“There are a certain number of predators out there who need to be locked up,” said Neal Griffin, a police lieutenant in San Diego County, California. “But nowadays, especially in the last ten years, I’ve seen this crazy militarization of law enforcement.”11 It’s a by-the-numbers approach, he said, that makes no allowances for extenuating circumstances. Low-level offenders like Mullenaux can’t get the kind of break that might alter their course and stitch up rips in the social fabric. It’s ridiculous and counterproductive to drop minor offenders into a nest ruled by sociopaths and then brand them as lepers when they are released and try to reenter society.
After Casey Mullenaux gained parole, he took the only bed available to him, in the apartment of his brother Cody, also a recovering addict. Cody tried to keep him straight, but Casey was right back in the same neighborhood of South Los Angeles County, where almost all his connections and relationships were with people inside the drug underworld. He had, of course, other friends from high school days, but those relationships didn’t hold up. When ex-addicts are shunned by former acquaintances, they have fewer options and can become depressed. Depressed addicts typically try to end the pain the easy way, completing the cycle by turning back to drugs. I had heard Mullenaux was using again, and about a year after his release, he called me from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Seventy-Seventh Street Station. This time he was busted for possession of a heroin-tainted syringe. As a one-striker, he was looking at a minimum two-year stay in prison before he’d be considered for parole. “I don’t need more prison,” he said. “I need help. I don’t know why I do this stuff. I don’t understand it.”12
Casey’s grandmother, a retired schoolteacher, marveled at how the system worked. “It costs them more to throw him in prison, which makes everything worse, than it would to put him in a program,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”13 Her shock was typical of middle-class people who brush up against a criminal justice system that mostly deals with the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
I made a few calls on Casey’s behalf, but trying to get him residential therapy instead of punishment was like asking to get him into the astronaut program. In chains, he was brought back into Long Beach Superior Court on a Tuesday. The prosecutor had offered him a very typical deal—thirty-two months at 80 percent (twenty-five and a half months of actual prison time). When Casey showed hesitation in court, Judge James D. Otto reminded him from the bench that if he passed up this chance, he could end up serving much more time. Usually the only way to beat a possession charge is by questioning the legality of the search. But cops can search parolees at any time for no reason at all. Mullenaux’s court-appointed attorney, who urged him to take the deal, had already told him he was looking at a possible ten years if he went to trial. He did what was rational under irrational circumstances and accepted the “bargain.”
Violent crime has in fact subsided since the advent of wholesale imprisonment. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tells us that in 1994 there were 51.2 violent victimizations per thousand adults. By 2009 that figure had dropped to 16.9.14 This represents “a spectacularly dramatic social change,” observed University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) public policy professor Mark Kleiman.15 But is it the mass jailing that made us safer? No. Although there were far more people behind bars in 1994 than in 1980, the 1980 violence ratio was almost precisely the same, at 51.7 incidents per thousand adults.16
Criminologists citing causes for the diminishment of serious crime point to the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic and the greatly increased availability of legal abortion beginning in the 1970s. As far fewer unwanted children were born to poor, teenage mothers, there were smaller waves of underprivileged adolescents practically predestined for crime. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, noted the decline of inner-city children’s exposure to lead through paint and gasoline, which she said altered brain patterns, vastly decreasing self-control while increasing the propensity to violence.17
Still, logic dictates that some of our 2.3 million prisoners might have committed additional crimes had they been running around free. Professor Robert Perkinson of the University of Hawaii estimates that the dramatic rise in imprisonment has been responsible for about 25 percent of the decrease in crime.18 He may be right, but he doesn’t spell out the methodology that brought him to this number. Other academicians look out across the vast American Gulag and like what they see. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in the Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”19
But researchers Bert Useem of Purdue and Anne Piehl of Rutgers estimate that increasing the number of prisoners by another 10 percent would cut crime by only one-half of one percent.20 Raising the incarceration rate essentially means imprisoning more offenders who aren’t violence-prone or dangerous. And as legislators struggle to keep prison costs down, inmates are less likely to learn a useful honest trade while incarcerated. They will, however, be exposed to new criminal tricks and a cruel environment in which the strong prey on the weak. By choosing harshness over good sense, society is transforming people who weren’t dangerous into thugs whose options to make a legitimate living have been drastically reduced.
“Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” points out Michael Tonry, former director of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.” Tonry, now a criminal law expert at the University of Minnesota Law School, finds the U.S. justice system needlessly harsh and extremely difficult to change.21
“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. Yet, he notes, the incarceration rate in the United States is approximately five times that in the UK, and “if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher”—a whopping four times higher, five people per 100,000 versus 1.28 in the UK.22 Some of this discrepancy could be attributable to cultural differences, but the firearms factor cited by Mauer is a likelier cause. About 65 million pistols are scattered across the American landscape. Useless for hunting, they’re designed to be easily concealed, carried, and used against other humans. They facilitate homicide and suicide on a grand scale. Although they’re mostly prohibited to private citizens in the UK, owning them is downright encouraged in many parts of the United States. Places such as Green-leaf, Idaho, and Kennesaw, Georgia, mandate firearm ownership.23 In those parts of the country where local law makes guns more difficult to purchase, they can and often are easily transported in from elsewhere.
For politicians, taking a hard-line stance on criminal justice is like choosing to accept a free lottery ticket. It can’t hurt. Yet some of the same lawmakers who crusade for zero-tolerance criminal statutes also say yes to the sale and ownership of assault weapons, armor-piercing munitions, and the 9-mm Glock semiautomatic pistol that can fire as many as thirty rounds before reloading becomes necessary. A gunman used a Glock in January 2011 to kill six people and wound fourteen at a shopping mall outside Tucson, Arizona. Among the dead was Chief U.S. District Court Judge John Roll. Among the wounded was Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ).