Inside/Out

Inside/Out
Reflections from Inside the Golden Gulag
by Sara Olson

No prisoner was surprised at the "historic compromise" in the California legislature that addressed overcrowding in the human rights sewer AKA the California Department of Corrections [sic] and rehabilitation (non-existent). The CDCR is grossly overcrowded, cramming into every nook and cranny of its massive system of human warehouses, nearly twice the amount of bodies for which it was designed. It has the largest of all the states' prison populations, 172,000 people in 33 prisons, camps and community facilities designed for half that amount. Several Democrats claimed they had to "hold their noses" when they voted for this massive prison-led expansion (53,000) in the country supporting the largest number of imprisoned people ever in the world. They should have cut off their noses to spite their moral lassitude.

Where it concerns prisons, despite the steadily declining crime rate since 1980, state assembly persons and senators have built careers on the backs of inmates, whoring for campaign "donations" from corporate and special interests. They don't do the peoples' business. They do the business of the business class, the wealthy and ruling elites. In California, they cater to the powerful prison guards' union and to its sidekick, the victims rights gangs, both funded by state taxpayers who, apparently, never run out of money.

SB40 easily, quickly, passed the California legislature. Schwarzenegger signed it into law on Friday, April 13, 2007, a fitting date befitting the bad luck it visited on California's luckless prisoners. Prisoners are in the gun sights of Republicans and Democrats and there's little difference between the two parties on prison issues. SB40 slammed shut the small window opened for sentence reduction that the U.S. Supreme Court's Cunningham decision afforded when it was handed down on January 22, 2007. California's Attorney General, Jerry Brown, said that "potentially thousands of California's inmates could go home early." Cunningham ruled that routine sentence enhancements by judges without a jury finding were unconstitutional. Eighty-one days of grace were all prisoners got to file writs in a near-hopeless grasp at future freedom. Under SB40, judges once again can routinely add enhancements to sentences post-plea agreements and bench trials. Thanks to prison reform queen, Senator Gloria ("I have to think of my future") Romero (Democrat,. Los Angeles) who presented her SB40 bill to her political cohorts, April 13 brought a quick close to an aperture of optimistic aspiration.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag, was interviewed on Pacifica Radio KPFA's "Hard Knock Radio" in April, 2007 by anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn. She said, "Prisons kill. They are killing machines. Ask who shouldn't be in prison, not who should be." She declared that prison building undermines community organizing even in rural areas. In urban areas, particularly those that are poor and populated by people of color, saturation policing criminalizes entire neighborhoods, making them fertile hunting grounds to search for prey for prison cells. In Golden Gulag, Gilmore wrote: "The California State prisoner population grew nearly 500 per-cent between 1982 and 2000, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980 and declined, unevenly but decisively, thereafter. African Americans and Latinos comprise two-thirds of the states' . . prisoners; almost 7 percent are women of all races; 25 percent are non-citizens. Most prisoners come from the state's urban cores--------particularly Los Angeles and the surrounding counties. More than half the prisoners had steady employment before arrest, while upwards of 80 percent were . . . represented by state-appointed lawyers for the indigent. In short, as a class, convicts are from de-industrialized cities' working or workless poor."¹

The California State prisoner population grew nearly 500 per-cent between 1982 and 2000, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980 and declined, unevenly but decisively, thereafter.

One element missing from the 2007 prison-bed expansion was any mention of reform. The expansion will cost $7.7 billion, ballooning to around $15 billion given the interest owed eventually on the non-voter approved revenue bonds that will fund it. From this huge chunk out of the state budget, only $50 million will go to desperately-needed rehabilitation programs. Despite all the state studies, commissions and reports that have prescribed them, there are no sentencing or parole policy reforms nor any early releases of nonviolent offenders. Republicans claim "there's no such thing as a nonviolent offender". Democrats must think that, too.

While newspapers in the state have diligently covered the problems of the prison system, television--the form of media from which 94% of Americans get their news, leads the cheers for more prisons and for more prisoners to fill them. Crime leads newscasts, presented in breathless tones that highlight the opinions of prosecutors and law enforcement. Crime leads because it draws viewers who buy products which draw advertising monies for news departments which now must earn their own way in these tight-budget days. Whether or not crime really has escalated, one would think it has, because crime is always front center and lurid. Even false leads are presented as major stories in a "what if . . . ?" scenario. A more measured response would be, "so what?"

Police chiefs and district attorneys have become big celebrities. For money, television stations will present ads for anything having to do with keeping jails and prisons at an overcrowded capacity. In 2004, Proposition 66, which would have offered some modest "three-strikes" reform in that prisoners within very particular parameters could have gone to court to seek sentencing redress, was leading in the polls a couple of weeks before the November elections. A wealthy southern Californian, whose sister was reportedly a crime victim, financed a television ad to defeat the mild reform initiative. He was joined by Schwarzenegger and former Governors Davis, Wilson, Deukmejian, and Brown in a series of spurious claims devoted to the effort. Outright lies, the usual "thousands of criminals, hoards of outcasts and untouchables, on the streets" sort, frightened just enough of the normally uninformed California public to keep the proposition from passing. Later, Schwarzenegger said that Californians weren't ready to reform "three-strikes" and, of course, the media sycophants allowed that broad untruth to go unchallenged. The truth was, if one tells big, well-financed lies on t.v. ads, people will believe you.

The United States incarcerates over 2.1 million people. The prison population has grown faster over the last 20 years than the overall population. The impact of mass incarceration has hit the poor the hardest, as one would expect. It especially impacts people of color. Of all ethnic groups in proportion to their incidence in the general population, Native Americans are imprisoned most, followed by Blacks. In African American communities, one in 12 men are behind bars. This is due, in large part, to sentencing guidelines, both state and federal, and the War on Drugs.

How did this country come to institute a system of mass incarceration as an important tool for social control of poor people? In August, 2004 Robert X. Cringely wrote an article, "Fred Nold's Legacy".² It revealed that in 1982, the Department of Justice (DoJ), headed by Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese, hired Fred Nold and Michael Block, two economists at California's Hoover Institution, to "come up with some economic twist for the new [U.S. Sentencing] guidelines that would make them more effective at reducing crime. Every 20 to 30 years, the U.S. Sentencing Commission updates sentencing guidelines to keep them current with social trends and circumstances. Block and Nold had completed a research paper that indicated that monetary fines for antitrust crimes might "encourage potential white collar criminals to think again". The fines, for those who succumbed to temptation, would be "a significant source for revenue for the enforcers".

The opportunity to do a DoJ study opened the door to the research-oriented "big time" for the two economists and for their statistician, Sandy Lerner. They started their own company to do the work.

The DoJ, ultimately, refused to accept the research or the final paper on which it was based. The new company folded. The study by Block and Nold, "which was intended to economically validate the proposed sentencing guidelines, instead showed that the new guidelines would actually create more crime than they would deter. More crime, more drug use, more robbery, more murder would be the result, not less. Not only that, but these guidelines could lead to entire segments of the population entering a downward economic spiral, taking away their American dream."

The study and its conclusions were buried by Meese and his DoJ. The proposed sentencing guidelines were implemented unaltered. Cringely wrote, "We spend tens of billions per year on prisons to house people who don't contribute in any way to our economy. We tear apart Black and Latino communities. The cost to society is immense, and as Block and Nold showed, unnecessary. AND THE FEDS KNEW IT AT THE TIME."

Cringely's conclusion about why the Republican DoJ did something they knew would be destructive for an entire demographic of society is stark. "My view is," he wrote, "they went ahead because they were more interested in punishment than deterrence. They went ahead because they didn't perceive those in prison as being constituents. They went ahead because it enabled the building of larger organizations with more power. They went ahead because the idea of a society with less crime is itself a threat to the prestige of those in law enforcement."

Burying the study led to Fred Nold's 1983 suicide. Michael Block eventually went on to serve a six-year term on the U.S. Sentencing Commission and to work at an Arizona Conservative think-tank, the Goldwater institute. Cringely knew Fred Nold and thought his work was so important that he couldn't allow it to die with him. Sandy Lerner, Nold's and Block's statistician, founded a start-up company with her husband named Cisco Systems. Cringely added, "Maybe you've heard of it."

Mass incarceration increased because crime appeared to increase after the War on Drugs, fed by Colombian cocaine revenues and deeply entwined with Reagan's Central American wars in the 1980's, was declared. In California in 1980, the percentages of commitments by controlling offense to the CDC was 63.5% for the violent crimes and 7.4% for drug crimes. By 2000, the violent crimes percentage had dropped to 25.3% and drug commitments had climbed to 39%.

A book review by Jason De Parle, "The American Prison Nightmare,"³ stated, "Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe . . . The increase in severity . . . of imposed tougher penalties . . . occurred on the front end with longer sentences . . . and on the back end by making fewer prisoners eligible for early release."

The Drug War is fought with arrests of small-time users and dealers. Most are for marijuana-based crimes. Jeff Adachi, head of San Francisco's Office of Public Defender, said in a March, 2007 interview on Berkeley's KPFA that while 15% of the black population uses illegal drugs, 70% of all drug users in prison are black. He said the solution to this disparity isn't to hire more black cops or to include more people of color in justice system jobs. Society doesn't need a color-blind criminal justice system. It needs more justice.

De Parle noted in his review of Bruce Western's book, Punishment and Inequality in America,⁴ "While blacks are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, they now go to prison eight times as often. We are used to thinking of prison as at least partially a byproduct of the larger tragedy of poverty; Western depicts it as a cause . . . He wrote 'the poor are made poorer and have fewer prospects.'" In a human life, prison leaves the twin residues of stigmatization and lost opportunity. Earning potential never recovers, bonds with family--especially with children--are strained and/or broken and many are permanently disenfranchised.

Western wrote, "A prison record reduces a black man's chances of getting married by 11 percentage points . . . the whole family does time. From 1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers behind bars rose sixfold . . . Among white kids, just over 1 percent have incarcerated fathers, while among black children the figure approaches 10 percent . . . nearly half [of these men] are living with their children at the time of their arrest."

Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990's economic expansion

During the Clinton presidency in the 1990's, the prison boom grew in leaps and bounds. The 1994 federal crime Bill and 1996's AEDPA (Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act), both signed by Clinton, are notable for their legislative curtailment of prisoners' rights. One major claim that Western quotes Clinton making is, "This is the first recovery in decades where everybody got better at the same time." Western claims that this was just not true for black men. He wrote, "The prison expansion reflected inequality. The prison expansion created inequality. The prison expansion hid inequality from view. De Parle added, " . . . the government omits prisoners when calculating unemployment and poverty rates. Add them in, as Western did, and joblessness swells. 'Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990's economic expansion,' Western warns. Count inmates and you also erase three quarters of the apparent progress in closing the wage gap between blacks and whites."

De Parle's review also covered the book, Locked Out⁵ by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. He discusses several issues that the book raised; for instance, well over four million Americans have lost the right to vote and whether ex-felons would want to vote after losing that right while incarcerated or on parole and probation. What's most crucial about their findings is the link between race and the vote. "The more African Americans a state contains, the more likely it has been to ban felons from voting." They find [racially-based]" . . . statutes' history in states such as Virginia and Florida . . . were enacted along with grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests as 'another means through which the African American vote was restricted.'"

De Parle argued that the reason to give ex-felons back their right to vote is, "--to exclude 5.3 million people from the rolls--is to offend the principle of universal suffrage and undermine democratic legitimacy." He added, "if felons were allowed to vote, the United States would have a different president. Disproportionately poor and black, felons choose Democrats in overwhelming numbers--giving them between 70 percent and 85 percent of their votes in presidential elections." He noted that other elections are affected too. De Parle wrote that, "Manza and Uggen find that seven modern Republican senators owe their elections to laws that keep felons from voting: John Warner of Virginia (1978), John Tower of Texas (1978), Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (1984), Connie Mack of Florida (1988), Paul Coverdell of Georgia (1992), Jim Bunning of Kentucky (1998), and Mel Martinez of Florida (1998)." According to the authors' estimates " . . . four would have lost even if only the ex-felons in their states had voting rights, . . . since the senate has been so closely divided [since 1978], a fuller enfranchisement might have shifted some years of partisan control to Democrats."

If prisoners could vote or if even only ex-felons could, a different kind of Democratic candidate might emerge. However, perhaps only a different party, not Democrat or Republican, could produce the kind of politician who would have the courage to support legal changes across the country for ex-felon, what's more, felon enfranchisement. As former Senator Bill Bradley said in a radio interview as he discussed his "no vote" in 2002 when the U.S. Congress gave Bush the go ahead to invade Iraq, "Democrats don't have the courage of their convictions."

If prisoners could vote or if even only ex-felons could, a different kind of Democratic candidate might emerge.

Class and race deeply inform the cowardice of politicians when confronting prison reform in California and in the United States as a whole. Politicians depend on the "kindness" of corporate-controlled media which need crime stories to lead their news and, by extension, the imprisonment of as many criminals as possible as a meal ticket. Government and the powerful interests that control it find hiding the poor from view much more useful than-what?-redistributing wealth? Ah! No.

The 1960's and the early 1970's were eras of rebellion. Social upheaval reigned and mass organizing coupled with resistance led to a ruling class reassessment. How to deal with the rising up of those at the bottom? What to do with lower-middle and working classes who had the luxury of going beyond high school to college which led to questioning government policy? During the Nixon years, his theme of "law and order" surfaced and the Controlled Substances Act was enacted. It transferred control over drug policy from the Surgeon General to the Attorney General by giving the DoJ the power to create drug schedules. Thus began the War on Drugs. Later, Reagan's DoJ under Meese devised sentences that, despite real crime rates, would ensure that urban riots and political organizing couldn't lead to a challenge to state power.

In California, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising resulting from Rodney King's beating and the acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with that crime, reminded state politicians that they were on the right path with mass incarceration. Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote: "the legislature embarked on a criminal-law production frenzy, passing more than 100, and sometimes as many as 200, pieces of new legislation each year since 1988--up from the former output of 20-25 pieces, which included routine amendments of existing statutes. As a result, by 1994, the backlog had become so great that it was impossible to clear the legislative calendar by the end of each term . . . "⁶

For the 21st Century, the War on Terrorism plus Drugs runs on increasing legal legislation and the threat of incarceration. Anyone can be sent to prison for anything. Politicians have been reminding the public that they've been "protecting us" from criminals, terrorists, or simply other people for so long that they can't stop now. But don't be alarmed. Your elected officials--with their courageous votes (and, for a price)--are watching out for your interests. Yeah, right. Or . . you could just say, "NO!"

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Sara Olson can be contacted by writing to her at: W94197, 506-10-04Low, CCWF, PO Box 1508, Chowchilla CA 93610-1508