The NYPD scandal graphically illustrated a policy that saw young minority males as forgotten souls with a hopeless future who could be abused by scheming officials without fear of legal action. Statistics backed up the authorities’ cynical assessment. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their twenties who lacked a college education were jobless.16 In addition to all the usual causes, such as poverty, the lack of strong male role models, substandard schools, gang rule, drugs, and bullying, union jobs in manufacturing were rapidly diminishing. Those jobs used to be a lifesaver for countless Americans lacking higher education. Among those young black men who were high school dropouts, the jobless figure was a jaw-dropping 72 percent, wrote Bruce Western, a Princeton sociologist who compiled the data.17 These were more than double the rates for white men without high school diplomas.
And a 2010 study by Jill Doerner at the University of Rhode Island and Stephen Demuth at Bowling Green State University found that all other things being equal, federal courts doled out harsher sentences to Hispanics and blacks than to whites convicted of identical offenses. Young Hispanic males had the greatest likelihood of incarceration, and young black males received the longest sentences.18
Steven Raphael of the University of California–Berkeley analyzed 2000 Census data and determined that on any given day more black male dropouts in their twenties were in prison—34 percent—than were working—30 percent.19 And after the 2000 Census rates of incarceration and unemployment went up.
19
“The Future”
Tolstoy’s heartfelt novel Resurrection follows the life of Katusha, a penniless servant girl who is raped, impregnated, thrown into the street by the family that had employed her, and driven to prostitution. Although innocent of the charge, she’s convicted as an accessory to murder largely because jurors and court officials were eager to break for lunch. Prince Nekhlyudov, a juror, is also the blackguard who deflowered her years earlier and moved on. Now reformed, he is both startled and revolted by the court’s action. He hires an attorney to appeal Katusha’s case and takes her on as an all-consuming personal project. When all appeals are denied, the determined prince follows her from jail to jail. By the time she lands in Siberia, he’s met other convicts who, like Katusha, were clearly innocent but thrown into the bowels of the czar’s vast prison complex by a sloppy, horrifically untroubled criminal justice apparatus. The majority of convicts he encounters, although apparently guilty of their offenses, are lost souls who, since birth, were “neglected and twisted like uncared-for plants.”
After seeing Russian criminal justice up close, the prince despairs at the power of well-entrenched functionaries whose livelihoods depend on the vast network of police, courts, and prisons. How can reform take place when such powerful forces stand in its way? Perhaps, he speculates, it is possible to dislodge the functionaries by continuing to pay their salaries or “even to pay them a premium, to leave off doing all that they are doing now.”1
Were Tolstoy around to focus his acute observational powers on the U.S. criminal justice system, it would be very unlikely to earn a passing grade either. Al Martinez, a Korean War veteran who’s been a metro columnist for the Los Angeles Times and more recently the Los Angeles Daily News, has seen many inmates and crazy sentences over the course of his career. “Once they get you in the system,” he told me, “they have a way of hanging on to you.” Groups such as FAMM and the Innocence Project have found thousands of convicts whose sentences were ridiculously harsh or unmerited, but few of them receive mercy, even after volunteers work on their behalf for years. Attorney Marcia G. Shein has resigned herself to the fact that she will never get Alabama’s Wilmer Breckenridge out of federal prison. Earlier legal mistakes, cruel decisions, and inflexible rules ruined his chances of reversing either his narcotics conviction or his life-without-parole sentence. Anthony Fletcher still sits on death row in Pennsylvania, not for any crime, but because he refused to accept a plea bargain in 1992. Atiba Parker is serving his forty-two years in Mississippi for selling cocaine that weighed less than a half of a sugar packet. It’s impossible to know how many crushed souls like these languish within the impossible vastness of the U.S. Gulag. As a rule its functionaries don’t advertise their atrocities. But the more you dig, the more you find.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, while still a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston, asked, “What happens if we keep increasing mandatory prison terms through the legislature? We will have tens of thousands of men 20 years from now in their 50s, 60, and 70s, and the expense of warehousing these old men will be enormous. It will be hundreds of billions of dollars.”2 That was in 1992. Since then Human Rights Watch has found that between 2007 and 2010 the number of sentenced state and federal prisoners age sixty-five or older grew at ninety-four times the rate of the overall prison population. In January 2012, the nonprofit group reported that the number of prisoners age fifty-five or older grew at six times the rate of the overall prison population between 1995 and 2010.3
In one state, Michigan, the average annual health-care cost for a prison inmate was $5,801; that cost increases with age, from $11,000 for those age 55–59 to $40,000 for those age 80 or older. “Prisons were never designed to be geriatric facilities,” said Jamie Fellner. “Yet U.S. corrections officials now operate old age homes behind bars.”4
Government can shrug off the health problems of poor citizens when they’re out on the street, but when elderly convicts are wards of the state, totally at its mercy for all sustenance, the moral imperative to care for them is harder to dodge. Human Rights Watch visited nine states and twenty prisons as part of its study, and everywhere it found officials scrambling to respond to the needs and vulnerabilities of older prisoners.
Even as crime grows less severe, the criminal justice system keeps churning out more prisoners and keeping them into their senior years.5 The Pew Center on the States released a report in 2009 that found penitentiary systems have been the fastest-growing spending area for states after Medicaid, with spending on criminal justice increasing more than 300 percent in the previous twenty years.6
As state legislatures wrestled with their battered budgets, some members began to recognize the savings that could accrue from a more reasonable approach to criminal justice. In 2007 Texas began placing more low-risk, nonviolent offenders on probation or freeing them on parole. It also started providing treatment to inmates suffering from drug and alcohol addiction or mental health problems. “This [group] is the ones you’re mad at, you’re angry at,” said State Representative Jerry Madden, who helped lead the overhaul. “They’ve done something that’s really dumb, stupid against the law, but you’re not terribly afraid of them.” Texas also began making extensive use of electronic monitoring to track probationers and parolees, and it reduced penalties for those guilty of technical violations instead of sending them back to prison to serve their full sentences. In January 2011 Madden figured the state avoided about $2 billion in prison costs by following these practices. The state’s prison population of 155,000 grew only slightly in that span rather than increasing by more than 17,000 inmates as predicted.7