During two years of supporting your presidential campaign, I often clicked through your online Blueprint for Change, seeking your views on the proliferation of U.S. prisons. I found them, usually in comments about assisting prisoners re-entering society and altering sentencing and drug laws. Such comments were lodged under "Civil Rights" and "Crime and Law Enforcement."
It is time for national leaders to address the problem of mass incarceration within another paradigm, that of social reconstruction. There are 2.3 million people in our prisons, quadruple the number in 1980, now making the U.S. the most imprisoning nation on earth. The brutal culture within prisons is also of special concern, since incarceration practices tolerate and often promote the degradation, rape, torture, and brutalization of prisoners by both guards and other prisoners. In his book Harsh Justice, Yale comparative law professor James Whitman contrasts U.S. prisons with Europe's, showing how U.S. systems transpose "doing time" into a soul-killing bludgeon, dehumanizing prisoners in almost every part of their being.
Spiritual and secular voices of conscience decry U.S. prisons as violating the sacrality of human life by treating the confined almost like slaves. Early in the present era of mass incarceration, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens lamented that a 1984 ruling suspending prisoner rights "declares prisoners to be little more than chattels."
Growing populations and brutality in prisons are not just problems for those "behind walls." Millions of children of the incarcerated live in our midst with their hearts creased by the bars that confine their parents. Their families must move to the rhythms of the imprisoned. Prisons release every year some 700,000 people into our communities, and they are a festering wound for our whole body politic, circulating social neglect, brutality, and failing lives-from prison to society and back again. American Indian, Black, Hispanic, and immigrant communities suffer especially from these circuits of neglect. In 1996, the National Criminal Justice Commission already described prisons as "social catastrophe" for black communities.
We have become a "carceral" society, a society with an imprisonment habit that incarcerates also our own most cherished values. Citizenship's ranks are reduced. Equality, justice, peace, as well as environment and healthy families, all suffer. The travails of a carceral society are now clearly documented by scholars like sociologist Bruce Western in his Punishment and Equality in America, and by geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Golden Gulag.
I urge you and U.S. Attorney General Holder to be proactive on two fronts. First, increase support for re-entering prisoners, as part of the comprehensive employment and public works project that our entire nation now needs. This entails mobilizing teachers for job training and education inside prisons, as well as outside in communities to which prisoners return.
Second, thin the numbers of prison populations. Perhaps we cannot yet implement the calls for "prison abolition" that activist-scholars like Angela Davis issue. But you and your policymakers can recognize that filling prisons does not correlate with substantively reducing crime, and that in fact unchecked prison habits tend to foster crime and fuel carceral blight. Following advice from sociologist Bruce Western and others, you could reduce prison populations by (1) decriminalizing drug offenses and other "victimless" crimes, (2) reworking sentencing laws so that life sentences and draconian decades-long terms are kept to a minimum, (3) reducing time spent on probation and parole that generates new prisoners, often for only technical violations, and (4) ceasing to re-imprison people for technical violations.
Other efforts in social reconstruction are important. Racial disparities and bias, for example, are more evident in imprisonment practices than in almost any other social sector of suffering, with catastrophic effect for communities of color. Youth of color experience both harsher and more frequent confinement for drug-related offenses than do white youth. Proactive pursuit of racial justice must be integral to social reconstruction.
Health care, too, is essential. Truly "universal" plans should address the burgeoning health needs of the carceral class. Remembering the imprisoned and their families in new health care programs benefits all of society. Beyond health care, other economic planning is crucial, especially for empowering city neighborhoods.
In short, one of your administration's challenges is to ask at every stage in developing new projects, "How do these policies redress our nation's imprisoned and those affected by them?"
Many a seasoned prison activist warns that your promises are at best illusory. We don't ask you as president to do what must be mobilized by the power of the people, by their local community organizing. But with your office and leadership skills, we invite you to summon strength to reverse decades of the fear-based incarceration habit indulged by both Republicans and Democrats, and so lend the power of your presidency to bringing real change for a land now burdened by its prisons.
Mark Lewis Taylor, a professor of theology and culture at Princeton Seminary, has been involved with prison reform for over twenty-five years. His books include The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America.
