
purity of the drugs entering the US market has contributed to a fourfold
increase in drug-related deaths over the past twenty years, and the
government’s irresponsible prohibition of needle possession has helped the
expansion of HIV and Hepatitis C epidemics.footnote9 ‘We can’t incarcerate ourselves out of
this problem,’ Barry McCaffrey, the four-star general who heads the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, has admitted. ‘We have a failed social policy
and it has to be re-evaluated.’footnote10