The other day, Hillary Clinton gave a speech calling for a fairer justice system and an end to "mass incarcerations" in the United States. It was a good speech, and I was happy to finally see an American politician addressing the failures of our criminal justice system.But making our system fairer and ending the mass incarcerations is not going to be an easy thing to accomplish. Almost immediately, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke up against Clinton's idea. He said:
We don’t have mass incarcerations in America. Individuals are brought before tribunals, and they have counsel. They’re given certain rights. Are we not going to lock people up who commit crimes?
Romney is either a liar or an idiot, but either way he is wrong. Any honest person that looks at the statistics will be able to see that (see charts below). The United States has by far the largest prison population rate per 100,000 citizens of any country in the world. And it has the largest number of people in prison -- nearly 2.5 million people. No other country is close. China (with a much larger population) is the closest, with about 1.6 million prisoners. The truth is that the United States has about 5% of the world's population, but has 25% of the world's total prison population. That seems to me to be the definition of mass incarceration.
And no Mitt, neither Hillary Clinton nor anyone else is suggesting that we stop locking up criminals -- just that we limit those incarcerations to the criminals that need to be locked up to protect the public. All other countries lock up their criminals. Why do they not have a prison to population rate as high as ours? Are Americans more dishonest or criminal-minded than people in other countries? Of course not.
The sad fact is that while other countries lock up their criminals, the United States decided that was not enough. We decided to use our prisons to solve our social problems. The mass incarceration started with President Nixon's "war on drugs" in 1971. That has been an abysmal failure, but it has been continued by every president since then. They have all failed to realize that drug abuse is a social and medical problem -- not a criminal problem. And while the "war on drugs" has not reduced drug availability, it has filled our state and federal prisons (mostly with low-level and non-violent drug offenders).
That was bad enough, but then the federal government and many states passed new sentencing guidelines that gave judges no leeway in sentencing and vastly increased the length of those sentences. This also had an effect on our prison population -- causing it to balloon (again with many low-level and non-violent offenders).
We like to claim we are a free and democratic country that supports human rights -- but our prison population shows something else. It makes us look like a police state. And it makes us the laughingstock of the world. We need to change our criminal justice system and stop the mass incarceration -- regardless of what Mitt Romney and his right-wing buddies think. You cannot solve social and medical problems by criminalizing them -- and we were foolish to think that could be done.
(Note -- the caricature of Mitt Romney above is by DonkeyHotey.)
(This image of prison population rates is from chartsbin.com.)
(This image of the history of U.S. prison population is from politicalblindspot.com.)
